The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.

One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.

Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly.

North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives - or risk having their narratives shaped by others.

Mobile phones are one of the most insecure devices that were ever available, so they're very easy to trace; they're very easy to tap.

As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.