The revolution will be ... tweeted

Something very confusing is going on here. We were all taught that revolutions were led by charismatic guys with perfect haircuts, who read the most fashionable theorists of the day (at least, said they did), then went off to round up a crowd, leading them as they stormed the barricades while the leader - his hair still perfectly combed, his clothes a bohemian chic - yelled out inspiring commands. And after the day was won, and his revolution was done, he went off to Davos to talk about saving the world.

Then suddenly something changed. While charisma-boy - admittedly a touch older now, looking a little more 'prosperous' and, shall we say, contented with life - was busy in a Swiss luxury resort talking to some guy in wraparound glasses about their shared love of poor people, their beloved poor folk back home didn't get the memo. They started a revolution without them.

And when he got back and asked his enforcers to bring him the leader, preferably on a plate, they replied, "We don't know who he is. He's just a Facebook page."

The social protests roiling the Middle East were not quite leaderless, but they were as close to it as one can get, and still be called an organised movement. Crowd-sourcing via social media replaced party centralism. Ideas, more than people, led the way. And the ideas came not from prominent intellectuals who make it on to Charlie Rose, but through the Byzantine yet lightning-fast circuitry of the Internet, from sometimes obscure origins.

Power of the net

From what we can tell, the thinking behind the Egyptian revolution was lifted from the tactics intellectuals - forming a community in Internet chat rooms - observed in a Serbian opposition group. The Serbians, in turn, studied the revolutionary manual of an American pacifist. When The New York Times tracked him down this week in his modest Boston home, they found not a firebrand, but a shy octogenarian.

Egypt found the trick to shutting off the Internet for a short while, thereby freezing the communication among activists. But this amounted to destroying a village to save it: in today's economy, the need to remain online in order to manage communications and transactions is so pressing that you have to be willing to risk economic suicide to put your country offline. In the end, that was too much for Egypt's despots.

You can round up the leaders and shut down their Facebook pages. But then, new Facebook pages open. Or you get to the leaders' houses, and find out they aren't even in the county. They're operating from a server in Holland. Or their Internet identity was an invented one. The old communists dreamed of global revolution. This generation is actually pulling it off.

Uncertain future

Where this might lead is difficult to say. But the implications are enormous. We are so accustomed to the flow of information passing through a small number of nodes, which can be quickly intercepted or regulated, that the new media have caught a world unawares. Before, if your negatives were bad, you just had to try and sweet-talk Diane Sawyer. Now, it's not that easy.

Only a small number of visionaries talked about the revolutionary impact of the democratising, almost anarchic technologies the Internet made possible. The Arab revolutions seem to suggest they were on to something.

It's early days yet. Previous revolutions were quickly undone. The technology might yet be controlled, or the inventor of Facebook may be invited to Davos and persuaded to join the club and act a little more 'responsibly' (though another one will probably then just come along). Or, more simply - as some fear might yet happen in Egypt - the idealists could be outmanoeuvred by the generals, who, after all, still have the guns.

But it's a safe bet that what the rebels have going for them is that the generals still haven't read the manuals, can't understand them, and anyhow find the print too small.

John Rapley is the Bradlow fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and rapley.john@gmail.com.