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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Protests happened before the Internet. Before telephones, even. Neither are a requirement for people to communicate and organize.

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But times change and so has technology.

Adversaries have access to this technology too, and it's a power multiplier. If they can shut down access to those they are oppressing, then they become far too powerful.

Yes, protesters can still protest, but without access to the same tech that those they are protesting can use, they can be out-organized, their voice muted, and their effectiveness minimized.

We lost common access to the means that were used to communicate earlier. For example, anonymous and unrevocable access to the phone network used to exist in the form of payphones, which are being phased out.

You're being disingenuous. Think about this. The authorities wouldn't blanket shut down the Internet, they'd do it for the protesting populace, but leave their own access untouched. Protests largely suceeded in prior times because the capabilities of the populace vs. the government were largely symmetrical.

That would not be the case in this instance. You (the protestors) would be back to runners, unencrypted radio/code. They'd still have the modern comm suite.

It doesn't make things impossible for protestors, but it greatly shifts things in the government's favor for containment and ability to sustain itself against a now unconsenting populace. Always remember asymmetry will be employed as early and often as possible.

This argument is almost never useful. Times change.

People survived hundreds of years ago without electricity or running water, so it should be perfectly fine if the government shuts off utilities for protestors, right?

> Protests happened before the Internet. Before telephones, even.

US Population, 1870: 38,558,371

US Population, 2020: 331,449,281

That's not even necessarily the main issue - it's that the cultural norms around how information was spread pre-phone/internet have now been lost, so there's realistically no good way to get a message out to a huge number of people without access to modern communications technology. In a world where flyers or word of mouth or bill posters were the only forms of communication people naturally paid much more attention to them and their patterns of movement and interaction within the community enabled their effectiveness. Shutting off all electronic communication access is orders-of-magnitude more limiting than, say, a twitter ban (which I've argued before barely qualifies as a restriction on free speech).

Before telephones protests were far from peaceful and usually ended up killing someone.

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