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even if the result is similar: Mass gatherings, control of some essential public space - a square, a stock exchange, a park. All organized, it appears, using completely ethereal techniques: Text messages, video postings, chat rooms. Similar movements appear around in the world. In Iran, in Italy, in Russia. “Occupy Wall Street”, blossoms in New York City, a protest against wealth inequality and finance. It becomes a self-franchising social movement, appearing in hundreds of cities: Occupy Hollywood. Occupy Central in Hong Kong. Occupy - strangely — Vegas. Then in Sidi Bouzid, a Tunisian town you've never heard of, far away from all these unstable looking mobs, a spark lands. A local man has set himself on fire. Police (worse, a police woman) had confiscated his scales and his fruit and then tossed him around for no reason other than that he was poor and could do nothing about it. It is November 2010. Within hours protests begin in Sidi Bouzid. They spread to Tunis. 81Then Tripoli. Then Damascus. You watch as the anger, moving on once-invisible technological lines of video and text, demolishes the stability of all of North Africa. Over the next two years leaders are pushed from power in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen: their names, instead of being symbols of stability, instantly cast as sources of injustice. Other countries - Syria, Algeria, Sudan, and Bahrain tumble for periods into the black hole of civil violence. Some people mistake all this for a democratic revolution. Over time, however, it’s clear this is hardly that. Something more complex is emerging from the violent mist. New, nearly virtual terror groups organized themselves in the vacuum, hyper-lethal versions of connected protest. A new kind of political energy, a method of linking people and ideas and an easy destructive power, is alive. It seems to be as active in cynical, murderous fundamentalists as in the optimistic peace-hoping youth. Democratic revolution? No. Revolution? Yes, clearly, that. A few years later, after you've been replaced or are on the run, after your own country has had upheaval and you've had your visit from a well-meaning American diplomat urging you towards a quiet retirement house in Saudi Arabi, the Spanish social philosopher Manuel Castells will name the disease that undid you. Castells is perhaps an unlikely figure to diagnose the political illness that infected so much of the world after 2008. An elfin, kinetic figure with a disorganized mop of grey hair, he sports the wardrobe of an accountant and a rolling Spanish accent that flavors his speech with a surprising taste of romance. It’s a mixture that seems somehow ideal for a world often on his lips: “Reevolootion.” With the meticulous care an anthropologist might bring to documenting a distant, undiscovered tribe, Castells has spent decades finger-poking, classifying and explaining networks. In the late 1990s his books, lectures and research set the frame for the world we inhabit: fast- changing, ripped through by communications and technology, linked in unusual ways. “The network society,” he explained, “represents a qualitative change in the human experience,” he explained. 84 81 They spread to Tunis: Mohamed Zayani, Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politcs of Everyday Life in Tunisia, Oxford University Press (2015) 82 “The network society”: Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 508 62 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018294