"So you say you want a revolution?" III

Andrew Sullivan has been a man-on-fire these past few days. I can't keep up with him, so just go read The Daily Dish - you can read his incredible coverage of the fraudulent election in Iran, and more importantly, see how the people of Iran are not taking this lying down.

Relatedly, Alex Whalen (and many others) have posted about the failure of most of the Mainstream Media (MSM) to do justice to this historic event. But beyond how dumb the MSM is going to look when this is all over (and how incredible the blogosphere's coverage of this has been), the real trick to this is seeing how the shift in communications technology has made it so the Iranian establishment can't control the diffusion of information about what is going on. I think Alex hits this one on the nose:

Open networks will defeat closed networks every time. The old guard didn't understand how things have changed. The Millennials, both here and in Iran, so completely take open, decentralized communication networks for granted that they use them without even realizing just how revolutionary their simple acts of speech really are. And for my part, I'm happy to have been born into a generation in between, old enough to have played my own small part in building this new information system well before anyone beyond us geeks understood just how important what we were doing really was.

I have no idea where things will go in Iran next. Despite that, I am absolutely certain that the adoption of networks like Facebook and Twitter by young adults in Iran make any long-term bets on the closed system of the Ayatollahs a very, very stupid wager.

Allah O Akbar!