Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

This is just what we saw in the Arab Spring. One of the defining features of the revolutions that swept the Middle East in early 2011 was their use of communication technologies. During the protests in Cairo, Egypt, that brought down President Hosni Mubarak, one activist summed this up nicely in a tweet: “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” Yet this blade too cuts both ways. In Egypt, the government shut down the Internet to quell revolt. In the Sudan, protestors were arrested and tortured into revealing Facebook passwords. In Syria, progovernment messages popped up on dissidents’ Facebook pages, and the Twitter #Syria hashtag— which had carried accounts of the protests—was flooded with sports scores and other nonsense. “In the same way that, a few years ago, it became commonplace to talk about Web 2.0, we’re now seeing Repression 2.0,” Daniel B. Baer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, told the Washington Post. And repression 2.0 may soon give way to repression 3.0, as authoritarian governments become better acquainted with the technology now at their disposal.