Desert tea--A grass roots Egyptian movement
Image by Lone Primate via FlickrSandmonkey lays out his vision of the way forward in Egypt in his newest post. According to him, the best way forward is to adopt a strategy of getting the Internet-connected youth to take over existing parties and movements from online strongholds. Whether the strategy is workable or not, it is certainly innovative; it represents one of the first actual attempts to exploit the role of modern connectivity in a revolutionary process.There is much more.
“One of the first” and not “the first” because that honor probably belongs to Tea Party USA, which has used online organizing tools to try and take over the Republican Party. Like Sandmonkey’s vision of a leaderless popular revolution, the Tea Party is an example of a political movement that has no rigid organizational structure, no big office building in a great metropolitan area, no television stations. Nancy Pelosi kept looking for the funders of the “Astroturf,” and yet there were none to be found. She could not believe that a real grassroots movement could actually exist. Yet as the events of November 2010 showed her, the Tea Party really does exist. The question is whether a similar kind of force can operate within the Egyptian revolution. First of all, let’s see what Sandmonkey actually proposes.
First of all, he lays out with dismay the conventional alternative: keep on the current course and accept dwindling street protests or enter negotiations with Mubarak’s rear guard through conventional opposition authority figures. He has no appetite for either, probably because events either way will eventually be co-opted by the mustache Petes of the underground or the fixers in their Saville Row suits. The Egyptian revolution will die and revert to the same old, same old.
the status quo just won’t die. This lack of action and organization will be used against us (the protesters) in every way possible. The participants will start complaining about the lack of direction or movement leaders. The government will start complaining that the protesters haven’t offered a single person to represent them and negotiate with the government for them, and that the protesters don’t know what they want. Mind you, this is utter rubbish: It’s not that the protesters don’t know what they want (you can read about their demands everywhere), it’s that their demands are so nonnegotiable for them, that it makes no sense for them to engage in negotiations until a number of those demands get realized. Thus, Gridlock!Gridlock! This is eerily reminiscent of the despair generated by the financial crisis of 2008. The conventional political operators believed that the discontent was doomed to be co-option within either the Republican or Democratic Parties. Whichever way it went, the discontent would be channeled, beaten down, and dissipated. The same old, same old would win in the end.
Political pundits failed to realize that online tools made it possible for memes and databases to persist online without necessarily having to create union or underground style networks. And that in turn made it possible for organizations like the Tea Party to viably exist and mount challenges through political primaries which would alter the character of the 2010 elections. As we’ll explore after the page break, Sandmonkey has a strangely similar concept: to break the gridlock by going online.
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He proposes organizing online. This worked in the USA. It might not if a totalitarian group seizes power in Egypt and uses the database to chase down its enemies. The organization would have some potential, but it would need to overwhelm not only the status quo, but the forces within Egypt who want to become the new status quo.
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