Comments are flowing on the Arab and Iranian democratic revolutions, of which we see only the beginning. In a must read interview, Manuel Castells stated : “the popular uprisings in the Arab world perhaps constitute the most important Internet-led and facilitated change”. Beyond the direct role of the Internet and information technology in these movements, it is the anthropological and social transformations that make them possible that merit our attention. New types of individuals are born and grown up, wise, able to expose a political deceit, to coordinate, to speak to each other beyond social or cultural boundaries, to quickly adjust their behavior in face of previously unmet situations. In my opinion, the practices afforded by information technology and the Internet were key to the birth of these new capabilities, but their reach is not limited to where they were born. When one cuts the Internet, one does not stop (or at least not before a long time) the agency of those whom it empowered. We knew all this, and nonetheless, our surprise is huge. We are faced with the contingency of movements whose scale we did not anticipate, and neither did their originators. Retrospectively, historians will recall their antecedents and they will one day appear as part of a logical process, but today, they are in the best sense, events that spring up unexpectedly. To pay tribute to them, and express the fragile support of my keyboard, I would like to explore the inspiration that can be drawn from them by those who try to regenerate established but presently in crisis democracies. Two precautions are needed. For once, it would be absurd to confuse the situations of our respective countries: it is by recognizing their differences that one can build a constructive exchange. Furthermore, “democracy in crisis” is a tautology. It is the essence of democracy, because citizens are permanent judges of the imperfection of its state, to be always in crisis, always imperfect, and, at best, being reinvented. More at http://paigrain.debatpublic.net/?p=2884&lang=en