(It is increasingly obvious that social networks and cyber tools are making efficient autocrats, like China, even more efficient. But they seem to be making soft authoritarians, like Jordan, more fragile, and they are making Western democracies increasingly ungovernable.)

Finally, men could dominate women through formal and informal religious, cultural and legal norms. But the recent high-profile cases of young women fleeing male control in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. spoke for many Arab women who are no longer so willing to submit to male guardianship. This is especially true because women in many countries, Jordan, for instance, are now out-graduating men in both high school and universities.

However, without a change in the laws of marriage, inheritance, divorce and child custody — all of which favor men — all the women doing well in school will never be able to realize their full potential in the work force, where they are still badly underrepresented. Something has to give.

Meanwhile, it’s hard for men to marry without a job. Having lots of men who have never held power, held a job or held a girl’s hand is a prescription for social unrest — especially when they’re all on Twitter.

Welcome to the new Middle East!

Where does this go? Leaders across the region are learning that they “can’t rely on 20th-century tools to keep the populations quiet any longer,” remarked Marwan Muasher , the former foreign minister of Jordan, who now oversees research on the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 “broke the fear taboo in many Arab countries, and the collapse in oil prices since 2014 has broken the money bargain.” Citizens now declare: If you can’t guarantee me a government job, I get to say whatever I want.

Does that mean Jordan, for example, should change overnight to democracy? I asked Muasher . “No,” he said, “but there has to be a process of greater power-sharing between the governments and the people and civil society institutions. You can’t keep asking people to sacrifice, to give up government jobs and subsidies, to accept higher taxes, but still not have a real voice in their own governance.”

So, is all the new news bad news? Actually not — at least in Jordan.

King Abdullah has been slow to share power, but he remains a decent leader, trying to develop a decent country of 10 million that now hosts 1.3 million Syrian refugees. His most important initiative may be his push seven years ago to launch a tech/start-up hub in Jordan that is also a new factor in the region. For the first time here you have hundreds of private-sector start-ups — independent of the government — working on social problems as business opportunities.