On Friday, December 17, 2010, in the market square of Sidi Bouzid, a threadbare county seat of thirty-nine thousand in central Tunisia, 120 miles south of the capital city of Tunis, a twenty-six-year-old fruit seller set the world on fire where he had been born, and where on January 4, 2011, he would be buried.
Since the age of eight the fruit seller had picked and sold vegetables and fruit, earning a meager living from his wheelbarrow stand in the square, enough to support his mother and young siblings—even to send his sister to the university. He was also known, from time to time, to give free fruit to the very poor.
That morning, the municipal inspector grew impatient. No money for her bribe again? She would teach this fruit seller a lesson. Where was his license to peddle fruit from his wheelbarrow? “I don’t need a license.” Whose scales are these? “They are borrowed from a friend.” Where did you get these bananas? “I purchased them with a credit of 300 dinars. I am here every day.”
The fruit seller suddenly found himself slapped and spat upon; he heard his father, who had died when he was three, cursed by the inspector. Her “aides” seized his fruit, took his scale, and for good measure tossed the fruit seller to the street. Perhaps, also, he was kicked or beaten.
Angered, the fruit seller walked to the regional governor’s office to see if he could get his fruit and scales back. The governor refused to see him or hear his case.
Disconsolate, Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit seller, purchased a can of gasoline or solvent—some flammable liquid—and returned to stand in the middle of morning traffic where in full view of the governor’s office he doused himself with the fuel, yelled, “How do you expect me to make a living?,” lit a match, and set himself ablaze.
Dying, the fruit seller Bouazizi was soon removed to a hospital. Astonished, aggrieved, and infuriated, Sidi Bouzid’s street vendors and citizens gathered around, joined by Bouazizi’s mother and cousins. A crowd of several hundred stood in front of the government building. Some sellers dumped their wares on its stoop in protest. An attempt was made to storm the locked wrought-iron gates. Bouazizi’s mother raised her voice. The YouTube videos recorded by cell phone cams are astounding; the camera searches for its subject, but there is no crowd leader. There are many voices; a man holds his bananas aloft; anger and bewilderment are all around, as much for this sorrowful day, perhaps, as with this remarkable occurrence in Tunisia: a protest, and in that, a brief gasp of the exalted air of freedom.
After the protest Bouazizi’s relatives posted the cell cam videos to YouTube. Minutes or hours later Facebook had consumed them and they moved quickly among a few veteran activists. Fear of reprisal from state security froze others from “sharing” on Facebook, or even “liking.” But with one-third of Tunisia on the Internet—3.6 million users—there was plenty of viewing.
Al-Jazeera’s “new media” team, searching the web, found the videos. That evening, December 17, 2010, al-Jazeera broadcast the day’s cell cam videos around the Arab world.
Later that night, the national police chief arrived in Sidi Bouzid. A peaceful march to honor the fruit seller was held the next day. Tear gas flew; clashes followed; arrests were made. Police reinforcements arrived Sunday—one hundred on motorcycles. Rioting in this desperate desert dust-hole resumed on Monday with hundreds of young people—most so young as to have known only the twenty-three-year reign of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali—confronting the hopelessness of their lives.
The children of the regime, it was said, were turning against it, with “a rock in one hand, a cellphone in the other.”
The news, at first denied by official spokesmen, suppressed by state organs, or spun with a smiley-face by state-controlled media, traveled by other circuits: four television networks—al-Jazeera, France 24, al-Arabiya, and CNN—Facebook, and Twitter. An established blogosphere operated “offshore,” keeping information alive.
It might have been a blessing that until the end only activists had posted to Facebook. As the pharaonic regime in Tunis responded with digital suppression of the web, then physical repression of web partisans, they literally passed over Facebook, deeming it irrelevant, an Old Testament—like reprieve in this twenty-first-century story of liberation. The Facebook viewing continued unabated. The revolt spread.
“The hashtags on Twitter,” al-Jazeera reported, “tell the tale of how the uprising went from being local to national in scope: #bouazizi became #sidibouzid, then #tunisia.”
Video imagery transformed Sidi Bouzid from local backwater to global spectacle, revealing the truth all knew but no leader spoke, igniting passions and activating the aspirations of millions.
“We could protest for two years here,” a YouTube poster said, “but without videos no one would take any notice of us.”
In 2011, the 24/7 news cycle had a voracious appetite for content. Once on the Internet, images went “viral,” reverberating across broadcast television and social media like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, amplifying effects and accelerating change.
On January 14, 2011, a scant thirty days after the protests began, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was gone, having fled to Malta under Libyan protection, then to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His country—a dynasty of the few, by the few, and for the few—was no longer “his.”
Ben Ali had played by the same ageless bloody rules of despots around the world—repress fast and win, or go away. All other strategy would be improvised.
But Tunisia was different. In this opening salvo of the “Arab Spring,” like-minded grievants and partisans searched for, found, and saw each other—in seconds. Isolated by distance of miles and chasms of culture, they needed only a few bytes to connect, and two or three clicks of a mouse for a picture and some words to ignite their passions.
Television networks like al-Jazeera gained outsized reputations. Upon seeing its studios in Qatar, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had once lamented, “All that noise from this little matchbox?” In reality, al-Jazeera scooped up the great storm of signals from original reporting, blogs, Twitter and Facebook, and YouTube and blasted it to the world.
Knowing they were being seen globally—not just on al-Jazeera, but on Twitter, where partisans could see #Tunisia trending in the United States—many gained courage. Tunisia surged; events moved from clicks to bricks far faster than Ben Ali, armed only with the crude tools of truncheons and torture, could extinguish.
Two thousand miles to the east, in Tripoli and Cairo, Sidi Bouzid’s signal beamed clear. With millions of antennae raised, web browsers opened, and smart phones on ring, a new Internet age of the “many to many” received and rebroadcast Sidi Bouzid’s unmistakable message.
“Now is our time.”
“People, have some shame.”
The speaker was a pudgy-faced young woman wearing a striped shirt and head scarf. She sat, staring calmly and speaking steadily into a web cam.
Her name was Asmaa Mahfouz. It was January 8, 2011, four days after the death of Bouazizi.
“Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for 30 years. Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died, and I saw people commenting and saying, ‘May God forgive him. He committed a sin and killed himself for nothing.’
“They say, ‘These guys who burned themselves were psychopaths.’ Of course, on all national media, whoever dies in protest is a psychopath.
“If they were psychopaths, why did they burn themselves at the parliament building?
“I’m making this video to give you one simple message: we want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25th. If we still have honor and want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25th. We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights.”
By 2011, such a call to action was nothing new. In Egypt blockages, work stoppages, and sit-ins to protest this and that government policy were common enough. It was how average citizens had come to litigate their grievances. Block a street, claim an intersection, close a shop—these outbursts did not shock the Egyptian conscience.
From time to time street actions turned confrontational and bloody—Egyptians were not concerned with that, either. “Doing politics outdoors,” as Barnard professor Mona El-Ghobashy wrote, gave citizens a good grasp of the monotone response of police to control by force and fear. It was part of the rulers’ game of rope-a-dope perfected and played by the Mubarak regime. Give some room for expression, let leaders expose themselves, ruthlessly lop off some heads, denounce the rest as anti-Egyptian agitators, and kill off any thought of revolt.
Go home, all. And they did.
By late 2010, the tidal bore of sentiment built up over three decades of agitation, repression, and response was now at the seawalls of Cairo, Giza, and Suez. Over the years it had crested and retreated, the bitterness of vast unemployment and a median income of about $1 per day, cramped living, repressive security, and deeply corrupt government smoothed over with gifts of bread and wages (offset moments later by higher taxes), laced with stern warnings about the bogey-men of disorder or foreign elements and the necessity of the state-as-protector.
Egyptians were by 2010 well practiced in their opposition, having developed dozens of trade, social, and political groups, opposition parties and leaders such as Mohamed ElBaradei, and organizations of varying stripe such as the religious Muslim Brotherhood, the neutered but visible Wafd reformist party, and others—Nasserists, Islamists, Greens, liberals, Marxists, and secularists.
Each had run the regime’s gauntlet of repression. They also shared a recent history of loose collaboration and coordination, called the Kifaya movement, embracing a vision of democracy and reform and, specifically, urging direct presidential elections with competing candidates.
While dismal in outcome, their campaigns in well-controlled elections helped build networks, training, and experience in dealing with the state’s repressive guises. A sophisticated political culture of commentary and blogging arose, providing anyone with the Internet a view to the Arab street, dialogue with fellow partisans, and a steady visual and verbal diet of government abuse.
All was built upon a widely shared foundation of grievance. Egypt had become a nation of deep and wide resentment. “Mubarak’s regime,” the Egyptian blogger Sarah Carr wrote, “has stripped the act of earning a living of its nobility and cheapened the currency of dreams.”
In June 2010, the most common of occurrences—the brutal, senseless beating and slaying of a young man whom police dragged from an Internet café—splashed across blogs and Facebook. In response Wael Ghonim, a thirty-year-old Egyptian Google executive for the region with experience building websites for ElBaradei and an MBA from American University in Cairo, created a Facebook page named after the poor soul: “We Are All Khaled Sa’id.”
Covering his digital tracks with the nom de guerre “El Shaheed,” Ghonim plastered the Facebook page with photographs of Sa’id’s beaten body and face. None could mask that before the feet and clubs of Egyptian police had rearranged them Sa’id had once been a perfectly ordinary man with a nose, mouth, teeth, and eyeballs all in the right places and pointing in the same direction. Like Mohamed Bouazizi and millions of others across the Arab world, that was practically all Sa’id had. Now that was gone, too.
Enough. “Those photos killed me,” Ghonim said. “I felt in pain. I wanted to do something. It happened that I created this page, and it happened that 375,000 people ‘liked’ it.
“Once you are a fan, whatever we publish gets on your wall,” Ghonim wrote. “So the government has no way to block it—unless they block Facebook completely.”
Antiregime sentiment began cresting. “We Are All Khaled Sa’id” attracted cell phone cam pictures and videos, messages, and testimony recounting the corruption and beatings. By January 25, El Shaheed’s page was at 450,000 “likes”—a staggering number.
Ignoring the Facebook rumbling, Hosni Mubarak announced in September 2010 that the great progress of Egypt would continue with the planned succession of his son Gamal.
As the Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany put it, Egypt was to be handed down from father to son “like a poultry farm.”
Some Western commentators saw this as Egypt’s best hope. “If a democratic revolution is unlikely,” Harvard’s Tarek Masoud wrote in September 2010, “so too is a military coup. Thus, we are really left with two choices: Gamal or his father.”
The effect was to remind many Egyptians that not only had they no present, they had no future. In November the regime dropped all pretense at democracy and declared that in the general election just held, it had won 97 percent of seats to Parliament.
With opposition seats reduced from one hundred to fewer than ten, Egyptians’ fear of reprisals and even death seemed nothing against the fear of living another day, let alone a generation, without a voice or a vote. The only Egyptians who now had a stake in Egypt’s future were the members of Mubarak’s close circle, the military from whom Mubarak arose and drew strength, and the thousands of poor men and boys recruited from agricultural backwaters of Egypt to police its great cities.
On December 2, the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar published Wikileaks documents that exposed leaders across the Arabic world to be as corrupt as was generally believed.
On December 12, demonstrations and street battles broke out in dozens of Egyptian cities, protesting the sham election.
In early January, Coptic Christians—10 percent of the population and despised by Islamic fundamentalists—fought police in Alexandria after a church was firebombed.
Days later detainees at a police station in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo rioted and set fire to the jail; hundreds of relatives, believing their loved ones were trapped, swarmed the station, shouted their protests of innocence, and battled the police for hours.
This nation was wired to blow.
On January 14, the deposed Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunis for Riyadh, sending fresh currents ripping through Egypt. There were no circuit breakers left to blow. The Arab Spring was on.
“The delusions of dictators,” David Remnick wrote of Hosni Mubarak in The New Yorker, “are never more poignant—or more dangerous—than when they are in their death throes.”
The regime had declared January 25, 2011, the first “National Police Day” and gave everyone the day off from work and school. “We Are All Khaled Sa’id” had promoted numerous protests over the summer and fall. Seeing the page’s 375,000 Facebook “likes,” veteran activists contacted El Shaheed. Might he or she—for no one had penetrated the Facebook page’s nom de guerre—promote a small protest they had planned for that day on the Facebook page?
The protest’s goals were clear: get rid of the security chief and the emergency laws, set a minimum wage, and establish term limits for Mubarak. Within days fifty thousand people had clicked “Yes, Will Attend” to El Shaheed’s invitation. By January 25, the number had climbed to eighty thousand. Ghonim later said he’d had high hopes but no illusions. Translating clicks on the mouse to feet on the pavement was tough. He posted links to flyers anyone could print and hand out.
A Google exec by day, a writer of web copy by night, and passionate for Egypt, Ghonim was angry, but he had options. If the protest failed, it would be no big deal. “I’d learn from the lesson, move forward and do something else,” Ghonim said later.
The veteran activists who had approached El Shaheed saw this as something more. Having trained together and run previous campaigns, they had serious organizational and street skills. Even so, they figured the day would go fast—“like usual, we’d go out to protest and get arrested in the first ten minutes,” said Ziad al-Oleimi, one of the organizers.
The normal state of affairs. Or was it?
“It was on the Saturday night before these protests,” recalled Eric Trager, an American researching his dissertation in Cairo. “I actually heard a number of Egyptian friends who never in a million years would do anything political—because they were elite, or because they’re scared, or because they have friends who’ve been imprisoned—say, ‘Actually, January 25, I’m going to the streets.’
“All of a sudden, these opposition movements had started sending out tons of text messages to even random Egyptians. Facebook messages, YouTube videos: telling people where to go, how to behave at the protest, what they should wear, what they should not do—specifically, they should not attack the police.”
Police higher-ups later said their preparations had been quite usual. They’d briefed the plans the day before; orders were clear not to tangle with the protesters. Cairo chief of police Ismail al-Shair issued the customary warnings against congregations of five or more. Riot trucks were deployed on major thoroughfares and the streets around Cairo University, all announced as march routes by organizers. The Interior Ministry, designated as a target of the protest, was further secured; all avenues leading to the ministry were sealed. Routes inbound to Cairo were checkpointed to block the flow of partisans from the provinces.
Everyone was ready for the 2:00 p.m. start.
Except it began at noon. And protests started not at mosques in announced neighborhoods but at different ones. Facebook and the press carried the correct rally points, but with the feints carried off, and start time and routes all different, security forces were out of position.
Marchers went down side streets, undisturbed by police, beckoning to the tenements and balconies, waving Egyptian flags, picking up people along the way—with messages not of democracy but wages and food. “They are eating pigeon and chicken and we are eating beans!”
Dozens of such marches wove through Cairo’s tiny picturesque lanes, picking up a thousand bystanders here, a thousand there, streaming toward rally points in central Cairo. By cell phone and text they learned that crowds were gathering steam in working- and middle-class neighborhoods alike—all marching toward Tahrir Square.
Police sought to bottle up the side streets and keep the groups from becoming one. New streams arrived, thousands of chanting activists, Greens waving flags, liberal party youth sprinting down the Nile cornice, adding bystanders as they went. They paused in front of the ruling party’s headquarters to denounce Mubarak and promise him Ben Ali’s fate. Joined by still another group coming across the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, the roiling brigade headed for the state radio building, circled it once or twice, then headed off for Tahrir Square.
By 4:00 p.m., security forces in the square had gathered themselves up and were resisting new surges in. Soccer fans led chants of “Egypt! Egypt!” and battled police as they were chased and beaten. But the day was not half over. New marchers coming from farther away were now arriving by the hundreds and thousands. A former ElBaradei campaign chief entered the square from underneath the Qasr al-Nil Bridge. “It was one of the most profound moments of my life,” he said. “The sight of the square filled with tens of thousands heralded the long-awaited dawn. As we entered the square the crowds installed there cheered the coming of a new battalion, greeting us with joy. I wept.”
COMPRESSION. And so it went for four days and four nights as police in uniform and plainclothes battled protesters for Tahrir until finally demonstrators seized Tahrir for good. The same in Alexandria, Ismailia, Mahalla.…
The government of Hosni Mubarak fell eighteen days later. The Egyptian military, Mubarak’s guarantor, withdrew its support when it became clear that Mubarak could not stem the spreading protest, nor would protesters relent. Everything he tried, all the ruses, pandering, violence, and appeals, failed. Mubarak cut off cell phone service and the Internet, but the protests continued a cappella when the music stopped. They even multiplied: cut off from the digital world, protesters headed for the squares.
Wael Ghonim, kidnapped and held for days blindfolded, returned to enrapture throngs and energize millions of Egyptians. During a tearful television interview Ghonim apologized to parents for the deaths of their children in the square. Egyptians learned then that Ghonim was in fact El Shaheed. Television began to sway toward the protesters. Hugely popular news anchors Shahira Amin, Soha al-Naqqash, and others walked off sets rather than lie on demand.
The sympathies of any still-quiet Cairenes for Hosni Mubarak faded. Mubarak sent thousands of plainclothes security men to beat, shoot, and crush the protesters. Bloodied but persisting, protesters multiplied in march after march that stymied Cairo. Marches after prayers went from five thousand to forty thousand within blocks. The regime seemed unaware of the lessons learned by brutal Rome two thousand years earlier—perhaps even at Egypt’s expense. “Repeated punishment,” Seneca wrote to Nero in De Clementia, “while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all.”
Tear gas blanketed cities. Parties and individuals once on the sidelines joined in, seeing history in the making and not wanting to be on its wrong side. The Muslim Brotherhood brought its thousands and its discipline to the fray. Mohamed ElBaradei, late to support the protests with a tweet that made him sound a little like the Doonesbury character Roland Hedley (“Fully support call 4 peaceful demonstrations vs. repression”), was dutifully anointed by water cannon, captured for news cameras as a result of planning between protesters and the press. Fifty thousand blockaded a highway and provincial government building in Tanta; twenty-five thousand did the same thing in Kafr el-Dawwar. And the ruling party headquarters burned—most spectacularly in Cairo.
“The situation here is beyond belief,” transcripts from Alexandria police communications show. “We are still engaging very large numbers coming from both directions! We need more gas!” In town after town, police stations, provincial government buildings, and party headquarters were being surrounded, torched, and burned to the ground. In all, ninety-nine police stations and three thousand police vehicles were destroyed.
All this compressed into eighteen days.
Police fought with live rounds, bricks, whips, and pipes, but were encumbered by crowds so dense officers could not maneuver. Protesters stayed calm and resisted “eye-for-an-eye” violence. “No Stones! No Stones!” was a frequent cheer. Battles took shape that will now be forever part of the Egyptian memory. On the Qasr al-Nil Bridge police sought to keep surging crowds away from Tahrir. In Matariya Square in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis crowds from several neighborhoods struggled to breech police lines and became an unstoppable human mass; fifteen protesters died.
One night, Mubarak in a feint withdrew security and sent in his paid looters to refresh the imagination and fear of Cairenes—then brought in his “community safety patrols” to beat activists. The theater of lies was spectacular, inventive, and deadly.
Mubarak’s promises of reform and his efforts to divide and conquer by concessions here and there were nothing against the single-minded vision that soon emerged to bind them all: Mubarak must go. That was it: one vision compressed to one demand. “The people … want … to overthrow the regime!”
With a single demand binding all, no negotiation was possible. With no obvious leaders but millions in the streets, any effort to fracture and deal with one group would be tweeted to “trending” in moments; none could possibly tamp this down. With millions activated by deep passion and mobilized around a single goal, it was a fire that would burn until all fuel was gone—or Mubarak left, whichever happened first.
With no political solution possible, the police battled. Outnumbered by a million, in pitched battles ten thousand at a time, the solution came only when the military said, as so many Egyptians already had, “Enough.”
In Washington the events staggered the Obama White House. In Cairo in 2009, President Obama had promised the people of Arabia a new day. That day was now, but America was caught flat-footed. Mubarak the oppressor was also Mubarak the stalwart ally. Even on January 25 itself, the American secretary of state declared the Egyptian regime “stable.” Egyptians in the streets missed that memo.
Obama finally told Mubarak, “Change is needed now.”
“ ‘Now,’ ” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s spokesperson, explained, “means ‘yesterday.’ ”
Even if Mubarak played hard to get, Egyptian armed forces chief of staff Lieutenant General Sami Hafez Enan, on a long-planned visit to Washington, got the picture. With $1.3 billion in US military aid at stake, and perhaps less than certain about all those lieutenants and captains the generals left back in Cairo sitting in tanks, the delegation caught the first flight home. The generals were among Egypt’s wealthy few; the army’s middle ranks knew the pressures of the middle class. Those tank turrets were built to swivel.
THE FACEBOOK REVOLUTION? It is said that Egypt’s was the first Facebook revolution. Wael Ghonim called it Revolution 2.0.
“I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him,” Ghonim told CNN. “This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet.”
We cannot know for certain what this means; history is not yet finished. We can say that worlds clashed between tradition and bureaucracy, netizen and citizen, Facebook and state-controlled television and newspapers. Social media was no doubt a rallier, a force multiplier, and an echo chamber. Between tweets and al-Jazeera with forty million viewers, information was not hard to find, whatever efforts were made to suppress it.
Alya El Hosseiny, a twenty-one-year-old Egyptian student who as @alya1989262 sent the first tweet using the #Jan25 hashtag, told Twitter’s own “Hope 140 Blog” that Twitter kept Cairo current on news from Tunisia even with a general media blackout.
#Tunisia and #sidibouzid hashtags allowed us to follow the events for the whole month beforehand. January 14 [the day Ben Ali fled Tunisia] was the day we started believing in January 25.
But much hard work went on without tweets, shares, and likes—because those platforms were soon penetrated and manipulated by security forces. On the third day of demonstrations an elaborate twenty-six-page paper manual circulated widely showing where to form up, how to deploy, what to wear, and tactics to use. Above all, it warned, stay off Twitter or Facebook: “They are monitored by the Ministry of the Interior. Distribute by e-mail or printing or photocopying, especially if you own an office or store.”
These commercial social web platforms—corporately owned, without passion or accountability—proved dangerous. Anyone—state security or netizen—could operate on the Facebook and Twitter platforms. State security gamed Facebook’s Terms of Service, flagging partisan content as offensive and triggering automatic removals, which employees at Facebook would take weeks to review. Facebook’s Terms of Service forced page creators like El Shaheed to own up to his true identity—a revelation not especially conducive to staying out of the clutches of the state. Even before January 25 Wael Ghonim had to hand off “We Are All Khaled Sa’id” to a compadre who, safe on American soil, could own it in her real name. Ghonim remained anonymous and protected by “special arrangement” with Facebook. That’s no way to run a revolution.
With the downfall of Mubarak, and the promise of a new day for Egypt, Facebook use soared by five thousand new accounts daily. In Saudi Arabia, still awaiting its “spring,” web denizens grew wiser: Facebook use plunged by 25 percent over the same period.
Behind the worlds of both tradition and bureaucracy, of netizen and Facebook and Twitter, were people riven with fear, possessed of aspirations, some wishing for a future much like yesterday, others desperate to make tomorrow different at any cost.
From them arose leaders by the thousands in seconds. This was no “leaderless” revolution. But the digital world gave mass to a multiplicity of leaders, all carrying light armament like smart phones, using platforms like Facebook, quick to find and message networks of networks, a consistent vision moving all to action: “The people … want … to overthrow the regime!”
Traditional leaders like Mubarak were too slow to grasp this digital wave. ElBaradei struggled to be seen through the millions of texts; not being part of the digital wave, it is impossible to understand it.
New leaders like Wael Ghonim popped up however reluctantly, anointed by al-Jazeera and mainstream media searching for figureheads. Some new leaders were durable; some receded. Though only a few would step forward, setting themselves ablaze, someone else pops up on YouTube and says, “People, have some shame. I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square and I will stand alone, and I’ll hold up a banner. Perhaps people will show some honor….” And millions did.
This is the new leadership, where retweets and page views count, where “shares” and “likes” count. In the networked world, everybody gets social media, good guys and bad. Digital and kinetic collide. Best practice, if there is one, is never to repeat what you did yesterday, but constantly reinvent your digital moves: yesterday’s “hacks” can get you killed.
We can say that the day of the great autocrats is imperiled—whether they are men and women in government, or in industry, or even in our communities and families. The networked world creates too much visibility for such tyrannies to go on without questioning.
Few are prepared for this sometimes blinding light. In Egypt, society soon began its jagged new march toward healing, restoring the rule of law, and rebuilding civic institutions that Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak had each in turn eviscerated. That is the hard march to a nation of laws, perhaps the greatest collaboration of all, given name by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
In May 2011, crime waves swept Egypt. With their station houses destroyed and their leaders in prison, the police were standing down. The situation was at once worse and better than imagined. Worse because having maintained order by brute force for many years, the police were at a loss to understand the new demands of civil policing. What laws should they enforce, and how? Better because both the police and Egyptian society were confused and conflicted about the role of policing—and in their crisis perhaps available for change. As the Egyptian military slipped in to fill the void and signaled a worrisome return to the “bad old days” of just months earlier, would new police leadership emerge to rebuild policing in Egypt, not as a cornerstone of repression but as a guarantor of freedom? What will become of the Arab Spring?
We cannot say for sure. But the basis for collaboration is there. “What pace the political summer may keep with the natural,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “no human foresight can determine. It is, however, not difficult to perceive that the spring is begun. Thus wishing, as I sincerely do, freedom and happiness to all nations, I close …”