Cartoon by Patrick Chapatte

One of any coercive regime’s worst fears is a rich, open public dialogue on change and reform. When people start candidly discussing and debating their concerns, hopes and dreams, they begin to be aware of their true priorities and rights, and what must be done to reclaim those rights. Walls of fear begin to crumble. The regime’s cautionary myth of trading security and stability for freedom shatters.

That’s why authoritarian governments have silly things like Ministries of Information. That’s why open public debate on reform was stifled and state-terrorized not only throughout the Mubarakian era, but since the days of Nasser. The fake freedom of the press given by Mubarak was but a bone thrown to obsolete pseudo-intellectuals-slash-regime-brown-nosers and seemingly-dissenting yet unfocused traditional media. As long as it is contained within the conventional realm of information dissemination, it could be controlled at will. Regime-defined lines will not be crossed. A truly Orwellian nightmare for reformists.

What social media has created is a sort of an alternate space for reviving a dormant public consciousness into a sentient, dynamic social discourse. The assumption that social media’s largest influence was during or shortly before the 18 days in which Mubarak’s regime was brought down is very naive. This has been simmering under the surface of the Egyptian political scene for a while, particularly since the Presidential “elections” of 2005. The boiling point was reached on January 25th 2011. What I refer to here as the virtualization of dissent is what happened when the popular desire for change was shifted (by whom? I’ll get to that shortly) from real space, where it was in long somnolence, and cultivated it in a space that the Patriarchs do not understand: virtual space. Faced with something they could not yet comprehend neither the workings nor the effects of, the best the regime could do was detain and intimidate, and ultimately completely shut down the medium when the revolution broke out (a move which only betrayed how weak they have become and added fuel to the fire). They never really attempted to understand this medium and instigate their own countermeasures in “virtual space”, much to their own peril.

A key thing to understanding all of this is that the instigators of this phase changing resistance (from real space to virtual space, then back to real space in the form of strong confrontational popular action) are not particularly representative of the vast majority of Egyptians. To understand what this means, take a quick look at the demographics of a random sample of Egyptian “net activists”: young, educated, tech-savvy middle/upper-middle class (as compared to a country with a 42% illiteracy rate, for instance). In other words, those are not the truly oppressed masses, especially from an economic sense. This minority, however, spoke for all of Egypt. By taking the war for reform to their virtual turf, away from the regimes clamp down on political action in real space, then funnelling it all back out to real space in the form of a mighty wave of revolt, they have  reclaimed Egypt.