There is supposed to be something of an Internet revolution going on right now in Egypt, but have you noticed that the Internet isn’t directly involved? Oh there’s plenty of Twittering going-on, but it is all about the demonstrations and civil unrest in Cairo — not from those crowds. The Internet was turned off, you say, along with the mobile phone networks, but that misses my point. I think the Internet component of this social movement is being overblown. While it may be easy for a reporter to say that the Internet or texting or Facebook or Twitter is at the heart of what appears to be a multinational revolutionary juggernaut, I don’t think that’s true. I think it was just ready to happen.
What’s taking place right now is very similar to the Revolution of 1848 and there was no Internet for that one.
Beginning in France, 1848 saw a social revolution sweep across much of Europe, toppling most governments of the time. Monarchies and ministers alike fell with some like Metternich of Austria having been in power as long as Mubarak has been in Egypt. Yet there was no Twitter in Vienna in 1848. No telephone (that was 30 years away), no telegraph (invented in 1844 but not yet deployed in Central Europe), railroads were just beginning to be built, and even Reuters’ carrier pigeons were a dozen years in the future. All communication other than oratory or theater was written in 1848 and went the slow way, by ship, horse, or foot. And yet, in a single year, nearly the entire continent saw revolutionary change.
The simple explanation for 1848 was that people had been unhappy for a long time and were ready for a change. They were angry and the power brokers of the time like Metternich were old, fat, and too used to power. Doesn’t that sound like much of the Middle East today? These nations have old leaders, rigid bureaucracies, and very young populations that don’t really know what they have to gain or lose, but just want something different.
So Tunisia fell and then maybe Egypt. The King of Jordan fired his cabinet, trying to look like part of the solution, not the problem. It will be interesting to see if that works. And did you read Colonel Gaddafi’s lament for the passing of the Tunisian dictator on his flank? I knew Gaddafi in the 70s and his sentiments weren’t for Tunisia but for himself.
The literal old man of the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, where the royal succession is from brother-to-brother — a system that literally can’t continue with the youngest son of the country’s founder, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, now 67 years old. It will be interesting to see if the cousins are able to work that one out. I have my doubts.
Technology will play a role in all this, of course, but revolutions are conducted by people, not electrons, and even Twitter is just a tool.
very good point!
by people NOT by electrons – internet is just a TOOL!
I read somewhere that the spark that set off the revolt was the food shortages. People can suffer through a lot of things, but force them to go hungry, and you have let loose a raging inferno.
Lots of countries have hungry people that aren’t revolting against their government.
Not the point, which is that the food riots exists because these are *newly hungry* people; people who had known, at least, that their government/society/economy would get them fed. The sub-Saharan starving have always (in recent memory) been so. There was some, not a lot, of reporting of CIA analysis that the collapse of the Soviet Union wasn’t because Ronnie outspent them, but a series of wheat crop failures. Make more sense, seeing that happen again.
Was this the same CIA that put [insert dictator/terrorist organization here] into [insert pawn between USSR and USA here]? Does Russia or the US have any significant interest in Egypt now, or will Egyptians be defining their own future this round?
All Egypt has is lots of sand and a canal. No oil. Saudis have been giving them welfare for decades. Were it not for that, Egypt would be irrelevant. Not even sure how relevant the canal is now, given pipelines and really, really big tankers.
The canal is important. The world has lived without it. If it were to close again, it would be an economic inconvenience.
The other comment is more important — Egypt’s relevance. There are too many countries in the world that are not economically self sufficient. There must be a way to revitalize there economies. It would be in the worlds best interest to do so.
Do you see any parallels between the Middle East today and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s? The Soviets were ruled by old men and bloated bureaucracies, and all the various dictatorships were swept away in a short time. But the results don’t seem to have been as beneficial to the general population as in Western Europe. Which outcome is more likely in the Middle East, France, or the Russian Federation?
I think itis precisely analogous, which is how these things happen so fast. It can take 30 years to be an overnight sensation, even as a revolutionary.
And we can hope America follows suit soon.
I doubt it. The capitalist regime in the US likes to feed its population to the point of sluggish obesity.
sluggish of both body and mind, remember which sort of politician they support. I wonder what they’ll do now that Bloomberg has outlawed smoking outdoors. That bloody Socialist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Send the Montana Militia after him for a Second Amendment Solution?
Actually this may be the case, despite the blatant overfeeding . . . the oil rich “arc of instability” is to us what Eastern Europe was to the USSR.
Come to think of it, I believe the current number of Americans on food stamps exceeds 40 million (like 1 in 8).
Pipe dreams, with all due respect.
I’m Romanian and pretty much everyone in Eastern Europe realized in the end that our so-called revolutions were in fact black ops conducted by the KGB (all governments were formed by 2nd tier commies (cough, socialists)).
There’s no such thing as revolution in the Middle East. Despite all the “let democracy ring and/or evil, murderous Mubarak”-nonsense in Amerikan media, these movements are nothing less than a calculated remap of the force balance in that region.
P.S. how did you like the pinkies demonstrating along muslim brohood? I have to admit, there’s nothing in this world more refreshing than a bunch of useful idiots.
>Which outcome is more likely in the Middle East, France, or the Russian Federation?
Bear in mind that the 1848 revolution didn’t directly lead to modern France. The Second Empire may have introduced some democratic reforms, but was still fundamentally a strongman state. Arguably it had a lot more in common with the current Russian Federation than modern France – at least that’s my impression though I’m only passingly familiar with the period. These things take time, often generations, to play out.
Simon Hibbs
Although there are many similarities between the Fall of the soviet union and what’s happening on south of the Mediterranean I can’t really agree with bloated bureaucracies being one.
Sure, Egypt, Tunisia and many other Arabic countries have bureaucratic problems, mostly related to corruption, inefficiency and cleptocracy. But in itself the problem (from the viewpoint of those that are hitting the streets) is that they do not get enough bureaucracy. They are not getting an functioning administrative system (slow or fast, bloated or lenient), which would cater to their needs and function according to laws and regulations.
Interestingly, a point which is often missed when pundits decry corrupt bureaucracies is that corruption is an unavoidable effect of an understaffed bureaucracy. When queues grow intolerable there will always be some, who will lubricate their case’s advancement, just as there are some who will accept the lubrication (bureaucratic staffing shortages often coincide with low remuneration). Thus the vicious cycle is a fact, and the individual getting the worst deal in such a system is always the one who has no lubricant.
On the other hand well staffed and remunerated bureaucracies are a very good shielding against corruption – something many opinion-shapers seem to miss.
— something many opinion-shapers seem to miss.
something many opinion-shapers prefer to miss.
Good article on this by Canadian political/military analyst Gwynne Dyer: http://straight.com/article-371096/vancouver/gwynne-dyer-current-protests-arab-world-reminiscent-1989
If it’s not the internet that caused it, it must be that thing that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan described in Africa in 1960:
“The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”
Unfortunately the wind of change is now more famous as the title of one of the most irritating power ballads ever, from the Scorpions. I have to hear it over and over again here in Germany every year on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.
The best example of political evolution sits on the other end of Africa. Egypt needs a better government. Egypt deserves more economic opportunities. I can safely say the vast majority of the “West” wishes only better things for the people of Egypt. The problem with revolutions is they can cause one government to be replaced by a worse one, they can do more economic harm than good. I hope the next leaders of Egypt will learn from South Africa. Start with forgiveness. Put aside anger and hatred. When you do this, it is easier for everyone to work together. It will be easier to achieve the improvements the people of Egypt deserve.
I think that the digital media already had an unstoppable effect before the Egyptian authorities switched it off. If a million people text or tweet that Mubarak is an as–ole, it’s impossible to arrest even a small fraction of them them when it’s hard enough to even find out who they are.
It’s not just the latest technology that undermines regimes. Around the same time as Mubarak cut off the internet he shut down Al Jazeera’s Cairo office but it was too late because they had been broadcasting alternative information from their satellite into Egyptian homes for years.
I remember that even satellite phones were influencing public opinion around ten years ago when Indonesia was oppressing the population of East Timor. The regime had started the process of carrying out a genocide like it had done in the 1970’s, but this time journalists and locals were immediately able to contact the media worldwide. As a result the western governments were forced to put pressure on the Indonesian regime which they had armed, and eventually East Timor even became independent.
Next up: China.
I’ve spent time there… it’s a very different culture from Egypt – you don’t have a bunch of 25-year old men who are angry & ready for revolution, but mark my words, the younger Chinese people want to be part of the “hip” western world, not part of the stodgy old communist-capitalist “militocracy”.
Of course, the geography works in the favor of the Chinese government – even though the population is larger in China (compared to Egypt), it’s not as concentrated. But the younger Chinese people know that they can rise up & protest, and it will be covered on the world stage. Much harder to crack down on protesters these days with cameras & YouTube filmers around every corner.
Interesting times.
@Julia
Next up USA!
That’s what the Tea party was about!
… and once in office, the TEA candidates either go to loony bombthrowers (Bachmann) or start to slow down and get stale in the process of trying to broker deals.
hmmm, broker deals, where was that in the speeches?
face it, power absolutely corrupts. one snake, two snakes, blue snake, red snakes. they’re still all snakes 😉
And that is why I’ll be voting for the Libertarians. At least I know upfront that they are completely nuts 🙂
Close, but not quite: China, while having a seriously repressive regime, and having millions of people at or near starvation in the western regions, is facing an even bigger problem: the one child policy, which is why they’ve started to relax it a bit. Unfortunately, it may already be too late. Why? Too many male children, not near enough potential wives and girlfriends. Perhaps as many as 100,000,000 more male children than female. That’s a whole lot of sexual frustration that hasn’t yet come to fruition.
Don’t forget Malthus: there comes a point where too many people is just too many people. As we speak, labour productivity in capitalism reaches new heights, yet wage incomes continue to fall. There is no “theory of distribution” in neo-con capitalism to deliver this productivity gain to support a growing population. This is the reason that China exports the vast majority of its widgets: the vast majority of the population receives so little of the productivity that it can’t buy the stuff. Henry Ford, a raving Fascist, understood the problem, and raised his workers wages. That is a true fact. Today’s neo-cons prefer to ignore real history, and relate to fictional history.
Thanks to the rapidly expanding and modernising economy, most Chinese people have very little reason to rise up. The exception is with the regional minorities, but those pose no threat to the core political system.
Now if the Chinese economy hits the skids, all bets are off.
There is not much “Chinese economy”; it exports to *smaller* markets here and in Europe. Note: the heyday of Jolly Ole England was when it exported its manufactures to *larger* markets. The Great Recession forced the Chinese Government into “socialist redistribution” schemes in order to absorb even a fraction of output.
Really. A couple of years back I looked into this. Chinese exports in 2008 (2007 data) broke down as follows: a bit under 20% to the US, a bit over 20% to the EU and around 60% to the rest of the world. At the time most analysts were saying exports were 40% of Chinese GDP, but that number now seems too high, the more probable number being around 30%. China was clocking 12% GDP growth in 2008. On that basis, even if exports to the US were to drop to zero, China could still have posted a 2% GDP growth. Actually what happened when the recession hit was exports to both the US and Europe fell by 1/3. And China still posted an 8% GDP growth overall. So a 12% drop in total exports resulted in 4% drop in the GDP growth rate from 12% to 8%. This corroborates the ballpark figure of exports accounting for 30% of Chinese GDP.
Other factors to look at for the size of the Chinese economy: Steel Production is 10 fold US output. Cement production is also about 10 fold US output. Most of each are consumed in China, not exported. Domestic energy consumption also exceeds the domestic energy consumption of the US. Autos, in 2008 about the same number of autos sold domestically as the US. 2009 about 1.4 times. 2010 about 1.7 times (18 million vehicles).
All of your numbers make the case: thanks to China, the collapse of Western civilization happens sooner rather than later, due to China’s sucking up of the last morsel of needed natural resources. We would have been better off with an agrarian China such as Mao envisaged. Anyone with a 2 year old: you’ve condemned them to a pitiful future.
Much easier than one might think … as China heavily filters the Internet into, within, and outside of its territories. The overwhelming and vast majority of young Chinese people cannot recognize the photo, which we consider iconic, of the young man standing in front of the line of tanks in Tienanmen Square. The young people of China almost uniformly will tell you that the rioters in Tienanmen Square where criminals, thieves, and thugs. China has a collectivist culture where they are more likely want to fit in than to stick out. The next Chinese revolution will happen because the Chinese leaders want it to occur.
“The literal old man of the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, where the royal succession is from brother-to-brother — a system that literally can’t continue”
This bothers me. The very few Saudis that are somewhat favorable to the US are the ones in charge. A regime change in Saudi Arabia will cause a crisis for the US and the region as a whole.
One can say pretty much exactly the same about Egypt.
I don’t think so. Egypt is a lot more secular than Saudi Arabia and the dominant forms of Islam there are a lot more moderate. Even the Muslim Brotherhood is a very broad based organisation and it would be a mistake to treat it as hostile – that would only force it into an adversarial position WRT the west and that doesn’t have to happen.
Simon Hibbs
The web may not be playing a big role in Egypt now, but it certainly helped to heat up the pot for a few years beforehand.
I would agree with Cringely that Twitter was not *it*. Maybe 5-10% od a catalyst.
Hunger, oppression, feelings of helplessness etc bond much more deeply over time than a years worth of tweets.
We in the western world need to stop thinking technology is *the answer* to everything. I seem to remember an article in Wired where the author claimed one half of the worlds population had to make, or receive a telephone call.
Well, the spark came from Tunisia. And the match that lit Tunisia came from Wikileaks. And Wikileaks is most assuredly a product of modern technology. I fear the mainstream media is pushing the Twitter/Facebook meme to hide the influence of Wikileaks. J. Assange has made a point of his ability to bring down governments, as he did a while ago elsewhere in Africa. HE certainly knows what he is doing, if the MSM doesn’t.
https://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/hbd-human-biodiversity/why-we-should-end-foreign-aid/
Rather long article but the conclusion sums it up nicely: “Aside from the injustice of forcibly taking Americans’ hard-earned money for causes they themselves might not choose to support, we have another reason for ending foreign aid: it causes more harm than good.” To that I would add the same might be said about domestic aid.
Bob,
You’re right that this is happening because it was just ready to happen. However, I think you’re overlooking the Internet’s role in making it ready to happen. The Internet has made people more aware of what goes on throughout the world than they ever have been before. The young people of Egypt have more exposure to western culture than they previously did in history. Perhaps they took a look around and decided they were tired of living in a third world dictatorship. Without the Internet, they may not have been aware of the alternatives.
Or radio, or television, or movies … as you look at the pictures of even the poorer neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria one cannot fail but notice the number of small aperature satellite antennas there are on the outsides of apartment buidlings. Cell phones are more ubiqutous than personal computers. It’s less about The Internet, in particular, than it is about mass communication – texting, television, telephone, and talk.
I’ve argued for some time, and then I found the writings of Nick Carr which sent my dream of a juicy book deal up the pipe, that the Internet (in the form of blogs as this, and such) has quite the opposite effect, on the whole. What Internet does is disperse discontent into little, teeny, tiny silos. Millions of angry voices screaming into /dev/null. That’s what the Internet does.
Millions of voices screaming down thousands of pipes disperses the force, having the effect of pouring all that data into /dev/null — not quite the same thing, but has the same effect.
And, yes, I concur that the Internet is a dispersing agent: millions of Facebook pages … millions of tweets … millions of blogs … it’s like taking the force of Niagara Falls and pouring all of that force onto millions of front lawns, one lawn sprinkler at a time — lots of water, but no force or concentration, and no one really notices where the droplets are coming from.
Even if the millions of voices are not focused in the same direction, they could form a sort of swarm intelligence that could unconsciously self-organise without any central control, because they are driven by a common goal.
And even if you reject this swarm theory, the millions of particles (to use your water analogy) can behave unexpectedly when they are all flowing together. I once heard that even though the forces acting on individual water molecules are well known, you cannot use this information to predict how a large mass of water will flow. Instead you have to use completely different rules from the field of fluid dynamics. So even if the millions of internet messages from Egyptians do not act in unison, they will end up creating something that follows a pattern like an ocean current even if there is a certain amount of turbulence.
And to think – most of those in power at the time of 1848 died as a result of the revolution…makes one think…
I guess I disagree. Nations, states, tribes, even mobs are simply people acting collectively. Marx said new modes of production create new classes of people. So new modes of people acting collectively create new types of collective groups. I read a very interesting article on this, this morning on Slate “Twitter made me do it” or something like that. The writer said people who protest and defy authorities take very big risks and psychologists who have studied such groups and interviewed the participants have found they are willing to take such risks because they share very close bonds. No surprise. A platoon endures the horror of war because the men of the platoon share a close bond. When push comes to shove, you fight for the lives of the men next to you, not your nation or ideology.
The interesting thing about twitter is that it’s not about strong bonds. Online social networks are all about weak bonds. So the author is saying twitter can’t possibly be making them do it, because research shows it strong bonds that enable groups like this to take risks.
Interesting, but unconvincing . . . I don’t see how you can have strong personal bonds with a large a group of 250,000 or more people. That may be an argument for platoon sized groups, but something else is at play when large numbers of people revolt.
Found that slate article here it is: https://www.slate.com/id/2283615/
— When push comes to shove, you fight for the lives of the men next to you, not your nation or ideology.
Not to stir up the Red Staters and Tea Baggers too to mucn, but here’s an important point: during and after WWII it became clear that the Russian, German, and Japanese soldiers were more dedicated than American. When you stop and think about what the USofA brought to WWII that made the difference, it wasn’t troops, it was materiel. We had the excess resources (iron, coal, food) and undamaged factories to manufacture. It wasn’t democracy that won that war, it was steel.
Material is not the only factor in winning a war. The Brits had a lot more material than George Washington.
We were the Brits Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. An invading army, which does not intend to occupy and conquer, is not motivated; soldiers don’t fight foreign wars for democracy/whatever. We won the Revolution for the same reason we lost Vietnam and will lose Iraq, Afghanistan, and the like.
Singapore had no natural resources. A worse literacy rate then Egypt. What the New Yorker called “the most vile, dirty, poorest third world country in the region that one could possibly imagine”. Granted, the Brits made it point to tell the CIA to keep out and not try to turn into another Vietnam. Without much going for it, I guess Russia didn’t either and the domino theory never materialized there. Where are they now?
The problem is Population OVER population!
(Just look at any video of plague of mice and notice the similarities with Egypt and in the future any over populated area when food become expensive – jobs become rare and there’s no pandemic to get ride of people. Science controlled the pathogens of man but man could not control its desires to populate! — The argument for Female Rights)
Look at Britannica yearbooks for 50 years at the doubling rate of populations. Egypt has 80 million. In 100 years and it will be bigger than the USA!
Where are the jobs created (like USA) that will keep people happy! The houses food roads hospitals etc that make a society run smoothly!
In the 200ADs there was climate change and the crowds picked on the only new comers – Christians. AND it was localized as weather is – first here then there!
Look forward to interesting times!
What matters when Mubarak has gone is whether another President/strongman is elected/appointed. If Egypt were to convert to a Parliamentary system there is much less chance of another controlled dictatorship. Whatever its democratic faults, the very nature of a Parliamentary system precludes the emergence of dictators.
Virtually all countries, outside the Communist world, that have an elected or appointed chief executive with broad powers(with the one obvious shining exception) end up being dictatorial, corrupt and as FDR once said “he may be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch” and it is so much easier for the White House to deal with a friendly strongman!
The one cohesive political group in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood – beware what you wish for, because if they get in power, the whole dynamic of Israel and the Middle east will change for the worse. And you thought there was nothing to worry about!!!!
“I knew Gaddafi in the 70s and his sentiments weren’t for Tunisia but for himself.”
Care to elaborate? Even for a Renaissance man like you that’s a bit out of left field. My score card had you as Stanford Professor, #12(?) Apple Employee, 3 Mile Island author, journalist and entrepreneur… surprisingly, friend of dictatorial thugs was not on my list.
Why not make a post about it?
[…] Robert X. Cringely, from Mitternich and Mubarak […]
[…] He’s a well-connected and astute observer of the technical scene. This week he has an interesting take on the use of technology in the Egyptian revolution. He notes that most of the tweeting was about […]
man,this is my website page,please help me
https://www.puma-shoes.org
thank u very much.
Buy $10 Replica Designer Sunglasses with 3-day FREE SHIPPING
Online UK costume and fashion jewellery shop with,
I will continue to focus on
Tunisie emploi…
[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive Metternich and Mubarak – I, Cringely – Cringely on technology[…]…