http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/delusions-aside-the-ne... Zeynep: “But I disagree that the reason online protests do not work is that they are online, or they are easy. The reality, at this juncture in history, is that nothing really works. The Internet is not the problem; global citizen disempowerement is. It’s not the technology that is failing politics but it is our politics that has failed. … Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations. I find it ironic that, after correctly warning about the dangers of an Internet-centric worldview in which everything is perceived through the prism of the Net, Morozov himself is caught in a net-centric analysis of political activism’s decline. If surveillance, censorship and propaganda are the three pillars of authoritarianism, information, organization and leverage are the counter-pillars of citizen power. And the Internet provides the best and most appropriate infrastructure for strengthening all three. Morozov correctly claims that it does not do so in an unmitigated manner but unmitigated is not the same as ineffective or irrelevant. In this regard, the Internet is the greatest antidote to anti-communitarian forces. Frankly, I find even the most mindless lolcat sites on the Internet to be an improvement over canned-laughter-filled sitcoms. The point of lolcats is not the lolcats themselves, but to share them with friends, comment on them, make more of them, and enter the community via the joke. It’s the community, not the cat, that matters. (If you doubt this, try selling a book of lolcats and see how well it does.) I write this review in the aftermath of an atrocity; the assassination attempt in Arizona on a Congresswoman that claimed the lives of six others including a child. Every Internet community I am part of is roiled and there is widespread discussion on most of them about the event. Fifteen years ago, we’d all be watching TV, not communicating with each other.”