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

Here was a confluence possible only in the information sphere: old media mainstreaming a new media voice belonging to a central figure in a revolution. Dream TV was no Al Jazeera: its audience consisted of entertainment-minded, nonpolitical Egyptians.

At the time the program aired, the uprising had reached a crisis point. Six days before, Mubarak had delivered a televised speech in which he cited his service to the country and promised to step down at the end of his presidential term, in six months’ time. Many protesters felt the old man should be allowed a dignified exit. Others were wavering. Crowds at Tahrir Square grew smaller.

Ghonim’s raw, emotional performance on Dream TV has been credited with turning the tide decisively in favor of the protesters. It was a testament to the power of TV to capture and communicate sincerity: his sorrow when confronted with photos of dead demonstrators was both compelling and painful to watch. Before a mass audience, Wael Ghonim, that extraordinary ordinary person, gave the revolutionaries a face that ordinary Egyptians could identify with. He embodied information which changed the direction of political life in his country. His interview went viral on YouTube, new media compounding the effect of the old. The crowds in Tahrir swelled in size. Four days later, Hosni Mubarak resigned from office.

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The reality of the new environment is that the global information sphere, rather than any one medium or platform, erupts into nearly every political conflict, and not infrequently helps determine the outcome. Unlike, say, TV or Facebook, the information sphere can’t be blocked by government. It’s too redundant. Information leaks into the conflict anyhow.

This was demonstrated under almost laboratory conditions in Egypt on Friday, January 28, 2011: the moment the government shut the door on its population’s access to the internet. Mobile phone service was disrupted as well. Mubarak, on the brink of the precipice, wanted to change sides on the dictator’s dilemma, withdraw his gamble on modernity. He imagined he could push Egypt back into the past, to the comfortable days before the Fifth Wave.

The reason why Mubarak’s minions shut down the web was no mystery. They were afraid of it. The causes of this fear—which they never explained or even admitted—hinted at a revolution much deeper and more disruptive of existing human relations than any purely political upheaval. Starting with the octogenarian Mubarak, the people who ran the regime had come to power during the industrial age of information. They had been lords and masters of what could and could not be said in newsprint, what could and could not be shown on television. And they dimly comprehended the irreparable erosion of this monopoly, the loss of control over the story Egyptians told about their rulers.

Demonstrations planned after Friday prayers in many Egyptian cities were the immediate cause of the shutdown. But let’s inhabit the skins of the old men who ruled Egypt on January 28. What were they thinking? Very likely, that they were snatching away the means of communication and organization from the unruly public: that they had flipped a switch and cut off the public’s voice. The internet represented the enemy.

Yet streams of information still surrounded and invaded Egypt, beyond the ability of political power to control.

Shutting down the web made history in the worst way. In Egypt and abroad, the move communicated a feeling of crisis and panic in the regime. In exchange for a political placebo, the government incurred real economic costs and alienated powerful business interests. But the most important effect of the shutdown was to create a silence—filled at once by Al Jazeera, which among its many agendas had pursued a long-running campaign to de-legitimize Egypt’s ruling clique. Here was redundancy with a vengeance.

has probably been exaggerated, but there’s no question that the channel exemplified to many observers the power of the information sphere. The regime certainly felt this way. Its agents dropped Al Jazeera’s signal from the Nilesat satellite, and orchestrated the physical intimidation of Al Jazeera staff in Egypt. These efforts collided with the redundancy factor and came to nothing. Other Arab channels offered Al Jazeera space on their satellites, and much of Al Jazeera’s footage came from amateurs who could not be shut down or intimidated.

The channel kept the story of the uprising alive by streaming it to every corner of the globe. From snowy Davos, Switzerland, where I was attending a conference, I witnessed street violence in Cairo on my laptop, via Al Jazeera in English. Many others there did the same. My guess is that Al Jazeera was instrumental in framing the event to the world as a struggle between idealistic youth and a vicious thugocracy. It led Western public opinion—including, it may be, in the White House—to a tipping point favoring the end of Mubarak’s reign, despite real fears about the consequences of instability in the cradle of the Muslim Brotherhood.

YouTube amplified this sentiment, re-hosting video from Al Jazeera and other broadcasters, as well as raw footage from cell phone cameras which somehow found a path to the web. Unlike TV or live streaming, YouTube could select the most visually dramatic moments, and make them searchable. It archived spontaneity: a defiant young man suddenly gunned down by security forces, a bizarre horse and camel charge by Mubarak supporters into the crowd at Tahrir Square.

Virtually all YouTube videos favored the protesters. In the aggregate, the result was a brilliant exercise in geopolitical persuasion, wholly uncoordinated, but the more authentic and effective because of that.

The men who pulled the plug on the web must have known that they couldn’t keep ordinary Egyptians from learning about events. Hundreds of TV channels flooded the country’s airwaves. Possibly, they imagined they could reconquer some control over the framing of images. If so, that was a generational mistake. The images swirling around the uprising showed protesters as pro-democracy underdogs, the heroes of the struggle. The public never lost its mighty voice. It was in this context that Ghonim’s appearance on Dream TV delivered a decisive blow to Mubarak’s hopes of clinging to power.

I began this chapter with the story of an insignificant man—the Iranian blogfather, Hoder. In hindsight, with Egypt’s revolution and the “We Are All Khaled Said” page in mind, we can see that, in their persecution of Hoder, the Iranian authorities were motivated by self-preservation no less than moral outrage. They worried about the practical political consequences of giving ordinary people the means of public expression. Like all despots, they understood the fine points of control.

I end the chapter by observing, yet again, the strange embrace between information and power, now personified by the opposing figures of the drama in Egypt: Wael Ghonim, the Google marketing man turned Facebook agitator, and Hosni Mubarak, the air force pilot turned hard authoritarian. Together, they blew away our Rock–Scissors–Paper theory, with its naïve faith in the supremacy of hard politics, and reaffirmed how information interacts with power in ways that are open, unpredictable, mysterious.

Every step of Ghonim’s progress through the labyrinth of the Egyptian uprising would have been impossible when his antithesis, Mubarak, first assumed the presidency 30 years before. From the perspective of information, the two men grew up in different countries. Neither, therefore, understood the other, but Ghonim was a carrier of the Fifth Wave, an aggregator and connector, a drop of rain in a global storm, while Mubarak in his moment of crisis could only grope for a switch to turn out the light.

You don’t need to accept the idea that Facebook pages can defeat tanks and bullets to perceive—faintly, like a pale shadow over the events in Egypt—a cataclysmic transformation in human power relations.

CHAPTER NOTES

1 Image courtesy of Morningside Analytics

2 On Suleiman, see “Egypt Blogger Jailed for ‘Insult,’” BBC, February 22, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle\_east/6385849.stm; on Douma, see “Egypt Activist Ahmed Douma Convicted for Morsi Insult,” BBC, June 3, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22758415

3 On Sánchez, see Andrew Hamilton, “Yoani Sánchez, Cuba’s Popular Blogger, Has Been Beaten Up For Describing Life,” The Telegraph, November 28, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/cuba/6678937/Yoani-Sanchez-Cubas-popular-blogger-has-been-beaten-up-for-describing-life.html; on Nguyen Hoang Vi, see Emily Alpert, “Dozens Detained, Jailed in Crackdown on Vietnam Bloggers,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/12/world la-fg-wn-report-vietnam-bloggers-jailed-20130212

4 Photo by Joi, Creative Commons

5 Joe Parkinson, “Amid Turkey Unrest, Social Media Becomes a Battleground,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/middleeast/2013/06/03/amid-turkey-unrest-social-media-becomes-abattleground/?mod=e2tw

6 Nicholas Kristof, “The Daily Me,” New York Times, March 18, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/opinion/19kristof.html

7 “Music Industry Files Motion For Preliminary Injunction Against Napster,” RIAA Gold & Platinum News, no date, http://riaa.com/newsitem.php?news\_year\_filter=&resultpage=106&id=FBD85765-00D7-2B2D-1D29- 74FDD0F0826B; James Nicolai, “Creative Groups Slam Napster in Court Brief,” PC World, September 11, 2000, http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/80045/creative\_groups\_slam\_ napster\_court\_brief/

8 No known source site, usually identified as “web photo.”

9 Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: The Power ofthe People Is Greater Than the People in Power, A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 90.

10 See Roland Schatz, “How To Define Awareness Thresholds,” Media Tenor, 6th International Agenda-Setting Conference, Lugano, October 27, 2005, at http://www.agendasetting.com/2005/speakers\_ppt/ Schatz.pdf. Schatz is founder and president of Media Tenor International; I am a member of Media Tenor’s Board of Advisors. On adoption of innovations, see Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion ofInnovations, Fifth Edition (Free Press, 2003).

11 My chart.

12 Screen capture from Dream TV broadcast posted on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=V690GO7YzgA

13 Image courtesy of Arbor Networks.

Consider this book a canvas. My job will be to depict the strange chaotic world that was born with the new millenium and, I feel certain, will remain with us for a little while longer. I’m not a visionary prophesying doom, however, or a scientific wizard forecasting the shape of things to come. I don’t know the future, and I’m pretty sure they don’t either. If I describe the present accurately, I will have achieved my goal.

Very little of what I have to say will be original: maybe only the composition.

If, after all these admissions, you were to ask me why you should read on, I would respond: because the world I’ll describe is probably very different from the one you think you’re living in. The problem is that there are so many superficially dazzling aspects of the information tsunami. When I sit in my study in Vienna, Virginia, and Skype with someone in Beirut, Lebanon—that’s dazzling. It feels remarkable even as I’m doing it. So, naturally enough, attention has focused on the capabilities of digital platforms like Skype, Facebook, and Google, on the proliferation of communication and collaboration around the globe, or on the unprecedented growth in the volume of information. I understand the fascination—my own journey started with these concerns.

But it turns out that fascination with surface glitter has obscured our view to what is transpiring in the depths. There, human beings interact with platforms and information, and are changed by the interaction, and the accumulated changes have shaken and battered established institutions from companies and universities to governments and religions. The view from the depths is of a colossal many-sided conflict, the outcome of which, for good or evil, remains uncertain. In fact, the outcome will largely depend on us. And because we still think in categories forged during the industrial age—liberal and conservative, for example, or professional and amateur—our minds are blind to many of the clashes and casualties of this underground struggle.

MY THESIS

3

This is the story I want to tell—the reality I aim to describe as accurately as I can.

A WAR OF THE WORLDS, DEDUCED FROM THE DEVIL’S EXCREMENT

My thesis is a simple one. We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born. Given the character of the forces of change, we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture. You who are young today may not live to see its resolution.

Famous landmarks of the old regime, like the daily newspaper and the political party, have begun to disintegrate under the pressure of this slow-motion collision. Many features we prized about the old world are also threatened: for example, liberal democracy and economic stability. Some of them will emerge permanently distorted by the stress. Others will just disappear. Many attributes of the new dispensation, like a vastly larger sphere for public discussion, may also warp or break from the immoveable resistance of the established order.

In this war of the worlds, my concern is that we not end up with the worst of all possible worlds.

Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that has dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest. The two protagonists share little in common, other than humanity—and each probably doubts the humanity of the other. They have arrayed themselves in contrary modes of organization which require mutually hostile ideals of right behavior. The conflict is so asymmetrical that it seems impossible for the two sides actually to engage. But they do engage, and the battlefield is everywhere.

The perturbing agent between authority and the public is information. For my description of the present to make sense, I will have to show how such a vague, abstract concept can be wielded as a weapon in the war of the worlds.

Irreconcilable differences between old and new can be found in something as seemingly trivial as naming conventions. The industrial age insisted on portentous-sounding names of great seriousness and formality, to validate the organizations which spoke with the voice of authority: “Bank of America,” “National Broadcasting Corporation,” “New York Times.” Each of these three names stood for a professional hierarchy which claimed a monopoly of specialized knowledge. They symbolized a starched-collar kind of mastery, and they meant to impress. Even the lowest-ranking person in these organizations, the names implied, had risen far above the masses.

The digital age loves self-mocking names, which are a way to puncture the formal stiffness of the established order: “Yahoo!,” “Google,” “Twitter,” “Reddit,” “Flickr,” “Photobucket,” “Bitcoin.” Without having asked the people in question, I feel reasonably sure that the founders of Google never contemplated naming their company “National Search Engine Corporation” and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook never felt tempted by “Social Connections Center of America.” It wasn’t the style.

The names of two popular political blogs from the early days of blogging, Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, poked fun at the pretentiousness of the news business. Bridge-bloggers who posted in English from foreign countries leaned toward even more attention-getting names: Rantings of a Sandmonkey and The Big Pharaoh in Egypt, for example, and my favorite, the Venezuelan The Devil’s Excrement. Names of blogs have tended to become less outrageous with time—but the pull of digital culture is still toward goofiness and informality. The names asserted non-authoritativeness. They created a conscious divide between the old order and the new.