- fundamental and rapid transformation of political power, social structures, or technological paradigms
- political revolutions
- American Revolution (1776): colonial independence, constitutional republic, sovereignty from empire
- French Revolution (1789): overthrow of monarchy, declaration of human rights, rise of republicanism
- Russian Revolution (1917): collapse of tsarism, Bolshevik seizure, communist state
- Iranian Revolution (1979): theocratic transformation, popular uprising
- technological revolutions: agricultural, industrial, information, cryptographic
- the cryptographic revolution: public-key cryptography, Bitcoin, programmable money, self-sovereign identity
- revolutions emerge when the gap between institutional legitimacy and lived reality becomes unbridgeable
- cyber as a quiet revolution: replacing centralized information intermediaries with a decentralized knowledge graph
- network state as revolution through exit rather than voice: building parallel institutions instead of capturing existing ones
- see also democracy, social contract, propaganda, censorship, decentralization