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In an American Political Science Association conference paper, Yale scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that shutting down the internet made it difficult to sustain a centralized revolution in Egypt.

He argues that a shut down of the decentralized internet facilitated the growth and development of smaller revolutionary uprisings locally, where in-the-flesh movement building among activists had more traction, allowing activists to recruit some of the more apathetic/less enthused amongst them.

As a result, shutting down the decentralized internet actually made the movement more diffuse and numerous — and made it more challenging for authorities to control, track, and contain.

The abstract:

Conventional wisdom suggests that lapses in media connectivity – for example, disruption of Internet and cell phone access – have a negative effect on political mobilization. I argue that on the contrary, sudden interruption of mass communication accelerates revolutionary mobilization and proliferates decentralized contention. Using a dynamic threshold model for participation in network collective action I demonstrate that full connectivity in a social network can hinder revolutionary action. I exploit a decision by Mubarak’s regime to disrupt the Internet and mobile communication during the 2011 Egyptian uprising to provide an empirical proof for the hypothesis. A difference-in difference inference strategy reveals the impact of media disruption on the dispersion of the protests. The evidence is corroborated using historical, anecdotal, and statistical accounts.

The paper can be found on SSRN here.

In other news, a supercomputer allegedly has the ability to predict revolutions.

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