“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” These iconic words are from Alvin Toffler, who, along with his wife, Heidi Toffler, wrote epoch-making books on the Information Age.

Over the past two decades, social media has evolved into an indispensable tool for political movements, acting as a digital public square for mobilisation, a global stage for broadcasting dissent and a contested information space. Its role, however, is complex and double-edged, enabling rapid organisation while also becoming a battlefield for disinformation. The cases of Ukraine, Libya, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and India illustrate this dynamic evolution.

Alvin Toffler had predicted this outcome in their masterpiece treatises in the eighties and nineties. In The Third Wave, he defined three “waves” of development as coinciding with hunter-gatherer and agriculture-based civilisation, the industrial age and the post-industrial information era. Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980) did not lay out a specific, step-by-step guide for how to use social media to topple governments; after all, the internet as we know it did not exist. Instead, their work provides a powerful framework for understanding why the Information Age makes such challenges possible and, in their view, inevitable.

The core argument is that political structures are not eternal; they are products of the dominant economic and technological “wave” of their time. To understand the potential for change, we have to understand how the........

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