Blogflies in Egypt

ARTICLE: “Bloggers may be the real opposition,” The Economist, 14 April 2007, p. 54.

The pyjamahideen slowly emerge inside Egypt. Yes, some of the best and most impactful will have strong Islamist views (like any poll in the world shows: people want the globalization, but with content controls, labor controls and environmental controls), but do you think they would support the new, resulting Islamist regime that then turns on them and demands an end to their connectivity?

There is, of course, always the danger of the Iran Revolution scenario, but that’s the too much, too fast scenario, or what I would call the caboose-induced-trainwreck.

Actually, the slow but steady spread of this sort of protest is the best we can hope for:

Such pinpricks have yet to puncture the dominance of any Arab state. But with internet access spreading even to remote and impoverished villages, and with much of its “user-generated content” pitched in pithy everyday speech rather than the high classical Arabic of official commentary, the authorities are beginning to take notice.

Globalization is all about networks, and networks are all about workarounds, and workarounds promote the notion that man’s paths to happiness are infinite rather than singular, and that’s subversively political.