At least in public, Mr. Gladwell is sticking to his guns, but not too many other people are. In one informed example, consider a recent public interview I conducted with Naguib Sawiris, the Egyptian telecommunications billionaire and liberal politician who backed the Tahrir Square demonstrations.

When I asked him about the Gladwell theory, Mr. Sawiris first wondered, “Is he here in the room? Do I have to be polite?” and then went on to explain his criticism: “He has no clue what this technology has done to my part of the world. Ninety percent of the success of this revolution is attributed to it.” The point isn’t to mock the brilliant Mr. Gladwell — it is to recall that as late as the autumn of 2010 the impact of the technology revolution on civil society, particularly outside the developed West, was still very much an open question.

So much for the success of the rebels. Inside the citadel of the state, by contrast, 2011 was a veritable annus horribilus. That was especially true for some pretty vile dictators. But even in democracies, government didn’t seem to work very well. Political paralysis was a routine complaint in the world’s richest democracy, and in its biggest democracy; it was the diagnosis in presidential systems and in parliamentary ones. Right-wing governing parties were accused of dysfunction — and so were governments on the left. Some central bankers were attacked for printing too much money; others were criticized for doing too little.

The success of the protesters and the dysfunction of government are the flip sides of one another. They are related in an obvious way — people take to the streets when they think their leaders are doing a poor job. But the widely perceived failure of the state around the world is connected to the effectiveness of the protests in deeper ways, too.

Let’s start with the technological tools that made protesting so much easier. They may have made governing tougher — informed and empowered individuals are probably harder to boss around than ignorant, isolated ones. More important, though, social activists have embraced the technology revolution more effectively than governments have. The revolution is being tweeted, but government isn’t. It’s time for the state to catch up — and hopefully not by emulating the Chinese comrades with their cybercensorship expertise.

As for crony capitalism, this slogan of the street is both a challenge for the state and an opportunity. For some regimes, of course, crony capitalism, with a side order of repression, is the only dish on the menu. For them, the trends of 2011 do not bode well.

But most of today’s troubled market democracies don’t need a revolution to sweep away their cronies. What they do need is a new version of capitalism, designed for the 21st century. That is what the world’s protesters, in their different ways, are all asking for. Here’s hoping that 2012 provides some politicians with some answers.

Chrystia Freeland is global editor at large at Reuters.