From Samizdat to Twitter: How Technology Is Making Censorship Irrelevant

The experience of Iran suggests that the results can be significant. The Berkmann Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University suggests that 35,000 regularly-updated blogs are written in Arabic worldwide. Yet a separate Berkmann study suggests that as many as 70,0000 active blogs are written in Farsi.

In addition, it's nice to imagine — as Clay Shirky did last week at the Guardian's Activate conference — that dissidents hold a trump card: the absence of hubris. Power tends to make rulers "certain of what will happen next", said Shirky. As a result, rulers "try fewer things" than dissidents, who excel in terms of creativity. Meanwhile, as Shirky argues, "the wiring of the population" is "complete to the first degree". Even North Korea has a mobile phone network.

In practice, this means difficulties for sites that specialize in nudity, sex, dating, gambling, religion, alcohol, drugs, anonymizer tools and VoIP applications. For its part, traditional media censors itself, wary of selective enforcement of draconian laws.