Tyranny's new nightmare: Twitter

Over the last week, a variety of Western bloggers and alternative media outlets -- notably Andrew Sullivan's blog and Al Gore's Current TV -- have sorted through and ordered the incredible volume of information. Traditional news organizations -- most notably CNN and the BBC -- have relied on lots of information from ordinary citizens and have been extremely transparent about how they've done so, sorting it out right in front of their viewers.

The hard work of verifying, analyzing and fleshing out the facts has been left to the journalists on the scene -- notably New York Times columnist Roger Cohen and this paper's Borzou Daragahi, whose profile of Neda Agha-Soltan in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times was a model of what only print journalism can provide.

This hybrid journalism -- developed without plan and under the most intense pressure imaginable -- is the best and most workable glimpse of the West's informational future we've yet seen.

Meanwhile, the mullahs and their buddies can throw out all the correspondents they want, but the facts keep flowing. This is bad news for authoritarian governments. In the future, they'll have to choose between underdevelopment -- denying their people social media, cellphones and the Internet -- and control. It's a little clearer now why the Chinese are demanding that all PCs and hand-helds sold in that country come with built-in censorship hardware. Lots of luck with that.

Tyranny's irreducible dilemma is that the Web is, in its chaotic essence, the product of an open society. You can't have its benefits without accepting the democratic baggage.

Somewhere, there's a mullah gnashing his teeth, just as his great-grandfather did in the 1920s after pointlessly denouncing Reza Shah's introduction of antiseptics as heretical corruption. Modernity's a bitch.