The Web Is Changing The Global Political Order

Here is futurist Alvin Toffler as interviewed by the Gartner fellows in 2006: (bold emphasis mine)

I also think there's going to be a great boom when we stop thinking about companies and start thinking about restructuring governments - and completely restructuring these gigantic pyramidal bureaucracies that we rely on and that no longer function. So I think that there's going to be a huge market for software in new kinds of organizations. Now, I'm not sure whether it'll still be called software or what, but as you no doubt read in the book, I expect to see one big institution after another collapse just like the Katrina experience with FEMA and the government and so on. That our corporate structures are designed for the industrial age - and that made sense then and Max Weber wrote about it in 1910 and so forth and so on - but they're clearly inappropriate to the systems that are now growing up, economic, social, cultural and all the rest.

The web became an instrumental tool in uprooting Tunisia’s dictatorship as shown here and here.

Sensing the same fate that might befall the 30 year authoritarian regime, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak swiftly orders communications cut as riots has escalated.

From Business Insider

From the New York Times

For the first time since the 1980s, Mr. Mubarak felt compelled to call the military into the streets of the major cities to restore order and enforce a national 6 p.m. curfew. He also ordered that Egypt be essentially severed from the global Internet and telecommunications systems. Even so, videos from Cairo and other major cities showed protesters openly defying the curfew and few efforts being made to enforce it. (emphasis mine)

Old political structures designed for the Industrial era appear to be crumbling exactly as Mr. Toffler predicted. This is only part of the ongoing adjustment towards the “knowledge economy”.

Update:

I’d like to add that the transition to the knowledge economy is being fed by the forces of decentralization brought about by connectivity and information dissemination. And this is what governments are afraid of.

Of course, another major factor that contributes to this societal discontent has been inflationism- seen through rising politically sensitive commodity prices.

As we have long been saying, these are two major forces in collision.