Points of Interest

Nothing to add right now, but Iqra’i, which I’m sure stands for something and seems to be written by three quite sharp Yalies, is easily the best new blog I’ve read in a while. Sample:

I’m extremely wary about citing techno-subversion as a sign of incipient revolution under any circumstance — for one thing, the mainstream media’s tendency to consider any online unrest a symbol of widespread “discontent of the young within the system” seems to rely on projecting American patterns of Internet use rather than considering whether or not all youth in a country actually have Internet access, and whether it’s fair to generalize about those who don’t. But I think if it does happen, it’ll be more likely to happen under a Cuban model, where rebellion is amphibious between the lived world and cyberspace, than under a Chinese one.

The man who said “It is difficult to imagine that even manifest ‘dissent’ could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life” was one of the most successful revolutionaries of the past century. I can see the Havelian spirit in Cuban cyber-rebellion. The man who said “You cannot live through (life) unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery,” died, a failure in exile, at the hands of his gardener. There is some degree of Trotskyism in the internationalist, super-virtual Chinese rebellion. I like it far less.