As we watched the 12th Century battle the 21st Century in Iran over last weekend, one thing became startlingly clear. The revolutionary struggle going on in Iran right now is like none other than has ever been waged in the history of the human race, thanks to Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and all the other ways that people can communicate and share their ideas in Cyberspace. Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
As a person who is more tech savvy than many of my generation who cut their teeth while growing up watching ‘Howdy Doody’ on small, black and white TV’s in the 50’s, I honestly could not figure out what Twitter was for, in all its ‘140 characters or less’ glory, until Iran erupted following their clumsily rigged elections over the last couple of weeks. Now I get it. YouTube and Facebook make more sense to me now too.
You see, the Supreme Leader (I detest that title!) of Iran, in all his mid-evil (misspelling/pun intentional) glory, simply did not calculate that when he tried the time-honored route of brutally suppressing dissent, favored by the Hitlers, Stalins, Mao’s, Kim Jon Il’s, Mussolini’s, and so many other dictators, of shutting down the media and throwing out the foreign press, that Cyberspace made this brutal suppression of human thought, so 20th Century now . . . so passé . . . and so ineffective.
Half of the population of Iran is under 25 years of age; Afghanistan’s population is even younger: half are in their teens! As any F&HD reader with kids in their teens or twenties now knows, Cyberspace is their native playground – teens and twenty-somethings just assume that Cyberspace has always been there for them to play in and to communicate through, because it has always been there during their lives. I will always remember my daughter, now 23, when she was a little girl, busily working our upstairs desktop computer with some 10 chat windows open, and with our home phone in hand, and my office phone in her other ear (when she could snag that too, during a break in the action) merrily texting, chatting and communicating away with her circle of little pals . . . multi-tasking happily away.
Now in 2009, we are watching the groundswell in Iran through the only Media which cannot be squelched by the Supreme Leader and his equally insane Supreme Cronies and those motorcycle riding, demented Bizzaro Boy Scout Basij (so reminiscent of the Hitler Youth) as they lamely try to crack down on the tidal wave of dissent which has filled the streets of that truly ancient civilization, a battle which the 12th Century cannot win against the new Cyberspace Media of the 21st Century. It will not happen; it cannot happen.
Not so long as you can Twitter’s countless reports (we will have to get used to that term” “Tweet”!), right from the streets, of that 16-year old girl that those Nazi imitators left to bleed to death in the streets of Tehran the other day, or YouTube’s videos of blood and gore perpetrated mindlessly (and desperately) against people who simply want their vote to count, for a change, in a land ruled by a retrograde form of a religion which desperately needs to have its own Reformation and to join the modern era, or on Facebook, formerly the domain of your kids and mine, but, now transforming into a whole new form of revolutionary connectedness.
There is no way on God’s Green Earth that the Supreme Leader of Iran or his Brown-shirt thugs, Basij, or anybody else, will be able to stop ideas with force and brutality – not as long as there are ways in Cyberspace for those ideas to be heard and embraced in Cyberspace. That drama is playing out right now on the embattled streets of Tehran and Iran’s other cities. You can watch it endlessly, 24/7, on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and so many other places, all over the Internet, and they can beat heads, draw blood and kill the speakers, but you cannot kill the message as long as Cyberspace can broadcast it.