Revolution in the Age of Social Media

The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet

Linda Herrera

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781781686478
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Egypt's January 25 Revolution of 2011 was a dramatic demonstration of the role social media has come to play in radical activism. A key moment was the appearance of the Facebook page "We Are All Khaled Said, " which linked activists across the country. But how useful are social media in radical politics? And how readily can they be turned against the activists? Revolution in the Age of Social Media looks at the role of that seminal Facebook page and the conspiracy theories that swirled around its administrator, Wael Ghonim. Herrera reveals the immense power struggles that took place in virtual arenas, showing how social media can serve not only as a site of liberation, but also as a place where powerful forces-such the US State Department, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Egyptian military-vie for control over the hearts and minds of the young. The Egyptian uprising, while in many ways a distinctly Arab event, is also a universal story of power and insurrection in the age of social media.

CHAPTER ONE

Wired Youth Rise

In his memoir, Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater than the People in Power, Wael Ghonim makes a startling revelation about his interrogation at the hands of Egyptian State Security during the January 25 Revolution. Ghonim was an anonymous administrator (admin) of the Arabic “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page that issued the call for revolution. He figured it was only a matter of time before he would be discovered. When two State Security agents captured him on January 27, 2011, outside a trendy Cairo restaurant, Ghonim assumed it was because of his work on the page. To his surprise, the interrogators had no idea he was working as an admin. They were solely interested in his ties to his American dinner companions. Ghonim, Google’s head of marketing for the Middle East, had been in a meeting with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas and formerly of the United States Department of State, and Matthew Stepka, Google’s VP for Strategy. These were the last people Ghonim saw before disappearing for eleven days. He writes, “Little did I know that this brief meeting would lead me to the most difficult experience of my life.” On that same evening, Jared Cohen tweeted—rather indiscreetly given the risks faced by activists on the ground at the time—“For reliable on the ground resources in #Egypt (#jan25) follow @Ghonim @EgyptUpdates @alshaheeed.” Alshaheeed, “The Martyr,” was the Twitter handle for the “We Are All Khaled Said” page.

Ghonim recounts being blindfolded and taken away to an undisclosed location. During the interrogation, he was horrified to realize his questioners were trying to link him to the CIA. They were especially concerned about his relationship to Jared Cohen. Ghonim tries to downplay the State Security interest in Cohen by writing, “I didn’t find it strange that they specifically asked about Jared. His Jewish-sounding name could raise eyebrows in Egyptian State Security, given the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict.” Ghonim’s attempt to brush off questions about Cohen as mere sensitivity to a name is disingenuous at best. Cohen had held key positions in the State Department’s internal think tank, Policy Planning, under both the Bush and Obama administrations. He had been pursuing a policy that can be called cyberdissident diplomacy (CDD) by reaching out to tech-savvy youth in the sixteen-to-thirty-five age range with the aim of training them in particular forms of cyberdissidence and online campaigning. Cohen’s forte was building networks among young Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In 2010 he left the State Department to direct Google Ideas, where he specializes in finding technological approaches to “counter-terrorism” and “counterradicalism.”

The compelling story behind the youth-led revolt of 2011 is not quite the romantic tale of liberation through the emancipatory power of communications technologies that many had initially supposed it to be. Nor can Egypt’s internet politics be reduced to widely circulating conspiracies about hidden hands from the United States and elsewhere orchestrating people and events from behind the scenes. But let us be clear: there are some hidden hands that do need to be brought to light and understood.

The uprising that began on January 25, 2011, and that continues in different forms to the present has been expressed in virtual spaces and on the streets. It is part of an ongoing youth-driven social upheaval born out of a technological revolution, a period of enhanced economic liberalization, the spread of international civil society initiatives, an escalation of military aggression in the region, and a tightening of the security state.

For the reader ready to balk at the proposition that the revolutionary movement has primarily been a youth movement, let us be clear. There is no doubt that the uprising that began on January 25, 2011, and that will undoubtedly reverberate far into the future has taken place on multiple fronts and involves vast segments of society. People from a wide cross section of the Egyptian populace harbor ample grievances against a system of power that is dehumanizing and supports rule by repressive autocrats. The people who participated in mass mobilizations against the Mubarak regime in 2011, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) in 2012, and the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, have hailed from all generations and encompassed groups with diverse affiliations and social positions. The growing politicized classes include intersections of workers, students, women, children, the unemployed, white collar professionals, farmers, Islamists, Christians, atheists, liberals, artists—the list goes on. Our concern here is particularly with the growing and demographically dominant population of high school and university-educated youth born in the period from the 1970s to the early years of the millennium, who have been active in both virtual spaces and on the streets.

Prior to the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, the under-thirty-fives, who make up to 75 percent of the population in the MENA region, were mainly portrayed in policy, government, and academic circles as a “passive generation,” or a generation “on hold.” Yet it is this very generation that has been at the forefront of a cultural, intellectual, and political revolution that has been chipping away at the inevitability of the Old Order. Youth contain all the social, political, and economic variation that exists in society. Yet at the same time, members of this generation, particularly the wired among them, exhibit distinguishing features common to growing up in the virtual age. For instance, they display more fluid notions about privacy and value horizontal learning and sharing. They seem to consider it normal and acceptable to speak back to power, to interact across lines of difference, and to cultivate fictitious and anonymous public personas. As a collectivity, this generation has also shown itself to be assertive and ungovernable, characteristics that have developed as larger proportions of them have participated in the growing opposition culture, both online and offline. How did youth cultures begin transforming in the years leading up to the January 25 Revolution, and what does the politics of technology have to do with the changes?

The Awakening

In Egypt, the sleeper hit of the summer of 2006 was Leisure Time (Awqat Faragh), a film acclaimed for its realistic, gritty, and non-preachy depiction of Egyptian youth culture. The film captures the unmistakable crisis of being a young Arab. In the opening scene, three guys in their early twenties wander around aimlessly and ask each other, “What is there to do?” They feel misunderstood by their families, mistreated at work, uninterested in the university, and dissatisfied with love. To try to escape their boredom they dabble in drugs, pornography, sex, and Islamic piety, though nothing really helps. The purposelessness of their world leads one friend on a reckless path of death. At the end of the film, still at a loss as to how to get a handle on their lives, the three friends meet in an amusement park. They decide to take a ride on a cage-style Ferris wheel. The ride malfunctions when they are at the top of the wheel, rocking in midair. They cry out for help but no one hears. The closing shot of the film shows the three young men suspended in a cage and swaying in the wind. The image is powerful and the message clear: they are a suspended generation, in limbo, helpless, waiting to be rescued.

Fast forward to 2011. On January 14, 2011, the Arabic Facebook fan page titled “We Are All Khaled Said” (Kulina Khaled Said) was on fire. The page, which began in June 2010 in honor of its namesake, a young man from Alexandria allegedly killed at the hands of plainclothes police, blossomed into Egypt’s most active and consequential anti-torture-campaign-turned-youth-movement in over half a century. This social media phenomenon crystallized a new kind of politics that was supposedly leaderless, horizontal, and networked, and that operated on a principle of online to offline mobilization. By January 2011, the page had grown to 390,000 members, 70 percent of whom were under twenty-four years old, and over 40 percent of whom were young women. It received a staggering nine million hits a day. In the wake of Tunisia’s revolution, the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page issued a call for an event, the “January 25 Revolution, “which was to be Egypt’s own revolution. The page did not cause the revolution, and youth of the internet (shabab al-internet) were not the only group active in it, but it is hard to imagine the revolt being put into motion without, firstly, the Tunisian revolution, and, secondly, the changing political culture, mentality, and networked behavior of Egypt’s wired youth.

When the world learned that Egypt’s revolution was supposedly triggered by a Facebook page, a clamor erupted between the internet utopians and internet skeptics, between the proponents of the “new” politics of globalized networked multitudes as theorized by the likes of Manuel Castells, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, and the “old” politics of traditional movement building. Figures from the left of the political spectrum balked at the suggestion that “Facebook youth” should be taken seriously, or that US tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which embody the capitalist ideals of free market America, could be factors in an actual revolution, or in any movement that challenges the dominant global system. In his book The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, French philosopher Alain Badiou cuttingly writes: “Some commentators have regarded the role of ‘youth’ in the riots in the Arab world as a sociological novelty, and have linked it to the use of Facebook or other vacuities of alleged technical innovation in the postmodern age. But who has ever seen a riot whose front ranks were made up of the elderly?” In his cavalier dismissal of youth and social media, Badiou exhibits a deep misunderstanding of the radical transformation that has been occurring in Arab societies—a transformation that extends far beyond the traditional political sphere and that has featured wired youth at the forefront.

This generation has experienced exponential rates of connectivity while suffering from systematic disenfranchisement, especially when it comes to institutions of the state and the economy. Young people have had to contend with the dismantling of social safety nets, record high rates of youth unemployment, and spiking rates of inequality. If older cohorts who came of age between the 1950s and 1980s viewed the state as a repressive yet benevolent behemoth— since it provided affordable housing, education, government jobs, and food subsidies—the current generation experiences the state as purely rapacious, authoritarian, and indifferent. A twenty-five-year-old Egyptian university graduate illustrates this difference when he says, “I mainly associate the state with the horrible experience of having to go the police station to get my [national] ID.” To better understand how this wired generation started to coalesce into a counter-power requires going back to the era of technological opening. The high-tech revolution arrived in Egypt with a combination of excitement, moral panic, and desire. No one could predict how technology would change people and society, or how people would alter the technology.

Liberalization Egyptian Style

The Egyptian government, historically reluctant to allow the spread of technologies that would loosen its grip on its citizenry, nevertheless opened its doors to information and communication technologies (ICT) and the liberalization of the media. The transition to an “information society,” otherwise called a “knowledge economy,” came about through a combination of pressure and opportunity. The countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) tied any number of loans and trade agreements to Egypt’s willingness to sync its national economy with the knowledge economy in which OECD countries held a clear advantage. At the same time, an ICT-driven economy would allow Egypt to more fully participate in the global marketplace, with its promise of profits and economic growth.

As video games, satellite dishes, mobile phones, and the internet became more important to Egyptian society, these technologies did indeed bring a vigorous boost to the economy. They also contributed to a breakdown of traditional authority and control. The state tried its best to curb the “negative effects” of technology. The bureaucratic fixes proved especially ineffective when it came to controlling the “deviant” behavior of the new generation of tech-consuming kids. As the young absorbed the new technologies into their lives, starting early on with video games, these technologies made cracks in the traditional authority system of the family, state, and religious institutions.

The children’s game market entered the Arab region in the 1980s with the Japanese brand Sakhr, coproduced with the Kuwaiti company Al-Alamiah. It was one of the most successful products in the Arab world until production abruptly ceased after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, a reminder of the correlation between geopolitics, security, and business. A children’s video culture quickly developed around the imported games, whose characters and recreated environments were exogenous to the Arab world. Children would gather in the homes of middle- and high-class families, where they would play the games for hours, amazed by the magic of this new virtual space. Regardless of whether they won or lost, the players played the games endlessly, since they could be reincarnated ad infinitum, game after game. In the 1990s, Sakhr was replaced by Game Boy, which was later overtaken by PlayStation. Children who grew up with video games developed a taste for being masters of story and character, and they got accustomed to a high degree of interactivity. The video game market was a booming business, with profits surpassing those of even the famed Egyptian cinema.

Video games first took off in the homes of affluent families, but soon entered arcades and cybercafes, where they were available for rent. A social worker in Cairo recounted that even street children, through stealing and begging, cobbled together enough money to enjoy the thrill of playing video games for an hour or two. She observed that whereas they once used stolen money to buy drugs, they now used the money to play video games. This phenomenon of playing games with stolen money occurred not only among the poorest children, but also among youth from more affluent families. In middle- and high-class homes where parents placed restrictions on their children’s game-playing, their children sometimes stole money to feed their gaming addictions. The video game generation would rise up during the revolution and carry some practices it learned from the world of games into the streets.

The Egyptian state did not seem alarmed about the growing video game market. It was far more concerned about the growth of independent media and communications technologies, which infringed directly on the state’s traditional jurisdiction. The satellite dish—known as “el-dish” or “el-Taba3”—is a case in point. El-dish arrived in 1992 as a high-end, luxury commodity, costing roughly from $5,000 to $10,000. Its penetration was limited to international five-star hotel chains and expensive lounges and cafes. At that time, Egyptians could choose among a handful of state-controlled television channels.

In 1998 the first mass-market satellite dish was introduced into the Egyptian market, an Israeli brand called The Benjamin. At a purchase price of around $1,000, the cost was high relative to household income, but the dish was within reach of the middle classes thanks to popular installment plans and cost-sharing arrangements. Neighbors in apartment buildings pooled their resources to buy a single dish and split the connection across apartments. The entrance of Chinese dishes into the market around 2005 pushed prices down even further.

In Egypt, anywhere from 20 to 43 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, but that did not stop broad swaths of the population from finding creative, innovative, and at times illegal ways to get their hands on the dish and every subsequent new technology. In lower-income neighborhoods and informal communities, there was a parallel market for used and refurbished satellite dishes. A used dish could be bought for less than half the price of The Benjamin. Neighbors divided the cost and connected the dish across not only multiple apartments in a building, but between adjacent buildings. For the more cash-strapped consumer, wannabe hackers came up with an even more economical workaround, The Satellite Thief (Harami al-Dish). This makeshift signal-hopper was made out of a mix of stolen pieces of satellite dishes, cooking pots, wire fragments, mirror shards, aluminum foil, and duct tape, all for a price of less than ten dollars. In their turn, cell phones, video games, and computers would follow similar patterns of entering the market at high prices, but then falling within reach of large sectors of the population in a relatively short period.

With the spread of el-dish, ordinary Egyptians could peruse a wide range of programs. Satellite television, like the internet after it, was initially known as a source for entertainment and pornography, but it was not long before Egyptians developed a voracious appetite for news, religious programming, and Arabic talk shows. With the launch of Al Jazeera (1996), followed by Al Arabiya (2003), and BBC Arabic (2008), news became an essential staple in the Arab media diet.

Arabic satellite programming was taking off just as the US was in the early stages of spectacularly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars provided ample fodder for the Arabic satellite news networks, whose coverage fueled already strong anti-American sentiments in the region. The US government sought to turn Arab public opinion in its favor by operating its own Arabic satellite news channel, similar to what it has long done through its federal funded radio station Voice of America (VOA). In 2004, the US Congress funded a twenty-four-hour Arabic news channel, Alhurra, to the tune of $90 million. The channel was launched on Feb 14, 2004 and transmitted to twenty-two Arab countries. Weary of the American bias of Alhurra and not wanting for choice, Arabic viewers rejected the late-to-market channel. It fell flat. The US government sought to influence public opinion through new media technologies, but the experiment with Alhurra proved that satellite television was not going to be the outlet to do so.

If the satellite dish opened Egyptian society to alternative viewpoints, the mobile phone gave individuals the freedom of unmediated communication and the ability to spread messages across vast mobile networks. Anyone with a mobile phone could talk and communicate away from the home or office, where colleagues and families monitored their communication.

In 1990 an Egyptian household had to wait between one and eight years to obtain a government-controlled landline. At any point the government could wiretap a phone, intercept communications, or cut off a line altogether. In 1997 Egyptian business mogul Nagib Saweris founded Mobinil, the first mobile communications company in Egypt. A year later, Vodafone came onto the market and price competition began. At the beginning of the millennium, mobile phones were considered a luxury product. By 2007, with the founding of the third company, Etisalat Misr, phones became a basic necessity for Egyptians acro...