The right to rebel against an authoritarian power is part of
liberal and democratic culture. As early as the late seventeenth
century, John Locke theorised that if a state abuses its citizens,
they have the right to revolt. Nowadays, information and
communication technologies can help the early stages of revolt.
However, at the same time they also seem to offer the threatened
autocrats powerful tools. Failed revolutions that have unfolded
in our digital age in countries such as Myanmar, Ukraine, Iran,
Egypt, Hong Kong and Belarus, bring to light the great and often
successful efforts of authoritarian regimes to use new technologies
for surveillance, oppression, propaganda, censorship, and the
suppression of fundamental rights. The risk of a drift towards
despotism, from which even long-established democracies are
not immune, prompts us to ask what skills, rules and institutions
might help citizens to defend their freedom when it is under threat,
including in the digital sphere.
