>> I don't know if you've noticed but these two are having some very large impact in the world right now. Dictators of 30 and 40 years are being cast off.
Unfortunately, revolutions are nothing new. Bigger revolutions happened in the past quite impactfully without such technologies. These technologies perhaps add benefit in the arms race to better organize against government's controls for infrastructure, institutions, and society.
>> I think that's a pretty skewed view of history. Another way to see it might be that we used to mostly have largely anarchistic/socialist societies that were overrun by a few greedy people and we've spent the rest of our history taking back our freedoms from the elite few of our day.
Now you could say that even if we ever managed to get to a utopia state more greedy people will just show up but I would counter argue that e.g. Alexander the great wouldn't have gotten off the ground if people could have just sent a twitter to warn everyone else what he was up to.
The same technology that people use for freedom, powers that be can use for more nefarious purposes. Technology in of itself is amoral and neutral. It's rather about who uses it more effectively. Today, the general populace perhaps has an advantage in that they're maybe more savvy than governments. Not necessarily will be the case all the time though. And besides that, it depends on whether people would love what Alexander stood for and would actually prefer to follow him. Look at what happened in Germany. Nobody better cite Godwin's Law here. Mein Kampf is seriously a great example of how a single idea, communication, or piece of media can rally the people to a cause that people in hindsight realized was incorrect. Technology can likewise be played by both sides.
> Unfortunately, revolutions are nothing new. Bigger revolutions happened in the past quite impactfully without such technologies.
3 major drivers of the European revolutions of the 1840s (the longest period of sustained, international revolutions in history) were newspapers, trains and telegraphs. Like today's internet, they were loosely controlled by the state. Information could pass from capital to capital within hours, sometimes within minutes.
The key dynamic is not the medium of transmission; it is whether the state has yet managed to control it.
Unfortunately, revolutions are nothing new. Bigger revolutions happened in the past quite impactfully without such technologies. These technologies perhaps add benefit in the arms race to better organize against government's controls for infrastructure, institutions, and society.
>> I think that's a pretty skewed view of history. Another way to see it might be that we used to mostly have largely anarchistic/socialist societies that were overrun by a few greedy people and we've spent the rest of our history taking back our freedoms from the elite few of our day. Now you could say that even if we ever managed to get to a utopia state more greedy people will just show up but I would counter argue that e.g. Alexander the great wouldn't have gotten off the ground if people could have just sent a twitter to warn everyone else what he was up to.
The same technology that people use for freedom, powers that be can use for more nefarious purposes. Technology in of itself is amoral and neutral. It's rather about who uses it more effectively. Today, the general populace perhaps has an advantage in that they're maybe more savvy than governments. Not necessarily will be the case all the time though. And besides that, it depends on whether people would love what Alexander stood for and would actually prefer to follow him. Look at what happened in Germany. Nobody better cite Godwin's Law here. Mein Kampf is seriously a great example of how a single idea, communication, or piece of media can rally the people to a cause that people in hindsight realized was incorrect. Technology can likewise be played by both sides.