When a dictatorship deserved to be toppled, its benightedness was often illustrated through its ignorance of technology. During the U.S.-led war on Serbia in 1999, stories circulated that soldiers of the rump Yugoslavia who had raided a Belgrade opposition radio station had ordered journalists to “hand over the internet.” By contrast, any twenty-first-century uprising—from Cairo to Qom to Kiev—that could be presented as the work of young people communicating via social media received the benediction of pundits and the State Department.
