Is There Life After Facebook? The cyber gulag revisited & debate reloaded (On the Arab ‘Spring’, London ‘Summer' And Wall Street ‘Autumn’ – An Instructive Lesson for Asia/SEA)

Misled by a quick triumphalism of the social-media, the international news agencies have confused the two: revolt and revolution. The past unrests started as a social, not political public revolt. Through the pain of sobriety, the protesters are learning that neither globalization nor the McFB way of life is a shortcut to development; that free trade is not a virtue, but an instrument; that liberalism is not a state of mind but a well-doctrinated ideology, and finally that the social media networks are only a communication tool, not a replacement for independent critical thinking or for the collapsed crossgenerational contract. Londoners, Greeks and New Yorkers are experiencing about the same. How does the Arab ‘Spring’ correlate with the European Euro-frost, and American OWS unrest? For almost ten years now, the youth in Europe is repeatedly sending us a powerful message on the perceived collapse of the social contract. The cross-generational contract should be neither neglected, nor built on the over-consumerist, disheartened and egotistic McFB– way of life. Equally alienating and dangerously inflammatory is the collision of the entering youth generation (if/when deprived of the opportunity and handed over to a lame hope) – through a religious or political radicalization. In this word spanned between the Kantian hopes and Hobbesian fears, thus the final question: Is there life after FB? If so, how can we register our future claims?