This is your father’s revolution

 There seems to be some evidence that the Egyptian protests have been organized the old-fashioned way.

Thursday, January 27: Anonymous leaflets circulating in Cairo also provide practical and tactical advice for mass demonstrations, confronting riot police, and besieging and taking control of government offices. Signed “long live Egypt”, the slickly produced 26-page document calls on demonstrators to begin with peaceful protests, carrying roses but no banners, and march on official buildings while persuading policemen and soldiers to join their ranks.

The leaflet asks recipients to redistribute it by email and photocopy, but not to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter, which are being monitored by the security forces.

Charlie Stross suggested recently: “If I was in charge of organizing communications within a mass insurgency today, I would have an iron rule for comsec: With the exception of tools for real-time communication in the field during tactical engagements, no communication technology invented after 1945 may be used. Yes, microdots. Yes, dead letter drops. Yes, invisible ink made at the kitchen sink out of household ingredients. Yes, human couriers. Make the f--kers work to intercept our communications and hunt us down.”

It is still unclear to me that the internet had much effect on organizing the Egyptian revolt. It is fairly clear that it made it easier for the Iranian government to suppress the demonstrations in 2009. Malcolm Gladwell still stands.

Now, as far as validating a pet theory, conscription may be playing a key role in why the Egyptian army has not acted against the rioters ... or it may not. Thoughts?

Comments

[Luke the S]

Urk, it appears to have eaten my comment.

Anyway. The point of the Satellite TV/Internet boom in authoritarian regimes isn't that they let the underground parties and would-be dissidents take the vast, mute, inglorious Miltons to take the street, but lots of people are seeing that end result and jumping to that conclusion.

If you look at the good stuff on the relationship between the authoritarian state and the public sphere (Davis' "Memories and the State" for example) as the dark vision of Benedict Anderson's idea of nationalism, the dictatorial state can establish a Gramscian hegemony, or monopoly, over the public sphere and civil society.

The advent of Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, and the internet isn't that you can organize your people to "take the street" but it's the step before. There is no doubt in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Bahrain, that the government is 1) Brutal, 2) corrupt 3) vile. The Satellite TV networks offer alternative frames to every idea the state is force-feeding its people; the monopoly breaks down and regular market competition takes over. The internet amplifies this--watch a man being beaten to death by the Interior Ministry (Egypt) or create a vibrant alternate public sphere where embittered public servants steal and leak documents demonstrating kickbacks at the Ministry of Defense (Bahrain) or whatever.

If "my government is a bunch of shitty thugs, but they keep my lights on and my daughter safe" goes to "my government is a bunch of shitheel thugs, look at these pictures/documents/video" you lay the groundwork for the possibility of serious protests. You go from students, the communists, and the Muslim Brotherhood to Timur Kuran's model ("Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the Eastern European Revolution of 1989" World Politics, 1991) where by ones and twos, the crowd gets bigger, and every time it gets bigger, more people are comfortable joining in.

The opposite threshold is how many different coercive agencies the country has. If it's just the Army, and that's mostly conscripts, aces. But if it's Army in one ministry, secret police in another, and regular police in a third, it's much harder to break all three, or hope that one has enough manpower/hardware to take out the other two. (this is why Iran ground down).

I was in Egypt in 2005/2006 when there was another serious stab at democracy. The difference, this time, is the proliferation of images and video of the government doing bad things to its citizens as kindling for mass demonstration. (That, and the economic conditions are AMAZINGLY worse).

You should post that thing I wrote.

[Noel Maurer]

What thing you wrote?

I'm still not seeing the internet as decisive. Other places have revolted without it ... like Eastern Europe in Kuran's piece. I don't think I follow.

[Luke the S]

You asked me for an updated and expanded version of that email that I sent around earlier. It's at your HBS email, running just over 2,000 words, though it's not that out of date.

I'm not advocating for it being decisive, either, but that can give more leverage against an authoritarian state with a media monopoly than the population would otherwise have.