Slashdot Mirror
How Killing the Internet Helped Revolutionaries
An anonymous reader writes "In a widely circulated American Political Science Association conference paper, Yale scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that shutting down the internet made things difficult for sustaining a centralized revolutionary movement in Egypt. But, he adds, the shutdown actually encouraged the development of smaller revolutionary uprisings at local levels where the face-to-face interaction between activists was more intense and the mobilization of inactive lukewarm dissidents was easier. In other words, closing down the internet made the revolution more diffuse and more difficult for the authorities to contain."
As long as we're on the subject, reader lecheiron points out news of research into predicting revolutions by feeding millions of news articles into a supercomputer and using word analysis to chart national sentiment. So far it's pretty good at predicting things that have already happened, but we should probably wait until it finds something new before contacting Hari Seldon.
If you're like me you don't generally like the government I got loads of complaints with the state of the government in the USA but do I really do much about it? No I'm too busy with my job, friends and other stuff. Plus lets face it things aren't that bad here despite all the dire stuff they put on the news. But if the government suddenly turned off my porn and tv shows plus slashdot and various other sites I habitually use I'd be up in arms pounding on my congressman's door maybe even joining a riot if the mood was right.
If some supercomputer analyzed my public writings, it would recognize that I've been keeping the pitchfork I made out of the old plowshare handy by the back door for some time now. I ate the oxen quite a while back when Monsanto took my fields away, so it's not like I had any other use for it.
Unless you have a monopoly of that technology and don't use it to predict if your population will revolt, it would not give accurate predictions, as if he predicts something dangerous you will take measures to avoid it. That puts that kind of technology in a gray-to-dark area. Are them instruments of opression for your population or of allied countries? Or to attack/unstabilize another countries if they don't warn about that upcoming events?
If you guess the future and do nothing about it you are somewhat safe, but if know the future and can affect it, weird things like killer blue butterflies happens.
My bet is it would predict a revolution in the US every couple of years... probably every 2 years... right around election time...
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
The Internet is loaded with ways for people to distract themselves and find escape. Take that away, and people are both angry about losing their distractions and have a bunch of free time to talk to each other and to look around at the various ways their government mistreats them.
Palm trees and 8
Shutting down the internet had two other results: It made people in Egypt who were not involved in the revolution sit up and take notice. This especially applied to some of the higher income people in Cairo who used the internet for both entertainment and business. Also, shutting down the internet made the rest of the world a lot more sympathetic to the Egyptian revolutionaries. Shutting down the internet is such an obvious, massive form of censorship that it immediately becomes clear to a lot of people that the people doing it are doing a bad thing. It wouldn't surprise me if in thirty or forty years shutting down the internet will itself be considered a form of crime against humanity.
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
It's been recognized for generations that people won't rebel against a government for light reasons. As long as people have food and jobs to keep them busy, they'll tolerate quite a bit of oppression.
If BART had left the cellphone repeaters on during the first protest, most of us would have all forgotten about it by now.
As it stands, there are now protests planned every single week into the indefinite future.
Not being able to communicate with their phones has not, it seems, prevented the protestors from using the calendar function on their phones...
I think that the Internet is just a means to an end. The people were angry and ready to revolt. Lots of revolutions (Soviet Union dismantling, American Revolution...) happened without the Internet present. When people are angry enough word gets out.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
...you know the rest.
Communication technology goes both ways, it's a tool. There is no simple clear cut answer whether it's good or evil it is equally available. We love to paint things broadly with a black or white brush and that's what's happened after the middle easy uprising and the London riots. One seeing praise for open communication, one seeing suggestions twitter and blackberry PIN messaging should have been turned off.
In reality really pissed off people will find a way to fight back. Taking a step back here, ultimately cutting off the communication network is not going to do much because that is not the actual cause, rather a mildly helpful catalyst. It's just an easy target for whoever needs to be seen to doing something, and is getting rather desperate.
Hell, if they cut of my slashdots I'd riot harder.
Ultimately a savvy dictatorship would use internet, the internet after all doesn't care what it's used for it just pipes your data. Certainly governments and influential organisations, political movements etc use misinformation on the internet and it's useful idiot syndrome to great affect (see Fox news lol).
Secretly we all know that facebook, twitter and anything blackberry is actually kind of crap. It's just that everyone else is on them, and they seem to work well enough. There's still no substitution for old school word of mouth for your little uprising, which by some measures is more effective. They can't switch that off.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Very nice concept. We always hear that turning off the internet was effective suppression that protestors nevertheless overcame; this is a brilliant question to ask about another possible result.
Even pondering this kind of gently contrarion (as opposed to deliberately provocative or 'egdy') research demonstrates more curiousity and academic honesty than a lot of tenured people show in their entire lives.
And back then, when Ben Ali was still here and the riots started taking more and more regions, the gov't had the great idea of forbidding people from going to places where they might have the silly idea of "forming" a riot. Thus, football games were stopped, university courses cancelled...
Predictably, those who used to watch football every Sunday suddenly had nothing to do, and those who were preparing for exams found themselves in holidays... Why not join the riots?
So far it's pretty good at predicting things that have already happened
Just how does that qualify as "prediction"?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Taht's well and good (though sadly incomplete) for Mideast nations, but what of places like, say...
* mostly Hindu India ...and etc ?
* mostly Catholic Philippines, ]South America , Ireland, etc.
* mostly Atheist/Confucian/Buddhist China
* mostly Animistic or mixed-religion nations throughout Africa
* mostly Protestant UK,
May want to skip the whole prayer thing altogether once you start considering that many movements (esp. those of the left-leaning ideological persuasion ) are pretty much religion-free.
Props on the Foundation reference in TFS, though.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The research about predicting revolutions is awful. I don't understand how some people in social sciences still get to publish these results without even remotely trying to avoid confirmation bias.
If you read the research linked from the BBC story, you can see that they do indeed have some impressive-looking graphics that show how the media reporting changed prior to some revolutions. That's interesting, but it's completely and utterly useless without also taking random samples from other places and times and checking if the same changes don't happen when there's no revolution. If they do, the whole "finding" is almost useless: it's only slightly better than always predicting revolutions whenever you want to make a prediction.
Not as good as "The sheep look up," but apropos.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I don't know about the rest, but the UK is easy: revolution will never happen there. There's never even been anything close to a successful revolution there, and the inhabitants now probably couldn't even imagine such a thing. IIRC, the last "revolution" there was the Northern Rebellion and Pilgrimage of Grace during Henry VIII's reign, and that wasn't much of a revolt, they mainly were just protesting, and then they were such sheep that they were easily slaughtered by the King's soldiers after they naively believed his lies about establishing a special Parliament to hear their grievances about the dissolution of the monasteries. That was almost half a millennium ago.
It doesn't matter what their government does to them, the English people will never revolt.
The truth comes out! Another hippie gets his door busted down due to Another Moment of Slashdot Honesty! And according to his browser, he'd been looking mighty hard at some of the Sagmartha indica collection at The Attitude Seedbank all summer long! Hide your bong, Hippie! It's not paranoia if the really ARE coming for you!
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Think about all the time you spend online on twitter, Facebook, Youtube,...Realise that if you did not spend all that time online you would spend it doing something else like getting back at the bastard who just cut off your endless supply of porn, lollcat and meme. Lolll
Right: tea party.
Left: Chinese communist party.
Let them both run a country for a while and see how well each country does.
Start date: 2012.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Revolutionaryily replacing Kodos with Kang.
Azural - instrumentals
Point of order: Northern Ireland is officially considered to be part of the UK, no?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's no surprise that people who congregate can be threats to an oppressive regime. In societies with particular fearful rulers weekly prayers (mass, temple, etc) would be the only public meetings not easily suppressed. Stalin got away with it, and it's said that Hitler bought out the ones he couldn't bully. The regimes that don't fully suppress religion (or other gatherings, even sports), can find those places as ignition to chaos, and even committed atheists might find the time to attend the only meeting they can.
Good point, but you yourself missed something overall: Certainly, atheists may congregate under the guise of prayer or such, but we were talking about monitoring news trends. If all you do is have your software eyeball prayer meetings (esp. just those phrased towards the Islamic Friday prayers, since Christians do it on Sunday and others do it whenever), you're going to miss it - which was my entire point.
Even if you're just eyeballing public meetings, you're going to miss it - most revolutionary meetings nowadays are going to be clandestine, and outside of Islam, aren't necessarily going to be centered around praying.
But sure, get all butt-hurt and lash out - there's a kernel of good idea in your first post, but you're still doing it all *wrong* by focusing on only one tiny aspect of a much larger picture.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Well, that's true, but it's a pretty small part of it. I'm really talking about the main island (Great Britain); Northern Ireland is definitely an exception.