The Quiet Before, page 21
It’s an open question whether any force in Egyptian society, let alone one as freshly constituted as the revolutionaries of Tahrir—an unlikely blend of moderate Islamists, socialists, and nationalists—could have really contended with the army. But that portal they opened up was meant to lead to somewhere better, to a more democratic future. Why this didn’t happen is still a source of much hand-wringing and heartache among those who can even bring themselves to talk about it. But all the logistical might that Facebook had provided in the lead-up to Tahrir, in the overthrow of a dictator, proved useless when it came to organizing themselves into a true political opposition, a unified and coherent base that could stand up to both the Brotherhood and the army.
The first problem, it seems clear, was time. Hot-wired as it was by Tunisia, the revolution happened too fast. There was no chance to form what the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci called a “historic bloc,” the negotiated web of alliances and relationships rooted in a shared ideology that he posited as the necessary first step to seizing state power. Facebook encouraged instead two other tendencies that countered the hard work of hashing out a new agenda: rejectionism and emotion. Ghonim spoke of the page as being guided by “Tahrir’s pulse.” In one post near the end of the eighteen days, he wrote that their success was due to the fact that “we do not understand politics, compromises, negotiations, and cheap tricks….Victory will be ours because our tears are heartfelt.”
Facebook was good for tears. But this next stage demanded precisely those skills and strategies Ghonim dismissed. The first test of the revolutionaries’ ability to survive the fraught moment (let alone emerge victorious) came very quickly. Within a month of Mubarak’s fall, the generals provisionally running the country put a series of constitutional amendments before the public, without offering any clear timeline for the transition to civilian rule. It was a feint toward democracy that actually tightened their authority and control over the process. The Tahrir coalition was largely opposed to this sequence of events, believing that elections for a new government should take place first. But they couldn’t decide on the right way to articulate this position, how exactly to frame their argument, and small differences between them swelled. Instead of consensus building, infighting took over and something Ghonim came to think of as “mobocracy.” He described to me a dynamic much influenced by social media’s maximalism, in which a position had to be uncompromising or you would be “perceived as weak or neutral or irrelevant.” This of course was no way to find commonalities among the groups that had come together in Tahrir and now had returned to their corners.
And it only got worse at every inflection point—when the first parliamentary elections took place, and then the presidential one, and then every time the Muslim Brotherhood lay claim to a revolution they had initially shunned, or the army committed atrocities and then seduced the people into thinking that it alone could bring about stability. Proving just how right you were wasn’t enough; you also had to explain how wrong everyone else was, to make the one true point that would win the debate. Social media platforms tend to “favor declaration,” wrote Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at the University of Virginia who has studied Facebook. “They do not allow for deep deliberation. They spark shallow reaction.” Intense comment threads were the descendants of those “thrashes” on the WELL, except here there was no moderator to step in and calm things down, just a currency of “likes” that rewarded the statement that drew the most blood. The revolutionaries did meet off-line as well, in stuffy apartments clouded with cigarette smoke and yelling. Facebook alone was not responsible for all their failures. An established democratic political culture had never existed in Egypt; they were attempting something hard and unprecedented in their country. What they didn’t need was a medium of incessant one-upmanship, which only helped turn the air acrid.
There was also no longer any interest in the guiding hand of an admin, let alone one seen to be a member of the elite. At one point the Muslim Brotherhood even created a competing page on Facebook called “We Are All Khaled Said—the Official Page,” questioning the authenticity of the original instigators and their connection to what was happening on the ground. When I met Abdelrahman Mansour, Ghonim’s co-admin, who was then into his sixth year of exile in the United States, he said that even he had begun to question the group’s legitimacy. “Are we representing society or are we not?” he asked. “We kept talking and imagining initiatives on the internet without taking them into the streets or formulating a new party.”
The closest Tahrir ever had to a governing body was the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, a group of organizers who had come together in the square and represented a range of temperaments and political persuasions. If there was a promise of a future that wasn’t Islamist or junta rule, it began with them. But they struggled from the start with the ideological work of transforming what was a criticism of dictatorship into an articulation of the rights and responsibilities they wanted for themselves and their fellow Egyptians. What kind of compromise could be found between Islamist and secular Egypt? What freedoms were nonnegotiable for liberals like themselves? How could they sway fellow citizens who had never known voting rights and had long abandoned any expectation of transparency or accountability from their leaders? They couldn’t arrive at answers. They had no forum for asking questions and working them out, so they ended up fixating on the immediate tactical problems, “like teenage boyfriends with noble intentions and truncated attention spans,” wrote Thanassis Cambanis, a longtime Middle East correspondent who observed the aftermath of the revolution. Especially given the patchwork nature of the revolutionary coalition, it was necessary to choose certain battles while abandoning others. They were allergic to the practicalities of doing politics.
Social media never made it easier. It was only ever able to point them back to Tahrir Square, the tried-and-true method. When the moment clearly called for protest—when they demanded Mubarak be put on trial, or when the Justice Ministry proposed a law banning all demonstrations—they knew what to do. They could zero in on a point of outrage and motivate people to gather around it. It was as if social media had replaced their revolutionary project with a single instinct. Their greatest strength was the ability to resuscitate the magic and power of Tahrir, to pull off a millionya, a million-man march. But it was becoming a limited tool, a lever turned crutch. And while the activists did regularly return to the square, enamored with their own ability to quiet all the voices on Facebook for a day or two, the more politically savvy and deeply connected forces in the country, like the Muslim Brotherhood, did what they had long known how to do: set an agenda and impose order in their ranks. The revolutionaries never got quite organized enough. They lacked “the bloodthirsty hearts of the Bolsheviks who seized Russian factories, or the French who stormed the Bastille,” Cambanis wrote.
Politics eventually became the only way to claim the rewards of the revolution. When it was time for elections, first of a new parliament and then of a president, the weakness of Tahrir’s activists was exposed. They could not build a party. Those few revolutionaries who emerged as leaders did not seem interested in representing anyone but themselves, distracted by the lure of international conferences and speaking tours in the West. Ghonim received a reported $2.5 million book deal, which he announced on Twitter he was giving away to charity. But he was relentlessly attacked on social media as a hypocrite and an egomaniac, and even a spy. He feared increasingly for his safety.
One of the activists who did try to enter the political realm was Mahmoud Salem. I’d talked to him over the phone back in 2006 but hadn’t known his real name then, only that he was the blogger who went by Sandmonkey. I was working on an article about Middle East bloggers and his pseudonymous blog, Rantings of a Sandmonkey, was smart and irreverent and written in eloquent English. In retrospect, it was also brave, especially given that his mother was a prominent official in Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party. We talked about how blogs had broken down his preconceptions, even when it came to Jews, the ultimate other in Egyptian society.
Salem was widely read in the West by Egypt watchers, so when he unmasked himself as Sandmonkey in the middle of the eighteen days of Tahrir, after being detained and beaten by a crowd of pro-Mubarak supporters, it briefly became an international news story. Salem had as triumphalist an attitude as any other activist about the role of social media in tearing down the old regime: he was a proud adherent of the Khaled Said page. But his feelings changed once he decided to take the leap into politics and run for Parliament with the Free Egyptians Party, a newly constituted secular, liberal grouping, to represent the mostly middle-class Cairo district of Heliopolis. It was going to be hard, and Salem, ambling and with a guffawing laugh, stuffed into an ill-fitting suit, was not a natural politician. He posited his fifty thousand Twitter followers as one reason he had a chance—a bad sign. But, still, he wanted to embrace the new democratic world the revolution had opened up and not let it be monopolized by the Brotherhood or more established parties.
What he hadn’t anticipated was that social media would actively undermine his political efforts. “Running for office meant you were a power-hungry sell-out,” Salem would write in an essay for the World Policy Journal. “Voting meant you were participating in a charade and betraying the blood of those who had died protesting. Meanwhile, the dead were immortalized and turned into social media avatars before they were even buried.” The only people who maintained legitimacy were the ones rushing headlong into a confrontation with the police, again and again, and gaining attention online as a result. “This means of mediated ascension was nothing short of disastrous,” he wrote.
For him the revolution contracted into “a strange cultish religion,” “group-think on steroids—an abomination of a monster with thousands of arms and no brain.” What social media gave the revolution, the aspect that it seemed stuck on and could never outgrow, was “a spirit for destruction.” It was an incessant rejectionism. No one seemed interested in building, he said.
Salem ran, he told me, because he knew that Egypt’s future would be decided in secret back rooms. And he watched with anxiety as all the Tahrir activists disparaged the idea of trying to get inside. It was “imperative,” he said, to at least try. He failed, miserably. The party he joined had formed late, just a few weeks before the first round of the parliamentary elections, and he had to somehow capture the hearts and minds of a million voters in his district. Being a candidate was no fun. Salem was made for strategizing and, after losing his own election, he turned right away to running political campaigns for others. What he learned from this work made him even more critical of social media. “The street has to trust you,” he said. “Which means the people have to know you’re fighting for them, not just to mobilize them in anger and lead them in chants.”
* * *
—
ASTOUNDINGLY, ONLY THREE candidates associated with the revolutionary youth made it into Egypt’s Parliament when the votes were finally counted in January 2012. Three out of 508 parliamentary seats. Just half of 1 percent. A year had passed since the utopia of Tahrir Square, and the people who had birthed it were now shut out of the new Egypt taking shape. The big winner was the Muslim Brotherhood, or so it seemed until six months later, when the judiciary annulled the whole election and the military issued decrees strengthening its power. But if the Brotherhood would have a more precipitous fall in the long run, the liberal activists appeared the more immediate losers, edged out completely from a historical process whose spark they had lit. The next president would not be the Google guy. He wouldn’t even be sitting in Parliament, a body now dominated by men with beards and women in headscarves.
A week after Mohammed Morsi’s inauguration in June 2012, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition announced at a news conference that it was dissolving. But first, its members wanted to conduct an open postmortem before the press. “Even though it is not standard operating procedure in Egypt, we believe it is necessary for every group to submit a clear and transparent account of what it has done, good and bad.” The self-flagellation was both admirable and further indication of just how poorly suited they were for the cutthroat, zero-sum political environment that Mubarak’s ouster opened up. They blamed themselves for being out of touch, for not having reached out enough to the established institutions and having been a little too enamored with their brief fame and the illusion it gave that they were actually representing a constituency—a problem social media surely did not mitigate. Then, in a final act of digital hari-kari, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition deleted its Facebook page.
The remnants of this lost vanguard would still make efforts over the next year to reach the wider public. At one point, they took to the streets, bypassing social media with a film program called “Kazeboon!” (Liars!) that they projected on the sides of buildings all over Cairo. The short films offered unambiguous proof of the army’s increasing violence against protesters juxtaposed with generals smilingly explaining it away. The revolutionaries wanted the people to see this hypocrisy at a moment when the military was presenting itself as the only force that could restore order to the country. But if “Kazeboon!” felt comfortable as a form of activism, it was because it was still aimed at kicking up ire, not rallying people around a new ideology. The murderers needed to be called out and replaced, like Mubarak, but then what?
The walls were closing in, including on the Muslim Brotherhood, whose time in power was cut short after a year when a massive petition campaign that claimed to have collected twenty-two million signatures against Morsi’s rule led everyone back to the square. It was as if the needle were set back in the groove, a song Egyptians knew well by now. Angered by Morsi’s authoritarian direction, many of the Tahrir activists thought this was the right move and called for the army to step back in and remove him. A second revolution, they called it, a chance to rewind to 2011 and give true democracy another go.
But this was a counterrevolution in disguise. Within days, the defense minister, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, took charge. And in August came the denouement, when he aimed bulldozers and snipers at Muslim Brotherhood members and their families who had staged a massive sit-in in Rabaa Square. Some one thousand people were killed that day, according to Human Rights Watch. “What Tahrir ignited, Rabaa extinguished,” wrote David Kirkpatrick, who was Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times. The Arab Spring was over. There would be no Islamic version of democracy; there would be no democracy at all. A paralyzing nihilism set in. “When you can kill a thousand people in broad daylight with no consequences, none whatsoever—that was the day the game changed,” Mahmoud Salem told me from his exile in Berlin. “Nothing matters.”
* * *
—
BY THE TIME of the Rabaa massacre, Wael Ghonim had left Egypt and was refashioning himself as a social media reformer. “I was wrong,” he said, speaking into a headset microphone onstage at a TED event in Geneva in late 2015. This was the man who, more than any other, had become an avatar of the Arab Spring, and specifically social media’s part in the uprising. He had embraced the role, heartily. In his 2012 book, Revolution 2.0, he insisted that only one ingredient was needed “to liberate a society”: the internet. After Mubarak announced he was stepping down, with shouts of joy and fireworks filling the air behind him, Ghonim was interviewed on CNN and said he wished he could personally thank Mark Zuckerberg. (When he finally did, the behoodied Facebook CEO refused to let Ghonim snap a picture of the two of them together.)
But Ghonim now treated Facebook like a spurned lover. “The Arab Spring revealed social media’s greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings,” he said from the stage in Geneva. Facebook, he saw, was indeed a tool, but it was designed with a specific purpose, one that hadn’t suited the needs of his vanguard.
On the WELL, even when the conversation involved only a couple thousand people and the stakes were much, much lower than replacing an entrenched regime, a great many guardrails were needed to keep it a productive space, a home for talk that could build and not just destroy. What happened when you scaled those numbers up into the millions, removed those guardrails, the guiding moderators, and then introduced algorithms that kept people on the platform longer by elevating the loudest, most emotional voices? What you got was an incredible amplification system that also proved extremely ineffective at allowing people to focus, to organize their thoughts, to become ideologically coherent, to strategize, to pick leaders, and to refine a message. In short, the revolutionaries were denied everything they needed if they were going to win the day—a tall order in any circumstance. Once the rubble was swept off Tahrir Square and the paving stones were put back in place, it was this reality, Ghonim told his audience, that hit him “like a punch in the gut.”
When I spoke to him in 2016, after that remorseful TED Talk, he was living in Silicon Valley and running a start-up called Parlio with two Egyptian friends. Launched in 2014 with $1.68 million in seed funding from venture capitalists, the site was meant as an alternative form of social media, one whose algorithms would reward quality of engagement over quantity. It would prize “thoughtfulness and civility and substance.” Users had to sign a social pledge to participate. There was even an algorithm for identifying fights so that moderators could intervene. “The belief that we had as we were starting Parlio is that public conversations could actually work, you just needed to build the right environment,” Ghonim said.
