It’s certainly possible for a teenager in Chicago or Tokyo to contribute in some significant way to a campaign across the world. After Egypt’s external communications capabilities were cut by the Mubarak regime, many observers turned to a Twitter account started by a twenty-something graduate student in Los Angeles for what they perceived to be credible information; the student, John Scott-Railton, posted updates about the protests gleaned from Egyptian sources limited to landline phones. For a time, his @Jan25voices Twitter handle was a major conduit of information about the uprising—this despite his not being a journalist or a fluent Arabic speaker. But while Scott-Railton was able to garner some popular attention for his tweets, there are limits to what someone with his profile could achieve in terms of influencing policy-makers.
Perhaps a more important example is Andy Carvin, who curated one of the most important streams of information in both the Egyptian and Libyan revolutions, with tens of thousands of followers and countless journalists globally who knew that Carvin himself (a senior NPR strategist) had the journalistic standards of a professional reporter and so would tweet or re-tweet only things he could verify. He became a one-man filter of enormous influence, cultivating and vetting sources.
Ultimately, though, however talented the Andy Carvins or John Scott-Railtons of the world are, the hard work of revolutionary movements is done on the ground, by the people inside a country willing to take to the streets. You cannot storm an interior ministry by mobile phone.
The opportunity for virtual courage will shape how protesters themselves operate. Global social-media platforms will give potential activists and dissidents confidence in the belief that they have an audience, whether or not this is true. An organization might overestimate the value of online support, and in doing so neglect its other, more difficult priorities that would actually give it an edge, like persuading regime administrators to defect. The presence of a large virtual network will encourage some groups to take more risks, even if escalation isn’t warranted. Full of confidence and courage from the virtual world, a given opposition force will launch campaigns that are immature or ill-advised, the inevitable end result of the breaking down of traditional control mechanisms around revolutionary movements. These trends in virtual courage, for both outsiders and organizers, will have to play out for some time before opposition groups learn how to utilize them effectively.
In all, increased public awareness of revolutions and campaigns around the world will give rise to a culture of revolutionary helpers. There will be a wide range of them: some useful, some distracting and some even dangerous. We’ll see smart engineers developing applications and security tools to share with dissidents, and vocal Internet aggregators will use the volume of the crowd to apply pressure and demand attention. No doubt some people will create specialized devices to smuggle into countries with protest movements, handsets that come loaded with encrypted apps that allow users to publish information (texts, photos, videos) without leaving any record on the phone—without a record, a phone contains no evidence of a crime and is thus useless and anonymous to any security thug who finds it.
We’ll also see a wave of revolution tourists, people who spend all day crawling the web for online protests to join and help amplify just for the thrill of it. Such actors might help sustain momentum by disseminating content, but they’ll be uncontrollable, without filter or oversight, and their narratives might skew expectations for people on the ground taking risks. Finding ways to utilize new participants while exerting quality control and effectively managing expectations will be the key task for effective opposition leaders, who will understand how much else is required for a successful revolution.
… But Harder to
Finish
The rapid proliferation of revolutionary movements across newly connected societies ultimately will not be as threatening to established governments as some observers predict, because for all that communication technologies can do to transform revolutions in ways that tip the balance in favor of the people, there are critical elements of change that these tools cannot effect. Principal among them is the creation of first-rate leaders, individuals who can keep the opposition intact during tough times, negotiate with a government if it opts for reform, or run for office, win and deliver on what the people want if a dictator flees. Technology has nothing to do with whether an individual has the attributes to fill the role of statesman.
In recent years, we’ve seen how large numbers of young people, armed with little more than mobile phones, can fuel revolutions that challenge decades of authority and control, hastening a process that has historically taken years. It’s now clear how technology platforms can play a prominent role in toppling dictators when used resourcefully. Given the range of outcomes possible—brutal crackdown, regime change, civil war, transition to democracy—it’s also clear that it’s the people who make or break revolutions, not the tools they use. Traditional components of civil society will become even more important as online crowds swarm the virtual public square, because while some of the newly involved participants (like activist engineers) will be highly relevant and influential, many more, as we’ve said, will be little more than amplifiers and noise-generators along for the ride.
Future revolutions will produce many celebrities, but this aspect of movement-making will retard the leadership development necessary to finish the job. Technology can help find the people with leadership skills—thinkers, intellectuals and others—but it cannot create them. Popular uprisings can overthrow dictators, but they’re successful afterward only if opposition forces have a good plan and can execute it. Otherwise the result is either a reconstitution of the old regime or a transition from a functioning regime to a failed state. Building a Facebook page does not constitute a plan; actual operational skills are what will carry a revolution to a successful conclusion.
The term “leaderless” has been used to describe the Arab Spring, by both observers and participants, but this is not quite accurate. True, in the day-to-day process of demonstrating it’s certainly possible to retain a decentralized command structure—safer too, since the regime cannot kill the movement by simply capturing the leaders. But over time, some sort of centralized authority must emerge if the movement is to have any direction. The rebel fighters who faced down Muammar Gadhafi for months were not a coherent army, but by February 27, 2011, within two weeks of the first public protests in Libya, they had formed the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi. Comprising prominent opposition figures, regime defectors, a former army official, academics, attorneys, politicians and business leaders, the NTC’s executive board functioned as an opposition government, negotiating with foreign countries and NATO officials in the fight against Gadhafi. The NTC’s chairman, Mahmoud Jibril, served as the country’s interim prime minister until late October 2011, shortly after Gadhafi was captured and killed.
In Tunisia, by contrast, the revolution occurred so quickly that there was no time to form an opposition government like the NTC. When President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled, the Tunisian state remained intact. Citizens continued to protest the government until all remaining members of Ben Ali’s Constitutional Democratic Rally party resigned and an interim government the masses deemed suitable was in place. Had government officials been less responsive to the population’s demands, launching crackdowns instead of reshuffling positions, Tunisia might have followed a very different and less stable path than it did. (Interestingly, many of the leaders elected in the October 2011 Tunisian elections were former political prisoners, who had a different and perhaps more personal level of credibility with the population than returning exiles.) Tunisia’s prime minister, Hamadi Jebali—himself a former political prisoner—told us that, in his view, the first post–Ben Ali regime minister of the interior ought to be a “victim of the ministry of the interior.” As such, he appointed to this position Ali Laârayedh, who under the previous regime spent fourteen years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement.