Drunkard's Walk Forums

Is the Arab Spring an example of a stand-alone complex, as depicted in Ghost in the Shell?  Certainly the conditions were ripe for revolution, given the consistently high food and energy prices.  Still, revolutions are typically isolated events that take a long time to build up, but in a single season of 2011, protest spread throughout the Middle East.
Okay, you could say that the triggering event, Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation, was a copy of Thich Quang Duc's actions, though I'm not sure that either expected to overthrow their respective governments entirely.  And the other revolutions were copying the successful one in Tunisia.
But revolutions in those countries happened almost overnight.  And aspects of the network significantly contributed to those insurrections, such as the availability of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables.  Moreover, the revolutions have been enabled and coordinated by social media, mobile phones, and electronic communication.
None of the protest movements were organized around a charismatic leader; instead each protest movement seems to be motivated by individuals infected with the revolution meme, coordinating through the Internet.  So, has the network grown in such a way that we're seeing a bona fide stand-alone complex, as depicted in Ghost in the Shell?  Or am I reading too much into the situation?
I'm writing a fanfic that's set in the real world, in the modern day, and Aramaki Daisuke from Ghost in the Shell is one of the characters (at about age 45 or so). While this question is really for the fanfic, I thought that it belongs in this forum due to the subject matter.
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It's certainly an interesting phenomenon. We've seen the roots of this kind of thing (flash mobs and the like) already, but something on this scale is definitely new.

There's an old adage I recall reading once... "The Press will only be truly Free when everyone owns one." Well, these days, everyone does. And some of them use it. It's kind of like the way a riot starts, with people talking back and forth, sometimes getting things wrong, making poor or incorrect assumptions, until it all snowballs into spontaneous action and violence...
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Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

Soon after I wrote that, Malcolm Browne, the photographer of Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation passed away, so I guess there is a news item to go with this thread.
Yeah, things like flash mobs are related, as are the Anonymous Scientology protests, as they can unite unrelated, distant groups of people to action.  But both of those things seem like largely planned, organized events.  Simply using the network to efficiently plan activities isn't really that new of an idea -- it's just applying new technology to old-fashioned community organizing.
I'm more concerned about what this means in a place like India, where because of increased sectarian violence between tribal Hindus and Bengal Muslims, electronic communications have fueled a mass migration back into Assam.  This led the Indian Government to limit everyone to five text messages per day.  And while I don't mind that all of the high-schoolers will be forced to communicate in complete sentences, these are the actions of a government that really doesn't understand how technology actually works.
The situation with the Assamese migration looks like another kind of event where people are individually deciding to take action in a way that creates a spontaneous social movement, enabled through the network.  India is blaming Pakistan for this, though it doesn't seem all that likely to me, given that it's a situation where people are contacting friends and family directly though texts, emails, and social media, in hopes of keeping them safe.  Either way, it's creating massive instability in Northeast India.
I guess the difference between this and a riot is that it can happen everywhere, all at once.  It makes me worry about the consequences of what governments will do when they figure out the implications of spontaneous online action/a stand alone complex.  The responses so far have been to shut down network services (India, Egypt, Syria), but none of those have been terribly effective.
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vorticity Wrote:I guess the difference between this and a riot is that it can happen everywhere, all at once.  It makes me worry about the consequences of what governments will do when they figure out the implications of spontaneous online action/a stand alone complex.  The responses so far have been to shut down network services (India, Egypt, Syria), but none of those have been terribly effective.

I suspect that most of the problem the governments have in trying to cut off the internet is that:

1) They have to destroy any and all internet links within their borders. Nothing of it can survive to communicate with the infrastructure of the internet outside. Anything less, the internet's base architecture is designed to route around.
2) They have to choke off any and all electronic communication methods that can be used to reach the infrastructure remotely. Dial up lines. Long range radio. They'd have to keep a lot of people at least 5 miles away from the border (sufficient effort can propagate a wifi signal for easily 2-3 miles).
And overall, even if they manage those two things, by the time they realize they have a problem, it's already too late, people have already gotten together. Because, not only is the internet fairly insidious (once people have it, you can't really pry their hands off it and what it gives them) when it comes to how deep it really penetrates into a society, it's also lightning fast as communication methods go, and the messages wind up going out wide.
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"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor