So who are the players in Egypt’s drama? Sayyid Qutb, decades dead, is one: an angry young man sent from Egypt to America by friends who wanted him to loosen up, he underwent instead a kind of transformation. His journey through early 20th Century America as a man who was obviously not white, and who was inclined towards a conservative and faith-based perception, so appalled him that he crafted a synthesis of modern revolutionary ideas and Islam which effectively took the evils of capitalism as the evils of unrighteousness and substituted the deity for socialism or anarchy. That synthesis is one of the foundations of modern Islamism (and the Muslim Brotherhood), and of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Above all, their strength is in a clear, simple rhetoric and a pre-existing power structure.

Democrats, for sure: basic assumption is that they’re urban and educated middle class people, cosmopolitan in outlook and desperate for prosperity and gentle social progression (but not too much of it). A powerful, intellectual minority, but not a power base in and of themselves. And nuance plays badly in revolution.
The army, inevitably: classically the poorer and less well-educated people from rural and urban-poor backgrounds. Are they largely secular or moderate, or do they tend towards the Muslim Brotherhood? The officer class may have sympathies with the democrats or may be vested in Mubarak’s regime, depending on their own culpability and their assessment of the threat from within.
The rural and urban lower classes – farmers and manual workers. The ‘real people’. Historically – in other cases, which may or may not be similar – they know when they can’t take any more, and what they need – but which way will they break? Absent a charismatic and powerful leader emerging from this group and creating his or her own structures, they will be channelled by a nearby, compelling narrative. The slogan will be akin to ‘food, peace, freedom’, and the new regime will have either to delivery very fast or suppress the inevitable cries of outrage and betrayal. This is where the Russian February Revolution fell and the October Revolution changed the course of Russia from nascent distributed democracy to one-party state.
External forces – the US, EU, Israel, Pakistan, Hamas, Al Qaeda, the other Arab states. All or any of the above may seek to influence events and any such attempt will change what happens, but not necessarily in a predictable way.
So, yes, Mubarak’s regime is nasty. But given Egypt’s place in the world and the powers in play, it’s not clear to me that its fall is going to take us anywhere good. Given that it’s happening, of course, we will have to be in the mix, trying to get an outcome which suits us. The trouble is, again looking at history, our power brokers will prefer a strongman to a democrat vulnerable to being unseated by a religious ideologue. Someone, somewhere, is even now submitting a recommendation to back such a person over and above a genuine democrat, and if that course is followed we will yet again be in the business of supporting a monster for fear of a worse one, and the reputation of the developed northwest will sink further in the eyes of the Arab world – and, indeed, anyone else who’s paying attention.

Up till now we thought of cultural developments leading to the opportunity of people to move out of Africa. Now we see, I think, that it was the environment that was the key to this and the change from a glacial period into an interglacial opened the other possibility to leave Africa though the southern corridor and this certainly not only happened once, this happened many times during the (quarternerly) and this leaves a lot of possibilities for human migrations and keeping this in mind, might change our view completely. There are not many exits from Africa. You can only exit by the Sinai or by the south. That’s the only – that’s the only points where you can leave it. so either it’s the route that we propose, or it could be the route from Egypt to Sinai and both are possible, both have their problems and in any case, our findings open a second way, which in my opinion is more plausible for massive movements than the northern route.

..tonight, I am watching a country in the throes of a populist uprising turn off the internet as a protective measure. And I can’t help but wonder: If I were one of eighty million people living in a country in the midst of a nascent political upheaval whose access to the rest of the world was being antagonistically removed, would I start to think that maybe those simple packets that transport Facebook updates and Twitter status messages and mass emails are perhaps something more than the byproduct of business but a fundamental right of human beings to communicate with other human beings?

I have nothing more trenchant to offer than that as I get ready to go to sleep in my warm, secure bed. So I pass the buck to you: Is access to the internet a human right? And if so, to what end should we expect others to go to maintain it?

Research In Motion unveiled a concept design for a phone called the BlackBerry Empathy, which is based on a wireless “mood ring.” (No, I’m not making this up.) The ring somehow gathers your biometric data, which is sent to the phone. The phone would also detect the emotions of people near you, and would let you know if they’re angry, sad or bored; it would do the same with your social networking contacts. The idea is that everyone would know via Facebook how everyone else was feeling, based on biometric data.

After all, the radical transparency of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook may not be mutually exclusive with what we might as well call the radical opacity of Christopher ‘moot’ Poole and 4chan. Their uses may even be mutually necessary. Peretti puts it this way: if 4chan is the id of the Internet, then ‘Google is kind of like the ego, and Facebook is kind of like the superego.’ If that’s so, then there’s only one way the trend toward radical transparency won’t end up killing the Internet’s soul: if we can leave the light of all that openness every now and then to spend some time in the shadows where the crazy lives.

..augmented humanity implies inserting tech deliberately in the way of normal life, to better it. And Schmidt’s unspoken line is that job should fall to Google–it has diverse tools that operate in all of these “augmented info” spaces and beyond, and if they were all centralized and presented to you seamlessly via Android smartphones, then it could improve the human race. After all, thanks to its vast user-info databases, Google already knows pretty much everything about you, and almost what you’re thinking about where you’re going next (as Schmidt has previously noted.) He caveated his argument with lots of references to the phrase “with your permission,” obviously concerned he was overstepping the user-privacy boundary. But do we trust Google with the future of 21st century humankind? There’s a big assumption here that Google will always promise not to be evil.

Red Dawn 2, the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the foreground of the half-destroyed office building, whose jagged entrails were visible through the holes opened by the wrecking ball. A pedestrian routinely bumped into Asian-American extras with Michigan accents and fake Kalashnikovs, while a parking garage played the role of a Communist police station. It was an uncanny spectacle: the very real rubble of the Motor City’s industrial economy serving as the movie backdrop for post-industrial America’s paranoid fantasies of national victimization. What made it even weirder was the fact that the film’s producers just left the posters hanging when they packed up. A red-and-yellow poster on that same parking garage assured us for weeks afterward that our new rulers were “here to help.”

To date the model has successfully predicted civil unrest in Peru, Ireland, Ecuador, Italy and most recently, Tunisia. Iran is currently at the top of the list.