The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

This tangle of causation is why analysts who get paid big bucks to play the part of prophet invariably get the future wrong—or at least, whenever tomorrow fails to resemble yesterday.

The trajectory by which Bouazizi became a cause—in both senses of that word —deserves a bit of reflection. Nine months before his fatal moment, another street vendor called Abdesslem Trimech, from the provincial town of Monastir, set himself on fire over his mistreatment by the government, and later died. No protests ensued. In fact, nothing at all happened. Trimech, I imagine, was mourned by family and friends, but otherwise remained obscure and inconsequential.

Trimech was a different man acting in a different time and place from Bouazizi. True enough. But another significant difference leaps out, if we wish to understand why these two similar deaths had such dissimilar effects. Bouazizi burned to death in front of a camera. For as long as digital images hold true, we will watch him explode into flames, still walking, at a nondescript public square. This image was impossible to absorb without feeling pain and horror. Without words, seemingly untainted by special pleading, it told the story of a man driven by his rulers beyond the last measure of despair. The photos of Bouazizi’s selfimmolation were posted on Facebook, and aroused strong emotions in and out of Tunisia. In contrast, the unphotographed Trimech died a faceless shadow.

Tunisia’s revolution demonstrated one decisive change between the old and new information dispensations. The industrial age depended on chunky blocks of text to influence government and opinion. The new digital world has preferred the power of the visual. What is usually referred to as new media really means the triumph of the image over the printed word.

But another observation to take away from events in Tunisia is that the divide between old and new media is largely fictitious. It may be useful to speak of the internet or social media and contrast these with mass media, but what exists in reality is a single, deeply matrixed information sphere.

Al Jazeera, for example, is a digital satellite TV channel aimed at a mass audience. It’s new and it’s old. Both sides of the Tunisian conflict believed, with good reason, that Al Jazeera influenced the outcome by favoring the insurgency in its coverage. That could be considered a case of Big Media “setting the agenda.” But most of Al Jazeera’s Tunisia footage came from cell phone videos, taken by the public on the spot and communicated via Facebook. They were then re-posted online—on Al Jazeera’s website, on YouTube, and on thousands of niche sites. So this was also a case of new media driving news coverage.

The point I want to drive home is that there is now massive redundancy in the transmission of information. That’s another change from the old ways. You can jam Al Jazeera’s signal, but you can’t jam YouTube. You can shut down the internet—as Egyptian authorities did when they faced their own uprising—but you can’t shut down the information sphere.

A GOOGLE EMPLOYEE IN DUBAI SCHEDULES AN EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION AS A FACEBOOK EVENT

The success of the Tunisian uprising reversed the polarities of power as we have so far observed them. A mostly disorganized public toppled a regime which had ruled with unquestioned authority for 23 years. Paper beat scissors, somehow. Many factors played into this outcome, but I will venture to say, without straying into controversy, that one important factor was the effect of the information sphere—on the global public, on the Tunisian public, and on the Tunisian authorities themselves. Much of the information coming out of Tunisia during the protests reflected the work and the will of the public.

Still, there’s no doubt that the turmoil in that country began spontaneously, on the streets. That was not the case with the last event I want to consider. It originated online, as a virtual invitation to revolution scheduled on Facebook Events.

If you were to ask me to name the most significant geopolitical transformations since the fall of the Soviet Union, the 2011 uprising in Egypt, which followed close on the heels of Tunisia’s and repeated the same pattern, would rank very near the top. Egypt is the most powerful and influential country in the Arabicspeaking world. The fall of the old regime there sent shocks and aftershocks into the region, the effects of which are still in play today. Many good accounts, from both Western and Egyptian perspectives, have been written about this sudden turning of the hinge of fate—I have no wish to add another.

Here’s what I intend to do: to touch on three brief moments of that uprising, which reflect how supposedly “hard” political events were shaped by soft

information.

The first and last moment, the alpha and omega, share the same protagonist: Wael Ghonim, a young Egyptian whose talents lacked even a name a generation ago. Ghonim was Google’s head of marketing for the Middle East, and had moved to Dubai, a sort of Disney World of emirates, for his work. He was 29 when he created his Facebook page, 30 when he was kidnapped off the streets of Cairo by anonymous agents of the regime. I hesitate to call him ordinary or insignificant, as I have done with Hoder and others. Even before he provided the spark for the revolt, his life had not been a typical one for an Egyptian.

Ghonim himself, however, had decided opinions on the matter. He posted on his site that he had no wish to “start a revolution or a coup,” and did not view himself as “a political leader of any sort.” He then went on:

...I’m an ordinary Egyptian who cheers the Ahly team, sits at the local café, and eats pumpkin seeds . . . and who becomes miserable when our national team loses a game . . . the bottom line is that I just want to be proud that I’m Egyptian . . . ⁹

And it is true that, in the decisive TV interview given after his release, he was perceived by many ordinary Egyptians as one of them: a decent young man, humble in demeanor, markedly different from the pompous officials, angry revolutionaries, and otherwise peculiar personalities prevalent in Egypt’s politics.

Let us agree, then, that Wael Ghonim was an extraordinary ordinary person. He forged, on Facebook, a vital community which helped lead the charge during the early phase of the events of January–February 2011. His own telling of those events, the autobiographical Revolution 2.0, I recommend to anyone who wants to understand, from a very human perspective, the destructive effects of new information on a fossilized political system. Ghonim may have been the closest digital equivalent to Walter Cronkite: mediator to a disparate virtual public, whose authority was earned daily from below rather than accredited for all time from above.

He called his Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said.” The name signified a person, an event, and an image. Khaled Said was a young Alexandrian who, for reasons that remain obscure, was savagely beaten to death by thugs in the employ of the Mubarak regime. Such abuses took place with impunity and in public silence. Khaled Said was different, however. He had been a nice-looking, middle class young Egyptian, first of all. More importantly, his family, using a cell phone camera, had secretly photographed Said’s mangled face as he lay in the morgue. The difference with earlier photos of the handsome, smiling young man was appalling. In Egypt as in Tunisia, a powerful and disturbing image stood at the starting-place of revolution.

Ghonim used the images, and the story of Khaled Said, to fuel what was essentially a marketing campaign against regime injustice on his website.

At that point, Hosni Mubarak had been in power over 30 years—longer than Ben Ali in Tunisia, much longer than Ahmadinejad in Iran. His rule had acquired a monumental inevitability, and there was talk that the pharaoh’s crown would pass to his son Gamal. The political system in Egypt rested on pure gangsterism, lacking any ideological justification other than the authority of the men in charge: they alone, it was claimed, possessed the expertise to maintain security, grow the economy, and manage the complexities of a modern government.

In fact, the Egyptian government was less incompetent than it has since been portrayed, but that carried little weight with Egyptians, most of whom detested the regime for the everyday indignities and occasional brutality it visited on them. The problem was inertia. Political change seemed impossible, because it had never happened: and with such a dearth of hope, fear easily won the day.

I will pass over the marketing techniques applied by Ghonim to help members of his community overcome the fear barrier. The fascinating details can be found in Revolution 2.0. Instead, I want to move directly to a specific moment: January 14, 2011, when Ghonim, inspired by events in Tunisia, posted on the “Khaled Said” page a call for protests for January 25, the “Police Day” holiday in Egypt. Ghonim gave the event its name: “Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption, and Unemployment.” And he created a Facebook Event for it.

Ghonim linked his call to revolution to other anti-regime websites and activists. His aim was remarkably ambitious: nothing less than to bridge the gap between virtual and real, and to do so in the domain of hard politics. From a Facebook page, he sought to mobilize the Egyptian public against their government.

Consider the implications. If this leap was possible, the modes of organizing a mass movement prevalent since the French Revolution would be superseded— and attacking power and authority could become the work of amateurs, ordinary people, the untutored public.

Not long ago, a revolutionary was a dedicated professional. To achieve his goal, he needed an organization to conduct command and control, a published program to explain the need for radical change, resting on an ideology which persuaded and attracted large numbers of the public—who would then be formed into a mass movement by means of command and control. Organization, program, printing presses, ideology, mass command and control: this costly, slow-moving machinery, with its need for hierarchy and obedience, could be transcended by a single click of the mouse if Wael Ghonim won his bet.

Though he had scheduled a revolution, Ghonim specifically denied being a revolutionary. He claimed to be an ordinary Egyptian.

Besides the obvious danger of regime repression, two technical obstacles might have barred the way to his goal. Since these have been cited by writers who even now doubt that web politics can be transferred to the real world, I want to deal with them briefly. One obstacle pertained to the number of Egyptians Ghonim could actually reach with Facebook. The other raised the question whether the psychological distance between virtual and real was, under any circumstances, simply too great to be crossed.

The problem of numbers was a significant one. Egypt lagged in internet penetration, falling behind not just the West but also Iran and the wealthier Arab countries of the Gulf. A previous online call for an “anti-terrorism” demonstration, to be held on July 24, 2005, attracted a handful of well-to-do, university-educated young Egyptians who were quickly and peaceably dispersed by the authorities. It was more comic opera than protest. Internet penetration at that time probably hovered between 7 and 10 percent.

By January 2011, internet penetration in Egypt exceeded 20 percent. You may well ask whether, at that level, Ghonim’s message could have reached a large enough segment of the public—and, more generally, whether we have any idea what the minimal level of diffusion must be, for a message to enter the consciousness of the public. The answer to both questions is: yes.

Roland Schatz, a brilliant commercial practitioner of agenda-setting theory, has identified a level of media diffusion below which a message sinks without notice, but above which it quickly rises to public attention. Schatz calls this boundary the awareness threshold, and has estimated the tipping point at 15 percent of diffusion. Scholars have charted a similar trajectory for the adoption of every kind of innovation, including new political beliefs. “Critical mass” occurs at between 10 and 20 percent of adoption—the level at which enough diffusion networks become “infected” by the virus of change to make the latter self-sustaining. ¹⁰

The levels of internet and social media penetration in Egypt were consistent with a potential to break through the awareness threshold. During the 2011 revolt, this potential was realized. I believe Wael Ghonim won his bet. According to his own numbers, by January 25, the day of the protest, over a million persons had viewed his Facebook Event invitation, and around 100,000 had announced their intention to participate. It has been argued that most January 25 demonstrators weren’t there because of Facebook. That’s certainly true in terms of ultimate motives, possibly true in a more proximate sense. But many—maybe most— demonstrators were there because they had learned about the protests online. They had toggled from soft information to the hard pavement of the streets of Cairo, from virtual to real, from clever talk to pitched battles with the riot police. Almost incidentally, on the way to political change, they had carried out a revolution in Egypt’s information balance of power.

I should add that the regime clearly believed that “We Are All Khaled Said” played an important part in the revolt. So did the protesters, who accorded Ghonim a place of honor in Tahrir Square. So did Ghohim himself, with good reason. When he asked protesters in Tahrir how they had found out about the event, many answered “From ‘We Are All Khaled Said’” or other anti-regime Facebook groups.

If that was the case, the issue of psychological distance was answered empirically. It’s simply false to say that the public can’t make the leap between virtual and real politics. The problem has been posed in terms of online “weak bonds” as against real-life “strong bonds”—a proposition I will explore later in greater depth. All we need to know about the “strong bonds” objection, in connection with the Egyptian uprising, is that it applies only to the old mode of forming a mass movement. If the protesters had sought to replace the regime with a specific set of people, programs, and principles, the weak bonds of the digital world would have been insufficient.

But that’s not what brought out the variegated Egyptian public to the streets.
They just wanted to get rid of Hosni Mubarak.

A VERY OLD MAN SHUTS DOWN THE WEB, THEN FALLS THROUGH THE TRAP DOOR OF THE INFORMATION SPHERE

I want to make very clear what it is that I’m claiming—and what I’m not. I’m not saying that Ghonim and the internet caused Egypt’s revolution. Because human beings aren’t billiard balls, the application of Newtonian mechanics to political events invariably ends in confusion, and often in error. Ghonim and the internet were one cause out of many. If you have eyes to see, that should be remarkable enough.

I’m also not asserting the primacy of the internet, even under the conditions created by the tsunami of new information. Primacy goes to that massively redundant information sphere, which has absorbed new and old media alike. Within the information sphere, in the age of the image, I’d imagine that the most popular and persuasive medium is still television.

My second moment—chronologically the last—concerns the interview given on February 7, 2011, by Wael Ghonim to Mona Al-Shazly of Dream TV. Let’s unpack these elements.

Ghonim had just been released by the authorities after 11 days of detention in a secret state security prison. He looked gaunt and pale. Dream TV was a privately owned Egyptian channel, essentially the product of the dictator’s dilemma. Hosni Mubarak wished to modernize Egypt. Modern countries boasted an abundance of TV channels and content. Mubarak gambled that his regime could control the information pouring out of new channels. The owners were beholden to the regime, the content was heavily censored. However, compared to stateowned television, this was indirect control. It was more tenuous. During the recent political turbulence, private channels could pivot away from the regime’s interpretation of events. Al-Shazly, the interviewer, made clear her sympathy with the protesters.