Welcome to the 21st Century

Years ago I read a book by Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View, about scenario planning. The section that made the biggest impression on me was that planners at Royal Dutch Shell - using publicly available information - identified the possibility that the U.S.S.R. would collapse long before it did. Sometimes, we can identify a range of scenarios and come up with decent estimates of probability. But sometimes we can't, or at least we don't.

I don't know if any of the people whose job it is to think about these things really saw the Arab Spring coming. Gregory Gause wrote about this in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs in an article with the self-explanatory title, "Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring." He says that they missed it because no one had been paying attention to the military. "Most scholars assumed that no daylight existed between the ruling regimes and their military and security services." International donors have pressured the non-oil-producing states to modernize their economies. "Some Middle East specialists thought that economic liberalization could establish new bases of support for Arab authoritarians and encourage the economic growth necessary to grapple with the challenges of growing populations...Meanwhile, Western governments pushed the idea that economic reform represented a step toward political reform." Of course, saying so does not make it true.

Looking for this issue yesterday afternoon, I found the January/February issue, with the cover story, "The Political Power of Social Media," by Clay Shirky. He makes the case that one of the most important roles that social media play in promoting democracy ultimately will be in facilitating the development of civil society. "Political freedom has to be accompanied by a civil society literate enough and densely connected enough to discuss the issues presented to the public." In the long run, it's more important that a country's citizens can talk to each other than that they have access to Google and The New York Times. "Access to information is far less important, politically, than access to conversation."

Last week I went to a very interesting presentation on Cuba. While I've been following events in the Middle East and North Africa, I didn't know much about Cuba, so I learned a lot. There is a little progress on the civil society front, and the Ladies in White have continued to march each Sunday since the arrests of dissidents in 2003 (although I've read since that their founder, Laura Pollan, recently died, so the future of that group may be uncertain). And there are now lots of cell phones in Cuba, and some freedom of communication even if the government doesn't like it. The speaker talked about the blogger, Yoani Sanchez, who has bravely written about life and politics in Cuba.  But the most interesting thing to me in his presentation was the observation that everyone in charge in Cuba is old - they are all in their 70s and 80s. Every time someone younger starts to become prominent, they get removed from their position - there's a phrase for it in Cuba, which means staying home in your pajamas. So, one way or another, change will come to Cuba.   The speaker would not let himself be drawn into speculation about what that future might be like. In the meantime, if you want to know about Cuba present, read Yoani Sanchez's blog. Her most recent post is about unmasking the people who monitor telecommunications in Cuba.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that a U.S. Internet security company made the devices that the government of Syria is using to block access to the Internet. In the meantime, the government crackdown against the demonstrators continues. The U.N. estimates that more than 3,000 people - most of them civilians - have died since the uprising began in March.