Tweets Don't Burn Down Police Stations

This piece first appeared in the Big Issue last week. Sorry to not be 100% focussed on cinema - but if I wrote a cinema piece now it would just be about how No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits are exactly the same film. And that's not new or interesting for anyone.

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On August 1^st, the first day of Ramadan, the army violently removed the tents, stages and speakers the protestors, street-sellers and bystanders that together made up the 3^rd occupation of Tahrir square in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. After three weeks, numbers had dwindled, people’s minds were on the month of Ramadan ahead, and the Army took the chance to strike. There was nothing anyone could do.

Among the activists who were occupying the square, several are regular tweeters, bloggers etc who have a deep connection to their smartphones. These are the ones who’ve been on the cover of Time Magazine, cracked gags with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, been profiled by the New Yorker, had PBS programmes named after them. They were, in the mainstream consciousness of the Western world, the startlingly familiar vanguard of freedom in a hostile and confusing world. They were the faces that forced the long overdue realization that Arab cities house more than just the West’s fears and fantasies, that Arabs are more than just the foil to the West’s hero. They marched to Tahrir firing off tweets instead of bullets. 

But tweets do not burn down police stations, the country’s torture centres. Facebook alone can’t keep the army out.

The internet shapes the world we live in. Of course people used it. But its role, and the role of social media in particular, has been massively overplayed. If anything, it was the moment the government switched the internet off that they sealed Mubarak’s fate. It signalled the momentousness of what was happening,  and it forced people out on the streets to find things out for themselves on January 28^th.

Far more important than Facebook’s organisational capacity, were the hundreds of young men and women who gave their lives battling the government’s brutality. The men on the front lines who won control of Qasr el-Nil Bridge inch by inch, who torched the hated National Democratic Party headquarters, who chased the police entirely out of Cairo for three days. The innocent bystanders who were shot by snipers in Shobra. The young woman in Sohag bludgeoned to death by government paramilitaries. The Revolution, at its heart, wanted to be nonviolent – but that privilege was won through great sacrifice.

Rather than focussing on the fleeting significance of a tweet, we should remember the decades of street activism that paved the way for 2011 to erupt. For years, academics, intellectuals, activists insisted on their right to protest in the streets. They were routinely surrounded by thousands of riot police, they were arrested and shipped off to jails in the desert with murderers and rapists, they were attacked and beaten in the streets. It’s easy to go out and march when the crowd stretches as far as the eye can see, it’s a lot harder when there are only 200 of you. But we wouldn’t be where we are today without their dedication.

Instead of embracing the de-contextualized narrative of the immediate power of social media, let’s acknowledge that it was the mass industrial action, the strikes that swept the country, that brought the government to its knees. The next day, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces removed Mubarak. This was not a Revolution born of technology. It was born of years of injustice and corruption, it was born of the neoliberal dismantling and auctioning off of the state.

And it was born of humiliation. The last time we saw street protests of a significant size was when Gaza was being destroyed and we were aiding and abetting keeping our Palestinian cousins locked in their lethal prison. This was a Revolution born of decades of submission to American foreign policy and Israeli interests.

The deep fascination with the social media narrative is nothing more than an evolved  Orientalism – it reeks of fantasy, of exoticization. At an event in London someone asked if it was because young men and women in Egypt had used Western invented tools like Facebook that they took to the streets to demand a Western-style freedom. If I could have clambered through the audience and slapped him in the face with my shoe I would have, but it would have re-enforced an unhealthy stereotype.

The point is that the struggle in Egypt is universal – as we’ve seen from Wisconsin to Madrid to Athens – and it’s not yet won. It will take more patience, more planning and more pain than the online worlds of social media usually engender to win this one.