The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

I've been meaning to read this piece at The American Thinker since DL Sly recently included the link in a comment. It's hard to know what to make of the account, but it certainly provides a perspective I haven't been reading elsewhere. The author, described as an Egyptian student, sees the uprising as a popular backlash against moderately capitalist reforms by Mubarak's heir apparent, Gamal, which were never sold effectively to a population used to nanny-state control of the economy and a lot of socialist security. He also attributes the uprising almost entirely to the organizational tools of Twitter. He believes that, although the initial "flash" mobs were exaggerated, they were big enough to panic a crusty old autocracyinto shutting down the Internet. Paradoxically, the populace responded with emboldened ridicule of a repressive government running scared of modern communications.

Perhaps most interesting is the account of how, between the withdrawal of the security forces and the arrival of the army, the population took advantage of the power vacuum to storm every police station and prison in the country, free the prisoners, and confiscate the weapons. Then, as widespread looting broke out, neighborhoods spontaneously organized to protect each block with their new weapons. The author feels that the mass of the people have stopped demonstrating and are looking to the army to shut down the Islamist troublemakers. He also feels, however, that the neighborhoods will not soon forget that they took their security into their own hands, and successfully.

The author closes with a strange combination of predicting that nothing important will change, while at the same time suggesting that everything has changed. In the meantime, Egypt's economy won't soon recover, and capitalist reforms (if that is in fact what's been going on there) are at an end for the foreseeable future.