Teaching Old Cats To Bark

The confrontation between the state governments and free minded citizen is a neverending story. Since the industrial revolution and formation of modern nation-states in the 19th century it is a core principle for every government to increase the level of control over their citizen. The speed of technical innovation since then is gradually increasing, but only since the early nineties of the 20th century, we can talk about the new quality - this time of digital revolution. Dreams of improvement of human society connected to these two „revolutions“ are equally naive and false.

It is said that you cannot teach new tricks to old dogs. Digital revolution nevertheless requests impossible from the very start – we as if need to teach our governments´ old cats to bark – to understand and use qualitatively new ways of thinking, communicating with their citizen, intervene in the financial sphere, economy and culture.

No dictatorship of the past had so much information and control over individual citizen´s life as digital age governments – elected or not. At the same time, the digital revolution breaks through many constitutive barriers of the modern nation-state and allows the growth of no-national and non-state civic interest groups or cross-border virtual communities.

So, it is just another new version of the same old game. A lesson that digital dissidents of today are trying not to forget is that every rebellion is always most dangerous to the rebels themselves. Because – as always – it is not enough to stand up against somebody. It is much more effective to stand for something. Creating a factual example of working independently on the state systems proving the government control ineffective and costly would seem to be the best available strategy for all.