Catalyst for Arab Spring?...

Cleve Catmill published a science fiction story called "Deadline" in Astonishing Science Fiction, going into tremendous detail about a so-called doomsday device that used Uranium 235 as an isotope. It was 1944, and we (ahem) were developing the atomic bomb - through Feynman and Oppenheimer - using Uranium 238! Catmill guessed right. Our intelligence agencies were not pleased; Tom Clancy was debriefed the the White House (so the legend goes) for his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October due to it's stunning military accuracy.

There are obvious American parallels I've given commentary to already. Blame in on the democratizing force...of technology.

In 2004 [Jared Cohen] witnessed strange crowds of silent young people assembled in the marketplace of the city of Shiraz in southern Iran. They were studiously ignoring one another and intent on their cell phones. Cohen soon found out that they had assembled in an attempt to reinvent the Internet in a place where Internet use was seriously limited by the government. The crowd were using short range Bluetooth connections to communicate with strangers in ways that in other places would involve the Web: searching for a bassist for a band, promoting club nights or selling personal goods. When Cohen asked members of this peer-to-peer human Web if they were worried about being caught, they laughed. No one over thirty understands this is even possible, they said.

That gave Cohen a moment of premonition about the fate of repressive governments in the middle east, he told the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Arizona, yesterday. "These people are using technology to do things they're not allowed to do," he said, "they're self training in activism and one day this will help them organize for something else that is illegal and that they're not allowed to do."

Technology Review (published by MIT): How Internet Citizenry Will Decide the Fate of Nations