Last week, in an otherwise sleepy Senate Estimates session, Greens senator Scott Ludlum asked fellow senator and Minister for Communication Stephen Conroy a series of questions about the Government's proposal to "filter" the internet sites Australians can view. As Ludlum thrust and Conroy parried, neither suspected their tussle would ignite mass action. But, like a landmine buried just below the scene of their affray, the whole thing has suddenly blown up.

Campaigns have been launched, protests planned, reports filed throughout the broadcast media. Conroy now faces a rising chorus of complaints from backbenchers who suddenly find themselves deluged with emails from constituents.

All of this is due principally to the emergence of a new kind of connectivity, the "social message service". Typified by Twitter, a web service now mushrooming in popularity, these social message services allow you to subscribe to messages from your friends, while your friends can "follow" you and receive your messages. Across dense webs of interconnections (with many people all reading the messages of one another, forwarding the best messages along, etc.)

Twitter has become a bit of an early warning system. For example, the first reports of May's horrific earthquake in Sichuan appeared on Twitter, a full 30 minutes before the AP wire, because some of those affected by the earthquake used Twitter to spread the word. Over the following days, Chinese Twitter users coordinated rescue and relief efforts via Twitter.

Twitter has been around for about eighteen months, and many Australians - particularly those whose careers depend upon the internet - use Twitter to establish and reinforce business relationships, extend personal networks, even to sell off furniture before a move overseas. Twitter has become the Speaker's Corner, the neighborhood pub, and the auction block for tens of thousands of Australians. The Australian Twitter community, though often chaotic and larrikin, has a fierce sense of pride in its interconnectedness, which often makes Twitter feel more like a country town than a big city.

That civic pride has just collided with the Government's plans to filter the internet. The imposition of any constraint on the free-flow of ideas online strikes at the very heart of Australia's net culture - a culture that now keeps itself well-connected via Twitter. As soon as Senator Conroy's statements made their way out of Estimates, they echoed and reverberated through the Australian Twitter community. Tempers rose. Calls for action rang out, and were answered. A movement began.

In less than a week's time, Conroy has found himself in deeper and hotter water than ever before in his ministerial career. Australia's Twitterers, better connected than the Government which governs them, have out-organized, out-thought, and out-manoeuvered the government. Senator Conroy has taken a disorganized community of well-connected peers and given them an organizing principle, a raison d'etre. This may not have been Conroy's intention (I rather think it wasn't) but the senator must face the consequences of his actions. This mob won't quiet down until the Government drops the filtering proposal.

Worse yet, from the Government's point of view, when this mob succeeds in changing the policy of the Government, the Government will have implicitly blessed a new political force. This collective, ad-hoc political action (which I have termed "hyperpolitics"), is well on its way to becoming a permanent feature in Australian politics, no matter what happens in this particular instance. Both different from and complementary to online campaigning, hyperpolitics knows no party affiliation, and is too chaotic to be channeled into manageable forms. Hyperpolitics come at you from a dozen directions at once - a sensation Senator Conroy is now wholly familiar with.

Although the issue at hand involves making the internet safe and clean, that is actually less important than the force rising to oppose the plan. In the next days, weeks and months, as we watch the Department of Communications and Broadband modify its proposal and redefine their election commitments in the face of hyperpolitical opposition, we'll get a good glimpse into the inner workings of political life in Australia in the 21st century. Senator Conroy, as the first victim backed into the buzz saw of hyperpolitics, is learning a lesson that other politicians would well heed: the mob is no longer yours to command or control. The mob is fully capable of stating its own needs, and furthermore, is fully capable of satisfying them.