The Quiet Before, page 20
But from there, he stumbled upon the blogosphere. By the mid-2000s, blogs were a craze among the cosmopolitan youth of Cairo and Alexandria who used tools like the Google-owned Blogger or WordPress to make their own personal newsletters, sharing their every thought. Ayyash hungrily read the often overlong and self-indulgent public journals of Copts, Baha’is, gays and lesbians, Salafis, Communists, and the woman whose blog was simply titled “I Want to Be a Bride.” Class and religious divisions that had become so calcified in Egypt seemed to break down, and the blogs gave young people a chance to peer into the minds of others. Ayyash started his own in 2006, teasingly questioning some of the Brotherhood’s diktats. A typical post was titled “I’m a Muslim Brother and I Watch Movies.” His blog even earned him a scolding in 2007 from the head of the Brotherhood’s political department, Mohammed Morsi, the man who would go on to briefly become Egypt’s first and so far only freely elected president.
Blogging in those years became synonymous with dissidence. One Muslim Brotherhood website wondered in 2006, “Would you marry a girl who blogs?” The first modern protest movement in Egypt against autocracy fermented among bloggers who eventually gathered on the steps of the High Court in Cairo in 2004, their mouths covered by yellow tape scrawled with the word Kefaya (Enough). In 2007, the Mubarak regime even sentenced a blogger to four years in jail for his posts.
And then came Facebook. By 2010, everyone seemed to abandon their blogs en masse. Facebook reached a wider audience and offered more immediate gratification. While blogs called for longer pieces structured around an argument or narrative, Facebook posts were shorter bursts of information and feeling. They also felt ephemeral. Less care was taken with the craft of writing them and the cultivation of a voice or unique perspective that might draw readers back. What mattered now was adding an utterance to the scrollable feed that might stand out. Ayyash summed up the switch to social media this way: “The blogs were more of an intellectual space; Facebook was a personal one.”
But it did bring all those bloggers into a single noisy room, increasing the cross-pollination and sense of shared grievance. The political talk didn’t end; it just got snappier—more reductive but also more entertaining. Ayyash continued to drift from the Muslim Brotherhood, openly questioning its antagonism to women and Christians, and even started a Facebook page to register his offense at the group’s rigged internal elections. The April 6 Youth Movement began in 2008 when a couple of activists posted an event on Facebook, a general strike to support textile workers in the Nile delta city of Al-Mahalla al-Kubra. It quickly gained seventy thousand followers.
We Are All Khaled Said, when it went viral in June 2010, felt like another level of dissent. Facebook was churning with voices of discontent, and now they weren’t just on the same platform, they were all on one page. After Ayyash clicked to follow, he himself posted a comment: “If the people don’t do something about this, I will leave the country for good.”
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GHONIM, SITTING IN DUBAI, watched stupefied as the number of people following the page metastasized. He had recruited another admin he’d met online—a nineteen-year-old activist in Egypt named Abdelrahman Mansour—and together they were updating nonstop. But Ghonim knew he would have to escalate if he wanted to maintain momentum. He turned to his marketing background. It wouldn’t be too different, he figured, from the “sales tunnel” approach that he had learned at school. The first phase would involve dramatic posts, violent images and videos of police brutality, to pull in readers. He needed to provide a steady supply of emotional content, including posts written in the voice of Khaled Said imploring the living to take action. The second phase, he said, was to harvest more “likes” and comments, ramping up engagement. The third phase was to get those active on the page to produce their own content, essentially turning it into “a product being marketed by its loyal users.” The fourth and final phase would occur “when people decided to take the activism onto the street.”
All four phases happened very fast, practically in the span of a week. Ghonim received a message from one of the page’s followers, Mohammed, identified only as a twenty-six-year-old from Alexandria, and promptly posted it: “How about if we all gather along the Alexandria coast on Friday?” The idea was to carry out what they decided to call a “Silent Stand.” It was the newly formed group’s way of venturing out into the real world of protest. A few thousand young people, dressed in black, standing quietly or softly praying from the Koran, stood along the corniche facing the dark waters of the sea in Alexandria and along the Nile in Cairo. Mindful not to provoke or look unruly, they did not shout or chant, just gathered in mournful silence. The dramatic staging of it also served to feed Facebook, because photos and videos from the protests were posted on the page, gaining more “likes” and emboldening others. “It was amazing,” Ayyash remembered. “You cannot imagine how powerful it was to see those images of people from Alexandria and Cairo lining the beach or on the highway wearing black and staying silent. It was chilling for me. And that was the moment that I thought, yeah, Khaled Said is different from anything we have seen before.”
After the Silent Stand, the number of followers on the page grew, eventually topping 200,000 that summer. It became a creative environment, developing “its own culture,” Ghonim said. Ideas were proposed and critiqued. Even the Silent Stand, repeated a number of times in the weeks after the first one, became a subject of open debate. The few seasoned activists in the group complained it was too passive a political act. Others thought it was smart to avoid direct confrontation with the state. Ghonim himself saw value in the gentle approach, which allowed more and more seemingly apolitical young Egyptians to scale what he called “the barrier of fear” and express their anger on an issue as unambiguous as police violence. No one was talking about regime change, but the subtext, Ghonim knew, was clear: “These people are not zombies. They are real. And given the right time, the right call, they will act.”
But as the months went by and summer turned to fall, he also came to recognize the trap of organizing on Facebook. It demanded a fresh event, a novel focal point around which to rally the page’s followers. He tried to keep the collective fury going with videos of police torturing their victims. Then, when the first round of a parliamentary election took place in November, he put out a request to monitor polling stations and report back on instances of vote rigging, which he then posted. (Mubarak’s party, unsurprisingly, won 95 percent of the seats.) But the Khaled Said page was a restless place, now primed to expect a new high every few days. This was not a space for conversation and lengthy threads. It was a space where a particular, unyielding human desire for intensity and action could be satisfied. The number of followers, after reaching 250,000 by September, began to plateau.
Ghonim was still anonymous and living in Dubai, not exactly sure how to harness the page’s growing energy. He even ran opinion surveys to elicit some metrics on what everyone wanted to do next. Ironically, in this lull, before external events overtook them, a nascent opposition movement was beginning to form. Even given where Facebook wanted them to go—its penchant for performance above all else, privileging emotion over reasoned argument (all qualities that had worked to Ghonim’s advantage so far)—the comments became more thoughtful. They were wondering aloud together about the big questions: What was fundamentally wrong with Mubarak’s regime? What would be the best methods for attacking it? What were their own principles and aims? There was an ongoing exchange about economics and how any change in the country had to involve reducing poverty. At one point the issue of martyrdom came up, and there were differing opinions on whether suicide was an ethical protest tactic. One indication that this was turning into a community was the strong interest in learning the identity of the admin—much like the frenzy that surrounded Mabel Dove’s columns in The African Morning Post or even the desire to buy a coffee for Tex and the other WELL admins. Ghonim’s anonymity was something of a marketing gimmick—he loved the 2006 movie V for Vendetta, in which a renegade in a Guy Fawkes mask starts a revolution in a dystopian England, and he would teasingly post clips from the film on the page. But remaining anonymous also hid the fact that he was actually hundreds of miles away, safe in Dubai. Instead, he created a persona for the admin, an Egyptian everyman: “I do not wish to start a revolution or a coup…and I do not consider myself a political leader of any sort….I’m an ordinary Egyptian who cheers the Ahly team, sits at the local café, and eats pumpkin seeds.”
The question of how aggressively to protest and where to direct their anger was never fully resolved. It remained a regularly flaring tension. At one point during the Silent Stands a few demonstrators began chanting, “Down, down with Hosni Mubarak,” and it was captured on video. Ghonim thought it a step too far, fearing that public support would disintegrate if their message became overly political and deviated too far from a concern with the rule of law and human rights. But a counterpoint—which Ghonim, to his credit, also posted—called the admin himself naïve. Our problem is political, the dissenter commented. This opinion, Ghonim noticed, gained far more “likes” than his own moderate stance. The community he had prodded into existence was looking for a confrontation.
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IT’S HARD TO KNOW what would have happened next if the spark that set off Tunisia’s shocking revolution had not turned into a conflagration. The self-immolation of a fruit seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, which quickly led to the fall of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the country’s ruler, kicked the feedback loop into overdrive. No longer was it a fantasy to believe that an authoritarian leader could be deposed by his people, could be forced to apologize and flee in fear. Besides respect for those who took to the streets in Tunisia, the dominant feeling on the We Are All Khaled Said page was shame. “If Bouazizi had burned himself in Egypt,” read one comment, “admin would have organized a silent stand.” A decision had already been made to mark January 25 with a protest. That was Police Day, the annual holiday meant to honor the country’s security services. Now, after the fall of Ben Ali, they had to do more. Despite all the V for Vendetta playacting, Ghonim didn’t want to put anyone in harm’s way. But his younger, more radical co-admin, Mansour, convinced him that this was the moment. On January 15, Ghonim changed the name of the event to “January 25: Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption, and Unemployment.” An uprising was now scheduled on Facebook.
It wasn’t exactly inevitable. Tunisia provided the push, but there were only two possible roads for a movement that had been built on social media: either We Are All Khaled Said would soon fizzle out, incapable of sheltering a nuanced assessment of means and ends, or it would rally at a massive event—one that, ideally, could be captured on film and fed back to the page. Despite the name of the planned revolution, there was no real consensus yet about the way forward. Ghonim did post a long message titled “I Wish” that was a list of his own desires, some political (“I wish I had a real voice in my own country”), but most so dreamy as to be practically meaningless (“I wish teachers would establish in the hearts and minds of students a genuine love for knowledge and learning” and “I wish we could love one another”). Another document posted on the page written by a more hardened group of leftist activists made explicit their four objectives for the protest: ending the Emergency Law, confronting the problems of poverty in Egypt, firing the hated interior minister, and putting a two-term limit on the presidency. These were specific, concrete demands, but there was no time to discuss them or gain support for them because the scheduled revolution was hurtling toward a single overarching goal: the ousting of Mubarak.
For Ghonim, the stakes of what he had set in motion were suddenly apparent. Like so many others who had proclaimed as much on the page, he now felt ready to die for the change he was seeking. He booked his ticket for Cairo. The invitation to what quickly became known as #Jan25 was seen by more than half a million Egyptians in a single day, with 27,000 confirming immediately that they would attend. Traffic to the page itself reached 9,125,380 hits, and the number of followers jumped to 382,740. There was off-line organizing too, person to person and on photocopied flyers. Taxi drivers relayed the details of the protest to their passengers. But the momentum began and was sustained on Facebook.
What happened over the next eighteen days has been well documented. The young people who met on the internet marched through tear gas to Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Cairo, chanting about “bread, freedom, human dignity” and were joined by hundreds of thousands. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that what they created there, in the square, was, very briefly, a utopia. A world glimpsed only virtually, on blogs or through comments on the Facebook page, burst into reality. During those days there was a sense of common purpose that surpassed anything seen before in Egypt. The protesters risked their lives together, facing the army that surrounded Tahrir and the marauding thugs on camelback who at one point charged through the encampment. The young revolutionaries, which is what they were now, spoke of liberating one little patch of Egypt where they hoped to plant a democratic country, guided justly. They hugged spontaneously, wrapped themselves in Egyptian flags, sang protest songs, and organized massive operations to feed and house one another in the square. Young Islamists like Ayyash chatted with committed socialists and recently radicalized college students; Christians and Muslims guarded each other while they prayed.
Social media ceased to be a determining factor in this moment. On the third day of the standoff, Mubarak pulled the plug on the internet, and from then on it was just the insistent physical presence of a mass of people refusing to leave until Mubarak stepped down. In retrospect this goal would appear too narrow, cutting the head off a body that didn’t intend to stop moving, but it brought solidarity and quieted, for the moment, any debate about what would come next.
Ghonim never saw much of Tahrir. He was arrested shortly after the occupation began. On January 27 he was walking out of a restaurant when he was stopped by the police. He had made the mistake of having dinner with two Google executives, one of them being Jared Cohen, a former State Department employee who had worked on spreading digital tools to dissidents. Ghonim was assumed to be a CIA spy and Cohen his handler. He was blindfolded, handcuffed, and thrown into an underground cell, where he would remain for eleven days. He tracked time by the muezzins’ calls to prayer. In his dreams his hands were free, but he would wake to find himself restrained and aching. After a week, stuck in darkness, his clothes and body stinking, he grew suicidal.
When he was finally released, blinking in the bright light, he was both disoriented and psychologically taut—and suddenly, strangely, also a celebrity. He had no sense of what had taken place in his absence: in an attempt to help save him, his identity as the admin of We Are All Khaled Said had been revealed. And within hours of being let go, he found himself on live television. Ghonim insisted that he was not a leader. He kept repeating those words, “I’m not a hero,” in that interview and in days to come. About Tahrir, he said, “I was just a loudspeaker. I just made some noise and urged people to go down.” When the interviewer displayed the images of all those who had lost their lives in the square, news to Ghonim, he broke down, weeping uncontrollably in front of tens of millions before getting up and walking off the set. In the humility he showed, the pure emotion, and in the absence of anyone else who seemed to be representing the revolutionary forces in Tahrir, he was thrust forward.
This was celebrity of the sort social media loves: an ordinary person unexpectedly finding himself on an enormous stage, like an American Idol contestant. His tearful television appearance went viral. A Facebook page called “I Nominate Wael Ghonim to Speak on Behalf of Egypt’s Protesters” drew about 250,000 followers in forty-eight hours. He stood in front of tens of thousands in Tahrir and later even negotiated with the Interior Ministry. The feedback loop he had built was now swirling around him. He was the thing people were having strong reactions to and posting categorically about, just as they had about the photo of Khaled Said. Almost immediately, he felt flattened and misunderstood, but also panicked, desperate to take advantage of his moment in the spotlight. It was around this time that even President Obama fantasized out loud that he hoped “the Google guy” would one day become president of his country.
Within a few days of Ghonim’s release, the occupation of the square, the rolling protests and street battles, all ground to a halt. What had been impossible to imagine a few weeks earlier had come to pass: Mubarak had agreed to immediately resign. On the day after the news, the singing and hugging over and the tents dismantled, the Facebook page that had started it all, which by the end of the eighteen days had nearly 700,000 followers, coordinated the cleanup of Tahrir. This was an act of new citizenship—the country belongs to us now—but there was something naïve about it in retrospect, as if all that was left to do was pick up the trash and tidy up the square.
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THE NEXT TWO AND A HALF YEARS—from that triumphant February in 2011 to the summer of 2013 when the army retook full control of the country, leveling and destroying until it was clear who was in charge—was a period of intense political drama, crowded with elections and protests and massacres. But with some distance now the story reduces in size: The young had led a revolution. In Tahrir, they punched opened a portal to an alternate future, but it was one that only the Muslim Brotherhood, with its long history and rigorous discipline, was capable of entering. And, for a brief moment, they did. But the army and the institutional forces that had always propped up Mubarak never intended to let the country get away from them. In the end, everyone got a chance to play for a bit, but that body without a head found one in General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the old establishment rose again, labeling all of its detractors terrorists.
