Listening to http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/surveillance-america, I was struck by the following statement: "What took everyone by surprise was how this spread across the provinces . . . and, suddenly, over the weekend, became a huge unmanageable crisis for a government that thought it had the country under control." The reporter -- who did a great job, incidentally -- said a few other things that 'rung the bell', as it were: how 'all of these things' are a mix of local and national issues, leftists and rightists; the rapid spread, etc.
The Arab Spring, all of this, suppressed or not, is a consequence of information technology. People self organize in utterly novel ways, just as they began to do with the spread of printing and increased literacy. This is something totally new to human history, and is only just being understood.
