When I first I heard about the Reddit people campaign that wreaked havoc on wealthy hedge funds that were looking to profit from struggling companies like video game retailer GameStop, my mind went back in time. Not all the way back to 2008, where many members of the subreddit WallStreetBets – and those who live vicariously in their chaos – are irritated by the financial system. This was, of course, too big to fail, when many of the most powerful and spendthrift banks and commercial firms were saved from ruin to keep the global economy going. Instead, I thought of the protests for democracy in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which started almost exactly 10 years before the GameStop hijinks, January 25, 2011.
These protests, part of a regional movement to overthrow autocratic governments known as the Arab Spring, were a milestone for the idea that the internet would liberate the world. At the time, it was hard not to get carried away by the belief that a band of activists using social media tools could topple an oppressive regime. Ten years later, those hopes should have evaporated. Instead of bringing democratic institutions to countries like Egypt, which has long denied them, the Internet often works the other way around, destabilizing democracy around the world and expanding inequality. However, every time an online group tries to grab Man, we allow ourselves to dream again.
The protests that it started exactly a decade ago against Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, then 30 years in power, was widely seen as driven by the internet, which was considered unusually open to an autocratic government. In the days before the protest, the news spread through social networks. More than 90,000 people signed up to participate through Facebook, surprising the authorities and giving impetus to the movement from the beginning.
After the Egyptian government found out what was going on, he tried to block access to Facebook and Twitter. And when that didn’t work out, two days later he took the extraordinary step of “shutting down” the Internet entirely. An expert quoted at WIRED at the time said it looked like people at ISPs were “taking calls, one at a time, telling them to go off the air”. It is no wonder that people began to believe that the internet had magical powers to spread democracy – here was an autocratic government treating the whole project as a threat to its survival, rather than something to twist towards its own ends.
This desperate decision, which came on January 28, prompted me to write about the protests over The New York Times. I had been in Egypt for a technology conference in Alexandria a few years earlier, so I called people I knew to ask what was going on. When the shutdown ended, his shocked bills landed in my inbox. “It was the first time that I felt digitally deficient,” wrote a 26-year-old computer science graduate. “Imagine yourself sitting at your home, with no connection to the outside world. I made the decision: ‘This is absurd, we are not sheep in your flock.’ I went down and joined the protests ”.
Boosted in this way, the protests grew rapidly in force over the five days of the internet blackout and remained on the same course after the return of the internet. On February 11, Mubarak was out. There were elections, a new government and a strong sense of change. Then, the suspicion that perhaps the change was only superficial, with the same elites still giving the cards. Two and a half years later, there was a military coup, whose leader is still in charge today.
In the past few days, the experience of these Reddit-based speculators using cheap and easily accessible trading apps like Robinhood has tracked the Tahrir Square experience quite accurately, from shocking early successes, a feeling the whole world is watching, to a crackdown radical this may end up further promoting the movement.