What if digital tools make it easier to destabilize governments, but not to build new ones?
The past several days have been hard ones for those who cheered the fall of Hosni Mubarak less than a year ago. More than 30 people have been killed protesting the continued rule of the military council, and the Egyptian cabinet has tendered its resignation. Tahrir Square, once a symbol of the possibilities for a new Egypt, has now become a stage for the revolution's unraveling. These developments (and others since last February) have provoked a simple thought: What if the combination of social media and mobile devices does make revolutions more likely, but do not in turn make republican governing any more possible? What then?
Of course, it's not been settled that these new communications technologies do make revolutions any easier. It never will be. The ingredients for a successful revolution -- frustration, leadership, organization, and luck -- are difficult if not impossible to quantify. Scholars will someday count the numbers of tweets retweeted or videos "liked" on Facebook, and we will still be no closer to knowing what the effects were, sum told. But if you think that there's even the possibility that the existence of social media makes autocracies less stable, you have to grapple with the possibility that the indirect result of these technologies is the kind of chaos we're seeing now in Egypt, a kind of chaos that emerges between revolution and government.