Web 2.0 and Authoritarianism: Orwell Had it Backwards

My post yesterday about the fact that the Egyptian military cadets versus police clash noted that despite the fact that the government had banned not only the official media but Egypt's increasingly vocal independent newspapers from reporting on it (you can't report on anything involving the Army without crossing into taboo territory), you could watch a whole series of cell phone videos online within a couple of days of the events, leads me to reflect on the role that the information revolution has played in democratization movements. If the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the revolution wrought by audio tapes and the August 1991 Soviet coup/countercoup was the first E-mail revolution, the "color revolutions" in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan and the "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon were the first real Web 2.0 Revolutions. But the new political ferment is finding whole new avenues for organization: the revolutions to come will not only be televised: they'll be organized on Facebook, documented on YouTube and reported on Twitter. If the American Revolution were to occur today, Tom Paine would probably be a blogger or a podcaster or both. It's the new pamphleteering.

It's not as outrageous as it sounds. Last year during the labor troubles in the big Egyptian textile center of Al-Mahalla al-Kubra (a major city whose name literally just means "big place," but which is Egypt's cotton heartland), a Berkeley graduate student named James Karl Buck was arrested. With the government limiting contact between Mahalla and Cairo, he simply sent a one-word "tweet" to Twitter on his cellphone: "Arrested." Here's one account of the story. Once Berkeley and the US Embassy knew an American was in custody, moves were set in motion to get him out. Of course, a lot of people are arrested in a lot of places who don't have a friendly consulate they can text to, but even so they can get information out, as those videos I linked to already of the Army-police clash indicate. During the 2005 Presidential elections some underground video of polling place shenanigans turned up on Egyptian opposition websites: the security types just aren't tech-savvy enough to check cellphones.

Let me emphasize that while this works in Egypt, a country with significant international trade and communications links and an educated, tech-savvy and cellphone equipped middle class, it doesn't work everywhere. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, if you owned a typewriter you were required to register its keys with the police. Burma and North Korea do not seem to post to YouTube. But if you choose to block out the information age, you also cut yourself off from the global economy, and only a few hermit states like Burma and North Korea will choose to do so. Egypt is not a totalitarian society; it's authoritarian to be sure, and as the regime's arteries harden, it is often heavy-handed, but it has an independent press (though as seen here, it can't report certain stories), a traditionally independent judiciary (though fighting hard to remain so), and a people who've been dealing with would-be pharaohs since, well, the pharaohs, and have developed a wry sense of humor about governance. I have plenty of qualms about Egypt's regime, but great faith in its people. The fact that Husni Mubarak is not Saddam Hussein or even Bashar al-Asad means that, for all the regime's faults, there is an openness there, though tempered with a heavy-handed security regime.

The information revolution seems to have taken hold pretty well in Egypt, and while I haven't visited for a while it seems to have a lively Internet culture, tempered as usual with the occasional arrest of controversial bloggers. There's a real trade-off between Internet censorship and global commerce, and except for a few select cases of arrested bloggers, Egypt seems to have opted for the commerce side of the equation. China and Saudi Arabia have worked hard to control Internet access without impeding commerce: it hasn't always worked. Technology clearly is undermining authoritarianism. The idea that barring the independent newspapers from reporting the Army-police story will work is a sign that the security services just don't get it yet. But if the security services are behind the curve, the young hackers will really give them a run for their money.

And thus my title: Orwell got it backwards. In 1984 technology was the tool of the state in controlling the populace: viewscreens everywhere, everyone is constantly watched, Big Brother is constantly present. But technology went the other way: we can watch government. Google Earth shows us aerial views of just about everywhere (though someday I do want to blog on the strangely blurry imagery of Israeli Air Bases while you can identify aircraft types on Egyptian and Syrian air bases); government publications are available at the click of a mouse, and when the government — any government — does something out of bounds, cellphone video is all over the world in a minute. [As an aside, during the real, not fictional, 1984, I happened to be in Cairo on the night of the US Presidential election — Reagan-Mondale — and attended a party at the Nile Hilton of US expatriate types and a lot of young Egyptians. The Americans looked normal; the Egyptians were wearing straw hats with red, white and blue decor and were far more enthusiastic about the results coming in (in the wee small hours due to the time difference, though of course there wasn't a lot of suspense in the Reagan-Mondale race) than the Americans. Looking back, that may have been my single most Orwellian experience in the real calendar 1984.]

And, as I noted the other day in my "Mukhabarat 2.0?" post, young web-savvy Egyptians are not afraid to parody their security services. If democracy breaks out in the Arab world it will not be due to neoconservative preaching, altruistic evangelization, or patronizing neocolonial paternalism, it will come because the people have gained instruments that outmaneuver, undermine, or leapfrog over the walls the governments have built. It may not look like the American system, or the Westminster system, or even the French system, but technology is increasingly empowering people.

Okay, Egypt has taken a few hits here in recent days, so let me say something positive: if indeed Gamal Mubarak is going to be the next President of Egypt, he is at least Western educated (AUC), worked in the West (banker for a US bank in London), is a free-marketeer and, so far as I can tell, understands both globalization and the information age. I'm not a fan of hereditary monarchies, but his background and environment are very different from his father's. Of the various potential candidates within the government elite, he's probably a lot more of a free-market man than the various generals, party functionaries and security men otherwise in the picture. He would, I think, understand the lessons of those videos above, and perhaps move to restrain the security state, though I doubt he would end it.

Gamal is not, so far as I know, particularly committed to democratic reforms; odd how if you get your job because you succeed your father you may not see the advantages of electoral democracy. But open economies often lead to open societies (look at the changes in Taiwan and South Korea), though not invariably (China and Singapore). And he does seem to be the advocate of a more open economy. Perhaps I'm grasping at straws, looking for good points.