Yglesias links to Farrell; both are worth reading.
It’s still not clear to me the extent to which technology is enabling intramural communication among the protesters, as opposed to simply serving as a broadcast medium between a few of them and the west. I’m very curious to find out, though, and have a few emails out to people running proxies asking how much activity they’re seeing from plausibly Iranian IPs. At least one has committed to figuring this out; we’ll see if he follows through.
One thing is increasingly clear: the idea that you can change the world from your computer has a strong allure. From the various alleged DoS attacks underway* to the wrangling over hashtags and profile data (based on what seems to be pretty tenuous speculation about the regime’s filtering plans and abilities), a lot of narcissism is masquerading as activism. But then, this is the internet.
* These seem virtually certain to be counterproductive — how exactly does damaging digital communication empower the side without the TV stations in an information war? How are targets even being identified, except via the diktat of trusted-but-unverified Twitter users?
UPDATE: Austin Heap, who seems to be running the biggest clearinghouse for #iranelection proxies, has written an update sharing some stats. He’s apparently filtering source IP (seemingly using this list) and reports 2000 connections/second. Modern browsers reuse connections for multiple HTTP requests, so that’s nothing to sneeze at. I’ve asked him whether he’s comfortable generating some stats on where the outbound traffic is going.
WELL, HELL: If the professional diplomats at the State Department thinks that Twitter is vital resource for Iranian protesters, I suppose I can’t really argue otherwise. But it doesn’t make me any happier about a privately-owned technology becoming a vital part of the infrastructure supporting political activity. I should add that Twitter as a company has been nothing but praiseworthy, from how they rescheduled their downtime to the openness represented by their API. But there are limits to any for-profit enterprise’s goodwill. I would feel a lot more comfortable if #iranelection was occurring on a decentralized network (and yes, I realize there are immense technological hurdles to such a thing being practical).