Hosni Mubarak, Henry VIII and New Media

Let them eat chicken

What do Hosni Mubarak and Henry VIII have to do with one another...

aside from both being corpulent absolute rulers?

In 1534, Henry broke with The Pope and The Vatican through the Act of Supremacy. 

This was pretty unthinkable stuff - essentially he told the Pope and the Catholic Church to get lost.

Henry's act kicked off a massive wave of Protestant revolution that swept across western Europe and unleashed, among other things, Capitalism, The Enlightenment and the notion of individual liberties. Of course, all these would take some time; but Henry's act was far more 'revolutionary' than what you are seeing in Cairo these days.

What makes both the fall of Mubarak and the fall of The Papcy in England similar is that they were both driven by a new technology.

In the case of Henry, that technology was the printing press.

Henry might have been fixated on Anne Boelyn and his inablity to get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon via Pope Clement VII, but an illegal book by Martin Luther, courtesy of Gutenberg's printing press - that made such books both cheap and available, gave him the pathway that he needed, along with the intellectual rationalization and argument necessary.

Most of the protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square as driven by the needs of the flesh as was Henry - in their case, food and jobs.

But as with Henry, it was the new 'social technologies' that gave them the tools for the 'higher arguments' of freedom and liberty.

While Twitter played its role, I would also argue that the newly liberated video (liberated from television networks), married to the Internet that broadcast the moment to moment events in Tahrir Square, unfiltered by anyone.  It was these same small cameras and webcasts from Tunisia, after all, that had motivated the events in Cairo.

Henry's deposition of the Papacy was, of course, just the beginning. Soon The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and parts of Germany and France would follow suit - along with a long series of wars.

Egypt also is not the end, but rather the beginning as well.

Ideas are great, but unmarried to a distributive technology, they are nothing more than interesting.

The notion that one did not have to obey the Pope, nor need go through priests to gain salvation was an interesting concept, intellectually - but marry it to a printing press and distribute it to the world for next to nothing and you have a real Revolution.

Likewise the idea of freedom for Arab (and maybe soon Iranian and Chinese) people as well - married to visual images in an age dominated by television.

One thing you don't need here, as is becoming increasingly clear - is a TV 'Anchor' - particularly one who sucks down $14 million a year or so - to 'explain' what is happening, when they clearly don't know themselves.  Social media hits network news.

The printing press turned much of the old order upside down.

The Internet - particulary the visual internet, is going to do the same thing.

And that is no bad thing.