Consider the riots in Hong Kong. In 2008, China was a powerful exporter, dependent as it was on exports for social stability. The financial collapse created a profound crisis. An economy built on efficient exporting staggers when its customers are unable to buy its goods. The export crisis compounded an incipient financial crisis as cash flow from exports contracted. What followed was a series of purges designed officially to weed out corruption and unofficially to find scapegoats for China’s problems and to intimidate potential opposition. After all, the government had promised prosperity and was now facing the need for austerity. The purges were the beginning of a systematic repression in China that sought to retain Chinese economic dynamism without an equivalent political dynamism.

I'm making my way through It Came From SomethingAwful, which isn't about trolls, it's about the counterculture of nihilism that grew up in the '90s which was replaced by a counterculture of activism in 2011 which, upon the failure of OWS, became a counterculture of lulz.

It all comes down to the way economic and political dissatisfaction is expressed... because it will be expressed one way or another.