The revolution will be tweeted or whatever. People's power and technology.

Today in Tehran from #iranelection on twitter

Sunday evening I spent almost an entire train ride from Ottawa to Toronto glued to Twitter following the posts from #iranelections, which is a way to get all the posts about the elections in Iran and following a twitterer with the handle Change for Iran who was posting from his roof top every few minutes and then going down to join the protests and coming back.  It was an amazing experience to directly follow what was happening on the streets of Tehran as it was happening.  More important, though, Twitter became a major source of information for those opposed to Ahmadinejad's government and protesting what they consider to be fraudelant election results. 

Knowing there would be protests the Iranian government shut down Facebook, MySpace, reduced internet access and even cell phone messaging capacity, which had been a major source of information for many activists.  I guess they didn't know about Twitter, which doesn't need broadband access and which is apparently very difficult to block because of the way it is designed.

The MSM (mainstream media) has been reporting the protests pretty accurately but of course people in Iran cannot get access to that so Twitter has become important to inform them as well.   I am not very well informed about Iranian politics and I am trying to catch up.  There lots of analysis in the usual places Democracy Now, Al Jazeera, rabble.ca and The Bullet .  Tonight Jeff Farias will be intervening Noam Chomsky at 7 pm ET online.

But what I want to talk about is the cultural revolution that is sweeping the globe combining a hunger for people's power with new technologies and the way in which these new technologies are facilitating a people's globalization.

It started with the Zapatistas at the turn of the twentieth century posting their ideas through Subcomandante Marcos to a North American and European youth movement hungry for a vision of a another world

On the one side is neoliberalism with all its repressive power and all its machinery of death: on the other side is the human being. In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman who rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and cynicism has dyed grey. Any man or woman of whatever colour in whatever tongue speaks and says to himself, to herself: Enough is enough!—Ya Basta!