Ethan Zuckerman's compelling 'cute cats theory' has changed my mind about the internet's role in the struggle for global justice
Zuckerman's argument is this: while YouTube, Twitter, Facebook (and other popular social services) aren't good at protecting dissidents, they are nevertheless the best place for this sort of activity to start, for several reasons.
First, because when YouTube is taken off your nation's internet, everyone notices, not just dissidents. So if a state shuts down a site dedicated to exposing official brutality, only the people who care about that sort of thing already are likely to notice.
But when YouTube goes dark, all the people who want to look at cute cats discover that their favourite site is gone, and they start to ask their neighbours why, and they come to learn that there exists video evidence of official brutality so heinous and awful that the government has shut out all of YouTube in case the people see it.
Second, the most common tool used by oppressive regimes against dissident sites is distributed denial of service (DDOS), sending floods of traffic from networks of thousands of compromised PCs that overwhelms the target server and knocks it off the internet.
Services such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are much better at surviving these attacks than a home-brewed dissident site.
Finally, Zuckerman argues that the lesson from the Arab spring is that revolutions are touched off by everyday people with everyday grievances – arbitrary detention, corruption and police brutality – and those people will use the tools they are familiar with to get the word out.
The first thing that comes to mind after you capture a mobile phone video of the police murdering a family member isn't "Let's see, I wonder if there's a purpose-built activist tool that I can use for distributing this clip?" Rather, the first thing that comes to mind is, "I'd better post this on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter so that everyone can see it" ...
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