"For most artists," as the famous Tim O'Reilly aphorism has it "the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." To me, this is inarguably true and self-evident – the staying power of this nugget has more to do with its admirable brevity and clarity than its novelty.

And yet, there are many who believe that O'Reilly is mistaken: they point to artists who are well-known, but who still have problems. There are YouTube video-creators who've racked up millions of views; bloggers with millions of readers, visual artists whose work has been appropriated and spread all around the world, such as the photographer Noam Galai, whose screaming self-portrait has found its way into everything from stencil graffiti to corporate logos, all without permission or payment. These artists, say the sceptics, have overcome obscurity, and yet they have yet to find a way to convert their fame to income.

But O'Reilly doesn't say, "Attain fame and you will attain fortune" – he merely says that for most artists, fame itself is out of their grasp.

And fame is necessary – but not sufficient – for a commercially successful career in the arts.

That quality of "necessary but not sufficient" surfaces again and again in discussions of the transformative power of the internet. It's also the source of much of the controversy about just how transformative the internet actually is.

Take the Egypt uprising. Western political leaders and sloppy journos characterised the uprising as a "Facebook revolution" or a "Twitter revolution." Critics countered that most of the millions in the streets were poor, illiterate labourers who didn't have computers or internet connections, and that they couldn't possibly have been mobilised by Facebook, and they certainly weren't writing the English-language tweets that western net-heads thrilled to as a window into the unfolding revolution.

Egypt endured brutal dictatorship for decades, and the rich, educated elite had enjoyed access to Facebook and other social media for years.

So what, exactly, created the uprising in January, 2011 – why hadn't it come in the first years of dictatorship, why hadn't it come in the early years of Facebook's explosive growth in Egypt?

The answer, I think, is that networked communications were necessary, but not sufficient, to a successful Egyptian uprising. The emails and tweets and status updates coming from Tunisian revolutionaries inspired their comrades in Egypt (some of whom they'd met face-to-face in regional meetings organised by the likes of the Open Society Initiative, but whose social connections were continued and reinforced by the net).

Al-Jazeera, a "traditional" TV network whose success is largely a result of their net-savvy business and communications strategy, mobilised the working poor. First-hand, English-language accounts from radicals in the streets garnered western sympathy and forced Cameron and Obama into confronting their nations' complicity in the Mubarak regime instead of sweeping it under the rug with excuses about Arab exceptionalism and regional stability.

Word of the YouTube footage of the fatal beating of Khaled Saeed spread via Twitter and Facebook, which made al-Jazeera and western blogs. At the same time, Egypt's bourgeoise lost patience with the corruption and bureaucracy of the Mubarak regime, and expressed and magnified its discontent through social media, often via loops that included members of the Egyptian diaspora in the west, such that these complaints could be filtered through and reflected back to western liberal sympathisers.

Taken at their whole, all these factors (and more – Goldman Sachs' rapacious gambling in the global food market, post-WTO employment malaise, and other circumstances too numerous to enumerate or even know) created the circumstances in which an Egyptian uprising could succeed.

My corollary to O'Reilly's "piracy/obscurity" quote is "fame won't make you a success on its own, but no artist ever got rich on obscurity". That is, being widely loved isn't sufficient for attaining fortune, but it is necessary to it.

By the same token, a global network that allows loosely coordinated groups of people to discover each other and act in concert while exposing their cause to the whole planet (especially its richest, most privileged residents) is not enough to overthrow a dictator — but I'm sure I wouldn't want to try to stage a revolution without such a network.