Comment by User23
Comment by User23 4 hours ago
This is nothing new. Google's instrumental role in the "Arab Spring" is old hat by now.
Comment by User23 4 hours ago
This is nothing new. Google's instrumental role in the "Arab Spring" is old hat by now.
I was paying attention to telecomix and US forces in-country maintaining cellular infra to fight against the information blackouts but what was going down on 4chan?
Idk tbh never been on 4chan but you ever wonder why that infra was being defended? Ever heard of a guy called Pinochet? Noriega? Videla? Doe? Or my personal favorite Mobutu?
Why are we pretending movements can't be co-opted or engineered or the CIA does things out of love would expect that on Reddit but not on HN. A lot of the countries involved did not recover look at their GDP pre vs during vs now. Look at how power centers have shifted and isolated Iran since then :)
I definitely agree USA was pulling for the revolutionaries, and making sure the powers that be couldn't snuff out all communications was essential in throwing the fight, I just don't believe in inception as far as inspiring a revolt in the first place.
I mention 4chan because I thought it synonymous with anonymous, and I was wondering what you knew that I didn't re: what hacking was happening.
And yes Mobutu with his little leopard hat is my favorite too.
Although i would never put it past the DoD under Clinton to manipulate an election here and a revolution there, my impression of Silicon Valley during the Arab Spring is a bunch of self congratulatory preening over the power of social media.
I always felt the CIAs greatest trick is letting people credit them with overthrowing governments, a power they don't actually possess, except to tip the scales with a little gun-running. Same with the so called Twitter revolution. Assange and Manning can take credit for leaking the cables, but the anger was domestic and already extant.
Hunger and poverty (mostly caused by sanctions and economic crises) are dry firewood, and social media are the sparks.
The former is the underlying contradiction, and the latter is the force of organization
Both of these elements are required for a successful color revolution
Force of organization is an interesting phrase, never heard that before. Reminds me of catalyzing crystal seeds, or how at the quark level mass arises out of information/order/entropy in the complexity sense. The more ordered the heavier it is. (Maybe this is fringe/kook/IANAPhysicist).
I guess before social media there would be other sources of order, churches, political organizations, youth groups. Maybe in the absence of that Twitter is all the revolutionaries had left (but my above conjecture is, there were greater sources of organization in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere than that which was legible online. (As an otherwise unaffiliated American I have no way of knowing.)
If you correlate the hacks of anonymous to that you will get an interesting picture to say the least :)
As someone that loves dev stuff it is so beautiful not a single soldier deployed but an entire region destabilized and so many people killed