The Utopian

By Justin Reynolds.

“Once upon a time, revolutions devoured their children. Of late, they seem to have gone on birth control.”

Can the mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt succeed even though they have failed to produce real political leaders?

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The twittering classes are on the march. What will come of the recent upheavals in the Arab world is not yet clear. Except for this: the protests that have ousted one dictator and are nipping at the toes of others could not have happened as they did without social networking technologies. The day after a despairing Tunisian green grocer, Mohamed Bouazizi, immolated himself in front of a government office, cell phone videos of protests in his small town appeared online, where they were picked up by Al-Jazeera and broadcast to every television set the country — and across the Arab world. Within days, Tunisians were reportedly joining Facebook by the hundreds of thousands, and the site became the nerve center of a popular uprising, channeling updates, gruesome and inspiring images, outrage and hope. “#sidibouzid” — the tag of a twitter feed that galvanized Tunisians in December and January — was printed on placards and paraded down the capital’s main boulevard. Tunisians appear to have pulled off what the champions of social media democracy have longed for: a genuinely grass-roots upheaval, free from the meddling of elites and the cumbersome, corruptible bureaucracies of domesticated opposition parties. Their actions have emboldened pro-democracy forces in Egypt, Yemen, and beyond. That noise you heard was the vox populi, pure and unfiltered.

Which might spell trouble. Tunisia shows that you don’t need leaders to topple a regime; in fact, in the early stages of an uprising, lacking a leader can be a major advantage. But what abets the disposal of tyrants becomes an obstacle when it is time to put something in their place. Crowdsourced revolutions create power vacuums that can be very difficult to fill by figures faithful to democratic ideals.

Once upon a time, revolutions devoured their own children. The latest generation seems to have gone on birth control. In lieu of children, what will they produce? We are just beginning to find out.  

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In the coming weeks, Tunisia will be overshadowed by the uprisingsthat follow in its wake. But it deserves to be watched closely. In some ways, it is more significant than what is happening in Egypt, where traditional organizational structures like parties and mosques have played a somewhat more important role from the beginning. (This is not to say that the protests there were managed from the top down, or that social media did not bring masses of people into the street. They did.) Tunisia’s revolution, by contrast, was wildly spontaneous — proof of what an oppressed people, without any parties to turn to, can do with enough anger and enough internet access.

For some time, the debate over social media and pro-democracy movements has been split into two camps. “Optimists” like the NYU professor Clay Shirky like to stress how online networks can synchronize a discussion among large groups of people and decrease the opportunity cost of collaborative action. “Skeptics” generally try to unmask these virtues as vulnerabilities. Evegny Morozov, in his recent Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, demonstrates how easily these technologies – precisely because they are so open and unpoliced – can be manipulated and monitored by regimes. Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, dismisses the diffuse “weak tie” networks created online as simply not up to the task of revolution: they buckle when the riot police charge.

The grands evénements in the Arab World will probably furnish further evidence for each of these perspectives. The Jasmine Revolution highlighted many virtues of social media activism. When its history is written, it will have to proceed hour by hour; at times, minute by minute. Near the heart of the story lies a remarkable symbiosis between the strengths of new media, like speed, decentralization, and access, and the strengths of old media, like its moral authority and its objectification of events.

In Tunisia, both forms of mobilization worked in tandem. Rumblings of revolution caught on video or recorded on message boards were picked up by regional news outlets, notably Al-Jazeera. These were then beamed back into the country by satellite television, which, because of its broad subscriber base, is practically impossible for a government to shut down (unlike Facebook, which, as we now know, Ben Ali’s regime came very close to shutting down). When Tunisians saw their own citizens protesting on the evening news, it seemed as though the revolution had already begun. The story itself tipped the balance, emboldening people who might otherwise not have to take to the streets.

But recent events also expose a real limitation in the debate thus far. Revolutions unfold in stages. It’s not just that x feature of social media might be good or bad – or both – for the ability of the people to topple their undemocratic ruler. A feature that propels revolution in one stage can hinder it – or run it off the rails – in another stage. Commentators have limited themselves to the impact of social media in the first of these stages for a simple reason: so far, most “twitter revolutions” have not had a chance to move from what we might call, in a broadly Hegelian vein, the “negative” stage (critique of, resistance to, and abolition of a regime) to the “positive” (institution-building) stage. Tunisia’s uprising has come as close as any yet to embarking on this positive stage. The challenges it now faces offer a peak, however small, into the future of revolution.

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Leaderlessness freed the Jasmine Revolution from a serious liability. Leaders can unite people, but they also divide: what endears them to some will alienate them from others. Moreover, leaders can be discredited or assassinated – and a good many of them, in the end, turn out to be more interested in themselves than their professed aims. I suspect that Ben Ali, in the days before his flight, was searching frantically for a man behind the mob: someone he could attack, blackmail, or co-opt. But this secret master puppeteer was nowhere to be found, for he didn’t exist.

Ominously, he – or she – still doesn’t. The Jasmine Revolution has, quite simply, failed to produce a leader. In the days following Ben Ali’s flight, the western press suspected that a leader might emerge from the official opposition, Progressive Democratic Party. But it turns out that the party was as surprised by the protests as the government had been. The UGTT, Tunisia’s workers’ union, has become something of a protagonist but hasn’t dared to claim the mantel of the revolution. Popular support for the Army runs deep — but it seems to rest precisely on General Rachid Ammar’s unwillingness to take power. As he says, he is the “guarantor,” not the voice, of the revolution.

If tyrants are racing to keep one step ahead of cyber activism, so are journalists. Reporting an uprising is easier if you can see it through the vision, personality, and game plan of its leaders (who, conveniently, are probably also fishing for an interview). In Tunisia, particularly in the first few days after the western media took interest, reporters tried to make “leading opposition figures” out of people who quite obviously were not (Ahmed Najib Chebbi, the head of the Progressive Democratic Party, is a good example). The figures they have extricated from anonymity, if anything, underscore the way that social media generates roles and expectations at odds with the requirements of building a new order after the old one has been destroyed.

 “Àli,” a programmer whose real name will probably never be known to the vast majority of Tunisians, is a hero of the Jasmine Revolution. He spent mid-January in front of his computer, far away from the capital, working 18 hours days to fend off government censors trying to lock down his Facebook page, which had become a go-to site for dissidents. Àli’s indispensible role required anonymity: publicity would have meant arrest. Prominent bloggers and tweeters — such as Lena Ben Mhenni or Yassine Ayari — are in a similar situation, though they must risk greater exposure. Their scoops and rhetoric can help to mobilize a people, but they’re accountable to no one, and their credibility rests in part on the way they are able to present themselves as symbols of, and not merely participants in, the movement. They are unlikely to become charismatic leaders on the strength of blog posts or 140-character tweets. Nor is there much reason to think that their skills correlate with the more transactional style of leadership that is needed to implement change. The activities of traditional protest movements like Solidarnosc allowed talented political leaders to emerge and gain organizational experience. Social media revolutions don’t just fail to produce such leaders. They depend upon and actively reward talents irrelevant to finishing the task that they begin.

The danger here lies not only in the fact that the Tunisian masses don’t have a leader. It’s that they can’t even tolerate one. To date, there has been one Tunisian who has attempted to make the leap from internet revolutionary to government official. Slim Amamou, a dissident blogger and software engineer, was offered the position of Secretary of State for Youth and Sports minutes before the first interim government was announced, and only days after he had been imprisoned for his writings. When he took the position he immediately drew fire from erstwhile comrades. “I’m worried you are making the wrong choice here my friend,” tweeted one. Another beseeched: “As a dear friend, I ask you… don’t accept to collaborate with those who killed Tunisians, stay clean stay citizen.” Amamou defended himself reasonably: it was a matter, he wrote, of “governing a nation. I won’t be comfortable with a govt. of noobs [newbies] like me. compromise. no choice. till elections.” For reasons not yet clear, he resigned after two weeks.

The resentment directed at Amamou was not produced by, or unique to, social media. It’s the old resentment of idealists against one of their own who has proved too willing to compromise. Social media has, however, exacerbated and confused this age-old tension. Some say that Facebook and Twitter promote “slacktivism:” a discount humanitarianism that is more concerned with making participants feel good about themselves than with the practical work of making change. But these technologies don’t only make shallow compassion easier; they also affect the psychology of the most committed.

The parallel reality of cyberspace combines all too easily with the parallel reality of utopianism. Online, politics is limited to romantic highs and lows: the flickering status and twitter updates, news that the police are in retreat, the thrill when you see how many views a video of protests has received, the revolting images of murdered civilians and brutal repression. This phantasmagoria is far removed from the unglamorous world of politics, where compromises, hierarchies, and discipline are unavoidable realities. But social media fosters the illusion of having overcome the old divide between utopianism and realism. This is because it is, in a limited sense, very practical: it can take out a dictator. But we have yet to develop the technology that would allow web activists on their own to build public institutions, create a representative government with separation of powers, or decide upon election procedures.

Nothing threatens Tunisia today like the precarious leadership vacuum Ben Ali has left behind. In past revolutions, this vacuum has been filled by popular leaders, who either assume power themselves (America, Russia) or work remnants of the old regime to keep the peace and manage a transition (Czechoslovakia, Hungary). Without such figures, governments in transition are vulnerable to a power grab, either by the deposed faction or an outside force — the military or a neighboring government.

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A similar pattern has characterized other so-called “twitter revolutions” of recent years — even those that seem to have had someone at the helm. Iran’s Mir Hossein Mousavi enjoyed the support of a fair percentage of the Iranians who took to the streets in the Green Revolution of 2009. But the connection did not run deep. Mousavi remains a rather conservative member of an officially tolerated opposition, whose interest in contesting the election happened to coincide with the demands of a street movement. The Green Revolution sought more profound changes than Mousavi ever promised, at least before he was thrust into the spot light. It would likely have cast Moussavi aside, had he not radicalized his own demands to keep step with the decentralized protest movement.

The same might soon prove true in Egypt. The mass protests in Cairo did not need an official leader to get going. Even now that key opposition groups have grudgingly accepted Mohammed ElBaradei as their temporary spokesman – a move that seems designed to appease key western players like the US more than to express their undying devotion to him – they are hardly likely to trudge along in whatever direction he decides to take them.

The more social media-driven the revolution, the less likely that it will produce – and support – popular leaders. Whether this is good or bad depends on the stage of the revolution. In the short-term, leaderlessness can be helpful in toppling a regime. In the medium-term, especially during the period of transition that must follow upon a successful revolutionary moment, it makes movements all the more vulnerable.

About the long-term we can, for now, only speculate. The main question in Tunisia is whether a fragile and distrusted interim government can survive long enough to prepare and oversee free and fair elections. This could take anywhere from one to many months. The Jasmine Revolution may never make it that far. But if it does, the technologies that make it vulnerable today could, once again, become a source of strength. For while strongmen with grassroots support can be protectors of the people, they can of course also become the most vicious of autocrats. 1989 turned out figures like Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, who guided their countries to self-government. But for every Havel there’s a Mugabe, a Mao, and an Ayatolla Khomenei.

Tunisia’s first democratically elected Head of State, if he comes to be, will need to be watched closely. But because the Jasmine Revolution did not produce a traditional leader in its early, heroic stages, he is likely to have less political capital and power than Mugabe, Mao or Khomenei did at the start of their rule. What is more, the skepticism fostered by the revolution’s heavy reliance on social media is likely to keep Tunisians vigilant. Especially if bloggers, twitterers and facebookers continue to engage in forms of “citizen journalism,” an active civil sphere could continue to hold the nascent power of their future leader in check.

Social media may not be able to produce leaders. But they certainly can be useful in policing – and, in turn, legitimizing – an elected leader’s authority.

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The Arab revolutions have become the focal point of an important debate over the potential of social media to foster democracy. But if we are to understand the true changes wrought by Twitter and Facebook, we need to move beyond the already staid dichotomy between “optimists” on the one hand and “skeptics” on the other hand.

Social media shape opposition movements in real – but also complicated and contradictory – ways. They are singularly effective at challenging seemingly unassailable leaders like Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak, even in the absence of traditional opposition networks. In this sense, the optimists are broadly right. But as revolutions move past the stage of opposition and attempt to consolidate gains, the limitations of net activism are coming into view. Political power, even in Tunisia and Egypt, will one day have to be wielded by flesh-and-blood political leaders, not twitter hash tags. The people of Tunisia and Egypt have to learn this lesson, and learn it fast. Otherwise, they may, in abetting the removal of one tyrant, merely create the conditions for another ruthless force to hijack their movement. In this sense, the skeptics carry the day.

But the ultimate irony of social media, ignored by both optimists and skeptics, lies still further afield. It is this: the childlessness of these revolutions makes them much more defenseless in the medium-term. But if they can survive the coming months, the net-mobilized masses of the Middle East may be more likely to resist the appeal of popular strongmen in the future.

Justin Reynolds, a PhD Candidate in History at Columbia University, has lived in North Africa.