Part
3
During the initial upsurge of
enthusiasm about the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions, observers noted
how effectively social media had been used as an organizing tool by
young activists. While it would be overstating the case to attribute
the revolutions themselves to social media (as some of the more
breathless analyses did at the time), the impact that online social
networks, cellphones, and new satellite television stations had on
mobilizing and informing people in these societies was undeniable.
The idea of young people using social media to topple dictatorships
played into the narrative of “tech-utopianism,” still in vogue at
the time, stimulating the idea that future political changes might be
organized from below through the liberating power of the internet.
The grim years that followed
the initial uprisings have mostly dispelled this narrative. While
liberal activists were adept at organizing online, so were political
Islamists and jihadist groups. These groups were better funded,
better organized, and already had experience operating clandestinely
– using the latest technologies for propaganda, recruitment, and
networking. Over time, it would be Islamist groups like the Muslim
Brotherhood, as well as jihadists, that moved into the vanguard of
the revolutions, pushing aside the liberal activists who had
initially captured the world’s imagination.
“Digital World War” is an
analysis of how opposition movements, and Islamists in particular,
have used social media as a tool of waging war against established
governments. Haroon Ullah is a former State Department official and
expert on Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami movement. Unlike
Patrikarikos’s book, “Digital World War” is a staid academic
analysis of how social media and other new technologies are altering
the dynamics between central governments and opposition movements,
both Islamist and liberal. But Ullah’s work also addresses the crux
of how social media is upending the traditional power dynamics
governing war and politics.
Perhaps the most destabilizing
aspect of new technologies is the way that they have potentially
supercharged the speed of political change. Youth-led revolutions in
Egypt and Tunisia began and ended within a matter of weeks, toppling
governments that had been in place for decades. Although both
countries had suffered from long-standing structural problems, the
sparks for both uprisings were lit over individual outrages –
corruption and police brutality – that were spread and rapidly
popularized over social media. Though many bystanders later joined
the protests for other reasons, the speed and scale with which people
initially organized would have been impossible in an era before
cellphones and the internet.
The very speed of these
movements, however, made it hard to build a sustainable order out of
the collapse of the old regimes. While it was true that online
mobilization played a role in toppling both Egyptian strongman Hosni
Mubarak and Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, it also
allowed little time for real leaders to emerge or for political
platforms to be agreed upon. While the people who went into the
streets were united in their indignation over injustice and their
opposition to the old order, they had very different ideas about the
future of their countries. When the regimes collapsed, the only
parties established enough to take advantage were those aligned with
the long-suppressed Muslim Brotherhood.
“It was not a matter of
Islam being some defining feature of Tunisian identity — despite
the Islamists claims,” Ullah writes, regarding the Tunisian
revolution and the subsequent election of the liberal Islamist party
Ennahda, “Rather, the victory was the natural outcome of the
inevitable schism between the nature of the revolution and the
readiness of the Islamists for power.”
Social media is not the first
information technology that has had helped galvanize revolutionary
change. Radio, telegraph, and even the printing press all helped
precipitate major socio-political transformations in the past, the
latter famously helping enable the Christian Reformation.
More recently, the groundwork
for the 1979 Iranian Revolution was laid with the help of a
relatively new technology: Popular speeches by the revolution’s
leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were recorded and copied onto
cassette tapes, which were then rapidly replicated and distributed.
Unlike social media movements that can close the cycle between
outrage and protest to a matter of days, however, it took Khomeini
years of painstaking media work to help build mass support for an
opposition movement in Iran. By the time the that Iranians finally
went into the streets against the Shah – motivated by many
different ideological currents – Khomeini was a well-known and
popular spiritual leader within the opposition. When the monarchy
fell, he was well-placed to marginalize his ideological rivals and
consolidate clerical power over the country.
The difference between Iran’s
uprising and the leaderless revolutions of today is vast and points
to one of the major pitfalls of internet activism. Online organizing
and propaganda can be legitimately useful for destabilizing regimes,
especially rigidly authoritarian ones that need to strictly control
the flow of information. But because of the speed with which it can
precipitate change, it is less useful for building up the networks
and organizations needed to fill the gap created when old governments
actually fall.
“When there is no single
leader to focus a political movement — Khomeini, Mandela, Lenin —
there may be more and faster revolutions than previously, but there
are fewer revolutionary outcomes and scenarios,” Ullah writes.
“So when a dictatorship – by definition and decree the sole
and strongest institution in a country — is deposed by
insurrections like the Arab Spring, what comes into the place of the
power vacuum is not dictated by those who have created it.”
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