Each of the heady, and now increasingly bloody and co-opted, revolts across the Middle East, reverberating as far as Wisconsin and China, were long brewing reactions to dictatorship. In extolling Facebook and Twitter, lazy American commentators mistook superficial means for fundamental causes, a high-tech update on the canard the poor and the oppressed experience no history and are never agents of their own change. That is, the very hubris now bringing down one regime after another.

We shouldn’t, however, underestimate the role of the internetz, a neutral net Wild West as much Tortuga as Thames — Tahrir Square as Tiananmen — a place where global neoliberalism can be subverted even while by other means enforced. Tunisia’s rebellion, setting off the dominoes, appears in part precipitated by net-leaked US diplomatic cables coming clean to the extent of ally Ben Ali’s corruption. In some way, in some venue, empire must level with itself, however much most of even its own apparatus must be kept in the dark.

But too much light and oxygen are typically poisonous to the more secretive taxa. So the US security nexus, its imperial initiative temporarily untracked, maneuvers for Julian Assange’s extradition even as it remains unsure whether the WikiLeaks are damaging.