Dictators are toppled by people, not by media platforms. But Egyptian activists, especially the young, clearly harnessed the power and potential of social media, leading to the mass mobilizations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. The Mubarak regime recognized early on that social media could loosen its grip on power. The government began disrupting Facebook and Twitter as protesters hit the streets on Jan. 25 before shutting down the Internet two days later.

It was John Gilmore who wrote that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” so at the time that the Egyptian government tried to pull the plug on it, that just made its pull, and its power, that much stronger.

What this does, effectively, is puts into very sharp focus the fact that in the future, differences will not be settled at the ends of firearms. They will be settled at the speakers on mobile phones and the screens of tablet computers. Control of the neural network that connects those dots, and the information that it can move to the people who are willing to do something with it, is where revolutions will truly be lost or won.