Comment by jazzyjackson
5 hours ago
Although i would never put it past the DoD under Clinton to manipulate an election here and a revolution there, my impression of Silicon Valley during the Arab Spring is a bunch of self congratulatory preening over the power of social media.
I always felt the CIAs greatest trick is letting people credit them with overthrowing governments, a power they don't actually possess, except to tip the scales with a little gun-running. Same with the so called Twitter revolution. Assange and Manning can take credit for leaking the cables, but the anger was domestic and already extant.
Hunger and poverty (mostly caused by sanctions and economic crises) are dry firewood, and social media are the sparks.
The former is the underlying contradiction, and the latter is the force of organization
Both of these elements are required for a successful color revolution
Force of organization is an interesting phrase, never heard that before. Reminds me of catalyzing crystal seeds, or how at the quark level mass arises out of information/order/entropy in the complexity sense. The more ordered the heavier it is. (Maybe this is fringe/kook/IANAPhysicist).
I guess before social media there would be other sources of order, churches, political organizations, youth groups. Maybe in the absence of that Twitter is all the revolutionaries had left (but my above conjecture is, there were greater sources of organization in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere than that which was legible online. (As an otherwise unaffiliated American I have no way of knowing.)