Innovation is not neutral because it embodies power. The Russian “non-truths”.

Despotisms have managed to turn technology in their favor, without looking to the future and remaining anchored in the past. But democratic institutions can always find a way to make it a driving force for freedom and well-being

What is the relationship between technological innovation and political regime or, to be more precise: does technological innovation linked to the communication revolution offer new tools of resistance to power, or does it make it more oppressive? In trying to answer such a question, memory cannot but go back to the onset of the Arab springs of 2011, above all to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. We all remember very well the “hangover” that assailed many observers, confident that the web allowed unprecedented forms of “leaderless revolutions”, indeed with widespread and changeable leadership, and therefore much more difficult to repress. We have all seen how they ended: with substantial counter-revolutions (as in Egypt) or at least with “Thermidorian” reactions (as in Tunisia), perhaps after a transit through phases of hijacking of the original revolutionary movements and motives by more political subjects traditional and traditionally organized (the Muslim Brotherhood). There have been sequences of events that have reminded us how, in the face of a revolt and even a revolution that takes on unprecedented organizational and operational characteristics, the holders of power always have the option of exacerbating repressionto exercise more brutal and indiscriminate, even “primitive” violence, as we tragically learned in Syria.