Technology Review: People Power 2.0 How civilians helped win the Libyan information war.

[tabatha]

(I looked for a "Technology" topic under "Computers and Internet" to post this. )

Really interesting article about the civilian contribution via technology to the overthrow of Gadaffi. It also counters the false and baseless claims that the revolution was not supported by the majority of the population:

"Libya's six million or so people are concentrated in a coastal belt of cities and connected in a kind of "cousinate" of extensive personal and family networks. The trust embedded in these networks was valuable to the opposition: a cousin's cousin could check bona fides, or a friend's cousin could supply intelligence from within the regime's security apparatus. Meanwhile, Qaddafi's brittle hierarchy, absorbed in the kind of capricious and despotic interventions dubbed "sultanism," was isolated from this social structure and plagued by distrust.

Libyans lived in fear of their sultan for over four decades, but their tight social networks proved highly resilient when the delusion that people believed in the regime—what Kilcullen calls "the presumed consensus"—fell away. At that point, the cousinate took on the sultanists."

Also interesting how women played significant roles. Mo Nabbous and Andy Carvin are mentioned.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/40214/?p1=A1

[Romulox]

1. LOL! Did text messaging assist with the racial cleansing, too?