We need less Chemo and Surgery and more "Voom."

[Fuchs]

I'm not convinced that costs or ease changed a lot, for much influence works best with much charisma, and that's still working the old-fashioned way.

Look up how many millions of poorly informed, technology-devoid Indians were harnessed by Gandhi for the struggle for independence.

Obama is known for savvy campaign organisation, but it was a simple, old-fashioned convention speech which catapulted him into the race in the first place.

Walesa started the downfall of the Warsaw Pact as a labour leader with a simple worker's strike at a Polish shipyard when the time was ripe.
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To me, new technologies and all the other changes that supposedly shook supposedly stable regimes so much are merely old wine in new bottles.

I'm coming from a history-swallowing background here, with much more history knowledge about thousands of years and five continents than one actually needs in life. Thus I see rarely anything really new.


Look, a singer can probably push a regime over the brink with a popular song and music video that's on almost all smartphones in the country and copied like a virus.
Just as well, a hundred years ago the singer would probably have composed a simple song everyone can sing - and almost everyone would sing, teaching others this way.*
The smartphone is a mere superficiality.
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One more:
An old boss of mine once explained to me why in his opinion the Dutch and Danes are much better at getting things done with political innovation and experiments than Germans: Whenever there's a challenge, they have one or maybe two university institutes as scientific advisors and thus usually one advising voice.
The German government on the other hand has a whole committee of scientific advisors from dozens of universities. There's almost never just one voice, and the different politicians pick the advice they like and don't get anything experimental of consequence done.

I suppose the overall noise level and diversity of voices heard from new technologies, new institutions et cetera does also have an element that promotes inaction.


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*:
Als Adam grub und Eva spann wo war denn da der Edelmann? / When Adam dug and Eve spun, where was then the aristocrat?
This simple line is still associated with the huge peasant revolts in Germany of around 1525, when huge peasant armies overwhelmed the ruling class in Southern Germany and were only defeated with help from North Germany and mercenary support.
It didn't take any modern technologies then to set ablaze much of Central Europe within months, almost turning around a thousand years-old dominant order of society.

[ganulv]

Look, a singer can probably push a regime over the brink with a popular song and music video that's on almost all smartphones in the country and copied like a virus.

The thing is that it is typically only in retrospect that we know that the regime was on the brink!

[Fuchs]

People with close-up knowledge of the country in question often sense such developments 'a bit' earlier than the foreign public.

Your foreign politicians won't get such news in their intel dossiers in time if your intelligence agency co-operates industriously with the dictator's domestic intelligence agency, of course.