Commentator in the FT on Monday or Tuesday said something along the lines of ‘the Burmese military junta wouldn’t dare carry out a violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in the era of YouTube’.

Here’s one of many depressing reports

YouTube doesn’t seem to have stopped rendition flights either. Read a very disturbing article in a back copy of the London Review of Books by John Foot yesterday. Will post citation when find it.

Basically the CIA, with the compliance of the UK government, have been snatching people off the streets, bundling them into cars or vans and then flying them to the American and UK favoured torture chambers. The words ‘vile hypocrisy’ come to mind.

Given the grip of global corporations in owning large chunks of something vaguely called web 2.0 and social networking; it seems likely that there will be limits to their revolutionary effectiveness. I suspect we might need real soviets before we build them in Second Life.