HOPE: “#FreeStacy: The Old Regime and the Twitter Revolution”

The whole thing reminds me of the book Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after Democracy in America. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, he examined the failed promise of France’s rebellion against monarchy. What concerned him was not just the Terror and the beheadings, but the fact that the French toppled all of their institutions and tried to remake their politics, only to see all the old institutions re-assert themselves. They ended up with the same system, just under new rulers. The main similarity between the new system and the Ancien Régime was its administrative centralization, the way everything was controlled out of Paris, sapping all power and initiative from local institutions.

This strikes me as a good analogy for what’s been happening with the old regime and the Internet revolution. The impact of the Internet has been a radical decentralization, the breaking down of gateways and barriers to entry for the transmission of information. But the old imperatives for centralization and control are still there, and they’re trying to reassert themselves.

Read the whole thing.

Centralizers gotta centralize, and they have all-new digital tools for doing just that. But those same digital tools can be used against the control-freaks posing as technological liberators.

Say, didn’t someone write a book about that?