I left you with a point in the previous article: it is unlikely that the Internet will lead to liberation – or oppression – all around the globe, just because of its inherent features. What usage of the Internet can do is change the face of political protest. Having access to a fundamentally new tool, protesters can now change the rules of the game, employing tactics that would be infeasible before. The technical term for these is ‘technological affordances’: tactics, such as flash mobs or the live-streaming of protests, which are made possible by the features of the Internet.
Of course, all this does not necessarily mean that protest movements will always be more efficient if they use the web. Regimes may also use the Internet to their advantage at times of unrest, or protesters may simply become too reliant on it, losing all sense of direction if they ever lose access to it. To recap from the previous article: it is not about what the Internet does to protesters, it is about what protesters do with the Internet.
Iranian Protesters, back in 2009
Until recently, much of the real-life evidence was discouraging from the point of view of protesters. Perhaps the best example we had to work with was Iran in 2009: protests against the incumbent regime, oppositional forces using the Internet to communicate and organise protests… yet you may remember that the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ ultimately failed to reach its goals. Well, several reasons were put forward for this failure: those protesters who used the Internet were too few and too disconnected from the rest of society to make a difference. Furthermore, many of the country’s Internet activists seemed to prefer working as part of leaderless groups, which made it very hard for them to fight coherently. As protest academics so often point out, organisations with ambitious goals need a strong leadership if they are to achieve success. Iran’s cyber-protesters, it seemed, were too few, too disorganised, too removed from society at large. And when the regime – perhaps as a public reminder that it is governments who control the web – shut off the country’s access to major Internet sites, the protest movement faded into irrelevance.
New examples from the Arab uprisings
Writing in late 2013, on the wake of the revolutions that still shake much of the Arab world, things look much different. Here, and particularly in the case of Egypt, protesters seemed to learn from previous mistakes and used technology to gain a real competitive advantage against the regime. The four weaknesses that had led to failure in Iran – a small movement, with no clear leaders, too disconnected from civil society, and an asphyxiating Internet blackout – were avoided by Egyptian revolutionaries, and this led to their ultimate victory against Hosni Mubarak in early 2011.
Egypt’s Internet community, much like Iran’s, was still tiny by Western standards. But this did not matter too much, because Internet users were the first ones to take to the streets, and did so in larger numbers than many other sectors of society. In other words, they played a disproportionately large role during the initial stages of the revolution, even if they were few (this finding comes from a fascinating article by Zeynep Tufekci). Furthermore, these people were neither inexperienced nor leaderless. There is evidence that key political activists such as Ahmed Maher or Mustafa al-Naggar, who had a great deal of experience combating the regime, were responsible for designing and co-ordinating key actions during the revolution. These leaders or ideologues made sure to keep Internet users closely connected to the rest of the protesters, uniting them to a broad coalition that also included trade unionists, Islamists and football hooligans, among others. Therefore, this was an online movement that was small but punched above its weight, was well co-ordinated, and worked closely with non-Internet users.
The Power of Blackouts
In an implicit acknowledgement of the power of online dissidents, the Mubarak regime completely cut off the country’s Internet connection for five days beginning on the night of the 27th of January, 2011. The government realised that it was losing the ‘Internet game’, and therefore decided to bring it to an end. This was a bold and unexpected move, one that would expect to throw the movement into confusion. And yet it did not: within two weeks, and despite the blackout, Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign by an overwhelming social coalition.
Egypt’s Internet networks shut off on the night of the 27th of January. Graph produced by Renesys
The Internet blackout failed, and many have extracted conclusions out of this failure. The most common claim is that the blackout showed the limited importance of the Internet. After all, if Mubarak was overthrown despite this blackout, surely the Internet was never essential? From my point of view, the main reason why the blackout failed is that it was implemented too late, when protests had already metastasised and the Internet had lost importance in favour of the streets. If an Internet blackout like this is to succeed, then the regime would have to implement it as soon as possible, so as to disrupt the initial stages of protest. And the question then is whether this is at all possible.
Think of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, which ousted their respective leaders within less than one month. Or the protests we saw more recently in places like Spain, the USA or Israel, all of which went through the traditional stages of uprising, from planning to occupation of public spaces, over just a few weeks. When used effectively, the Internet allows protesters to work faster, and regimes can be faced with formidable opposition fronts even if just some weeks earlier they appeared to be stable. Shutting off the country’s Internet connection may have worked for the Mubarak regime in Egypt had they done it earlier than they did. But just a few days before, not even the dissidents themselves believed that a revolution would be possible. The rapid evolution of this Internet-aided uprising caught everyone by surprise, and Hosni Mubarak was simply overwhelmed by this dynamic process. I guess at the end of the day that is the power of the Internet. A movement that counts on the support of a well-led, well-connected group of online activists can speed up the traditional process of an uprising, making it hard for governments to assess the situation. Of course regimes still have a lot of power here. But if the Arab uprisings are anything to go by, things can change very quickly, very unexpectedly, and catch even the most stable governments off-guard.
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