Governments have always understood that political authority rests on more than the ability to enforce laws. It also depends on the ability to shape how events are understood. For much of the twentieth century, that power was concentrated in the hands of the state and the institutions around it. Governments controlled broadcasting licences, influenced the press and issued the official account of events that citizens had limited means to contest. Dissent existed, but it moved slowly. Before it could reach scale, it usually had to pass through a gatekeeper.

The internet has changed that arrangement.

The state has not lost its police, bureaucracy, or institutional authority. What it has lost is something less visible but politically consequential: the monopoly over the first version of a story. A citizen can now record an event and distribute it almost instantly, without waiting for an editor, broadcaster, or official spokesperson to decide whether it deserves public attention.

That does not mean every viral video produces a political crisis. Nor does the internet manufacture public anger from nothing. But it has changed the relationship between grievance and visibility. A local injustice can now become a national concern before a government has decided how to respond to it.

The question, therefore, is not simply whether the internet can destabilise a state. Recent events in Bangladesh, Nepal and India suggest that it can. The more important question is how a digital network moves from being a space where people complain to a force capable of producing genuine political pressure.

Bangladesh’s 2024 student uprising offers one of the clearest examples.

The immediate grievance was specific: the restoration of a quota reserving 30 per cent of government jobs for descendants of veterans of the 1971 Liberation War. For students competing for a limited number of public sector jobs, the policy was widely viewed as unfair. Yet the scale of the crisis cannot be explained by the quota alone. The quota was the trigger. Beneath it lay broader frustrations over inequality, political exclusion and the perceived inability of ordinary citizens to influence the system.

What digital networks changed was the speed at which those frustrations could become collective.

Videos of demonstrations, clashes and........

© Paradigm Shift