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Unemployed intellectuals who are young have always been a threat to established tyrants. These are the people who have relatively little to lose, and they think they have a great deal to gain, by taking to the streets. When they are not shut down fast, they are emboldened. They assume that nothing can stop them, because tear gas and rubber bullets are not so great a threat. When people around the world can see street protesters, this encourages thousands of other protesters, who had attempted to sit the fence, to get off the fence and go into the streets. There is safety in numbers. When they can see on television or on the web that there are thousands of people in the streets protesting, they assume that they will gain a degree of invisibility and anonymity if they join the protests. So, they leave the safety of their homes and join the protest movement. Because of social networking, this can take place so rapidly that government officials are unable to respond fast enough to put a stop to it before it is obvious that there are thousands of people in the streets. The social networks can become a 68
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liability if the revolt fails to dislodge the existing regime. The government can use the Internet to track down those people who were activists in the early stage of the revolt. There is no way to hide your communications retroactively on Twitter and Facebook. The government is going to find out who sent out messages, and it will be able to trace the spread of these messages by means of the very technology that enabled the original protesters to recruit thousands of volunteers. But how many can the police arrest? There were too many protesters to put all of them in jail. The people the government will have to investigate are highly educated, and have enough money to own a computer and be plugged into the Internet. These are exactly the kinds of people the government does not want to alienate. These people have connections, they have money, and they have time on their hands. When you are talking about thousands of protesters going into the streets, you are talking about a protest without any organization. You cannot stop the organization when you cannot control a handful of the organization’s leaders. The social network system enables rapid response protesting without any clear-cut chain of command. There really is no chain of command. That is the whole point of social networking. It is horizontal; it is not vertical. To stop something from spreading, the government has got to shut the entire system down. A SPONTANEOUS REVOLT Social networks are changing the nature