Social Media, the ultimate WMD.

When George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq one of the main reasons (of the public and politically correct ones) was not only to free the Iraqis from the oppression of Saddam Hussein, but to stop the menace Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD for short) posed to the stability of the Gulf region. After months long of thorough search for said WMDs none was found. Maybe they were looking for the wrong WMD...

If you look at all the civil unrest happening across Arab countries in the last weeks you can clearly see that the ultimate WMD is neither a nerve gas nor a new virus, but Twitter, Facebook and social media in general.

Facebook was the channel Tunisian revolutionaries chose to coordinate their actions, probably they also 'recruited' adepts for their cause that way. The Tunisian government noticed it, and its answer was to reportedly try to steal all of the countries' user passwords. A naive and freakishly worrying move, that ultimately meant the nail in the coffin for said government. People were obviously not happy when they tried to start some kind of 'revolution', but the move from the deeply-corrupted government made obviously clear for them who the enemy was. The government is now out and the country looks for a renewed, more democratic and respectful with human rights government now.

The Egyptian government saw a similar revolution coming, with people organizing demonstrations and protest actions via Twitter specially. Realizing their Tunisian colleagues' highly impractical and unmanageable effort of trying to steal the whole country user base passwords was not the way to go, Egypt went even further. Egyptian government directly cut off the whole Internet supply to its citizens, trying to avoid the unavoidable. The result? Bigger and stronger protests than in Tunisia, although president Mubarak is still holding on, for now.

The digital era difference 

Some years ago it would have been easier for incompetent and ineffective governments to go through a situation like this. People could be increasingly unhappy about their situation, but with political repression and restricted freedom of speech playing their part, a revolution would be almost impossible to orchestrate. With Social Media everything is different now, the government can control the press and traditional media in general, but they have no way to control what individuals publish and post in the Internet... Combine this with the ever-increasing ubiquity of Internet access thanks to mobile networks and you have an unstoppable WMD capable of throwing down any government it targets. 

The economic reason behind

Tunisia and Egypt have been the biggest examples of the power of Social Media as a way for citizens to express their unhappiness with the way things work in their countries, but they have not been the only ones. Similar protests have taken place in Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Yemen, Oman and Jordan and things seem to be heating up in countries nearby. The common factor in all of these civil unrest actions has been the rise in food prices and consumption goods in general. We have previously talked about the worldwide commodities rally in different posts making things difficult for some industries, but when this reaches basic goods such as wheat, water, milk or rice things get ugly. People do not mind the financial crisis that has been plaguing the Earth in the last 3 years. People want a job, and they want their salary to be enough to cover at least their basic needs. Remember the Maslow pyramid? Well, you can have people not fulfilling the upper levels and going on with their lives without complaining. It is a cultural, educational and even religious matter, some people ask their lives for less than others. 

But when people cannot fulfill their most basic needs and the government does not do (or does not seem to do) anything to solve it you have an accident waiting to happen, a ticking bomb... 

The economical situation in those countries is not going to get immediately quieter or better, so we could be entering a phase of international instability and every knows what political instability brings: rises in commodities prices and stocks plummeting. Just the last thing the protesters need, another rise in their basic commodities prices, right?

A further rise in commodities and stock markets instability would not only affect these already troubled countries, it could also menace the economic recovery for the rest of the world and that IS the reason why we all should be giving a close look to the Middle East situation.

This issue should bring some interesting questions to the table for the people at Davos... but we will be discuss about Davos in the next post.