[The Game] The Revolution Will Be Twittered

Chapter 21.5

'You can't stop the signal'
- Mr. Universe

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June 16th 2009, Rome.

Claudia sat herself down on the floor - a slightly dusty expanse of tiled Roman opulence gone to seed. It was a pleasant early summer's day, the sky was clear and there was no-one around. The sun's rays broke through the walls and columns, shafted between the tiles and the cracked wreckage of a long-gone empire and spread themselves across where she sat with what seemed almost like enthusiasm. Birds sang. She drank from a bottle of water and looked around her, taking in the few tourists that were around. To their eyes, she was just another tourist - a vistor from another country. Not another time.

She opened her bag, taking out a sealed leather booklet, held fast with thin leather straps. Fixing her sunglasses on her nose and adjusting her sitting stance, she unwound the straps from around the leather holder and opened it up. A sheaf of papers sat before her. So, this was it, she thought to herself. The book that people were willing to kill for.

She sat a while, staring at the title sheet, its printed words and elegant signature in black ink. She whistled slightly and took another look around her. Two women stood nearby, one posing for pictures and the other gleefully snapping away. Claudia turned the page and began reading.

'Mysterious Ways: A History Of Evolution and Design In The 21st Century. Chapter 1 - "The Revolution Will Be Twittered"'

Compiled from notes taken by Liam O'Neill in January/February 2098, taken in interviews with members of the People's Council of Narrative and Story, Basel, Switzerland.

According to testimony given to Cardenio Agent Liam O'Neill, the history of the 21st century can be condensed to several key themes: the collapse of the globalised, corporate model and it's domination over the human life-cycle, the re-emergence of small, localised economies in tandem with the rise of super-national, borderless states of cultural and economic exchange, the ultimately cataclysimic race for eugenic supremacy amongst the world's remaining monetary elite, the exhaustion of carbon-based energy resources and their replacement with renewable resources in the form of a Global Renewable Energy Efficency Network (GREEN), the causes and outcomes of the Third World War and the collapse of most of the major totalitarian regimes in the face of hyper-mobilised 'grass-roots' citizen movements.

This last feature will be the subject of this first entry.

The world began to see the first signs of a 'metaphysical mutation' following the Iranian Presidential elections of June 2009. The alleged attempt by the Iranian authorities to rig the result of an election in favour of the Supreme Council's favoured candidate, the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, produced such a wave of revulsion, not just abroad (as was perhaps to be expected), but within Iran itself, that it set in motion a train of events which would lead to a seismic shift in government, not just with the Islamic Republic, but across the surface of the whole planet.

The fatal mistake that the Iranian authorities fell into was in allowing the Iranian populace to believe that they were actually taking part in an authentic democratic process. The 2009 elections had widely televised Presidential debates, allowing the citizenry to have an objective, unbiased opportunity to pass personal judgement on the mettle of each candidate from the safety of their homes, away from the interference of the 'morality police' and other state agencies. In addition to the more 'usual' (in the west at least) event of a series of televised debates, the 2009 elections were the first to see the widespread usage of what was then, rather quaintly, being called 'social media' - that is rudimentary mobile phone SMS services, primitive, instant messaging chat facilities and predominantly text-based social networking services such as the now defunct 'Facebook'*.

More pertinently, the text-based news-feed streaming service known as "Twitter" rose to a position of prominence after the fall-out from the election results (which according to recovered records, were announced a mere three hours after the polls had closed) which saw it become the premier cybernetic information loop (based on the principles devised by Norbert Wiener) on the surface of the planet. It is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of the 21st century that the systems which would ultimately lead to the creation of a planet-wide consciousness and a nascent global government, came not from a body such as the United Nations or the well-intentioned principles of organisations such as Amnesty International, but rather from the attempt to create a more effective system for shooting down Nazi bombers during the Second World War.

In a desperate attempt to silence dissent, the Iranian regime set about blocking off, closing down or just smashing to pieces as many communication systems within the country as they could. Initially the "scorched-earth media strategy" paid dividends. Foreign journalists were denied access to government facilities and were forbidden to record or photograph on the streets and eventually expelled. Prominent 'websites' (early cyberspace news article and video streaming facilities) such as the BBC World Services' 'BBC Persia' found themselves mysteriously blocked off, blogs were hacked, SMS systems crashed and phone lines jammed.

As the scale of the protests became apparent to the regime, panic set in with the Supreme Council announcing that they would investigate accusations of electoral fraud. Widely seen as an attempt to placate the million-strong protests in the streets, it gave the regime time to unleash it's attack dogs and silence dissenting media outlets. Bloodshed was widespread, panic sweeping the streets of Tehran, with regime forces seemingly assuming control of the city.

What the regime hadn't counted on was simple text-streaming services such as Twitter. Impossible to hack due it's multiplicty of feed sources, global reach and real-time 'duck and dive' capability, it became the primary source of counter-regime activity over a frantic 72-hour period which saw a full-scale cyberwar erupt between Iranian activists and the agents of the state.

Most notably, Iranian protesters were aided by a global army of "hacktivists" only too willing to help the nascent democratic movement. Posting rotating proxy numbers, war-dialling government websites and maintaining a running battle with government misinformation officers, Twitter and its associated ecosystem of picture, video and blog sharing spaces became the site of a "digital blitzkrieg". If the government lost control of the information war, it seemed, they would lose control of the country.

What was chiefly significant was that the activities mounted against the Iranian government were not necessarily coming from Iranian citizens: the source was global. This was a movement which paid no heed to notions of borders, ethnicity or nationality. Where political rhetoric had trained people to see only a world of differences between our cultures, religions and national desires, the world suddenly saw the emergence of an attempted cyber-revolution; led not by a political elite or any form of recognised party, but rather by a massive, global army of geeks, democrats, hackers, comedians, bored housewives and Iranian kids armed only with cell phones and laptops, that was playing a real-time game of cat and mouse with a totalitarian regime in the only way it could - by trying to win the war for the control of information in and out of the country.

The results, as we now know, were staggering, setting in motion a chain of events which would lead to what many claimed to be the first stirrings of 'the global brain'.

End excerpt.

* Information on "Facebook" is scarce after the great data wipeout of 2042, when British Government server-farms in Durham unintentionally released a lethal software-eating virus after DNA databases of UK criminals had become sentient and attacked the early 'internet'. However, earlier recovered resources (ironically from almost the same time as the Green Revolution in Iran) indicate that Facebook may have been complicit in its own Ourobourous-like demise.

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