When I first met I found out about the campaign made by people on Reddit, which wreaked havoc on rich hedge funds that want to take advantage of troubled companies such as the video game retailer GameStop, my mind went back in time. Not until 2008, when many members of the subreddit WallStreetBets – and those who live alternately through their chaos – are venting their anger on the financial system. This was, of course, the year of Too Big to Fail, when many of the strongest and most dilapidated banks and commercial firms were rescued from ruin to keep the global economy functioning. Instead, I thought of the democracy protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which began almost exactly 10 years before the GameStop hijinks, January 25, 2011.
These protests, which are part of a regional movement to overthrow autocratic governments known as the Arab Spring, were an important sign of the idea that the Internet would liberate the world. At the time, it was difficult not to be overwhelmed by the belief that a gang of activists using social networking tools could overthrow 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 spreading inequality. However, every time an online group tries to cling to Man, we allow ourselves to dream again.
The protests that started exactly a decade ago against the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, then 30 years in power, were widely considered to be driven by the Internet, which was considered unusually open there for 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 very beginning.
Once the Egyptian government found out what was happening, it tried to block access to Facebook and Twitter. And when this proved less than successful, he took the extraordinary step two days later to completely “shut down” the internet. An expert quoted in WIRED at the time said it appeared that people at the ISP were “receiving phone calls, one by one, telling them to withdraw from the air.” No wonder people have begun to believe that the internet has magical powers that spread democracy – here there was an autocratic government that treated the whole project as a threat to its survival, rather than as something to turn to its own. its purposes.
This desperate decision, which came on January 28, pushed me to write about protesting for New York Times. I had been to Egypt for a technology conference in Alexandria a few years earlier, so I called the people I met to ask what was going on. When the closure ended, their shocked accounts landed in my inbox. “It was the first time for me to feel digital disabilities,” wrote a 26-year-old computer science graduate. “Imagine that you stay at home, without having a single connection with the outside world. I made the decision: “This is stupid, we are not in their flock.” I went downstairs and joined the protests. ”
Stimulated in this way, the protests grew rapidly in the five days of internet disruption and remained on the same course after the return of the internet. By February 11, Mubarak was out. There were elections, a new government and a terrible sense of change. Then a suspicion that maybe the change was only superficial, the same elites continuing to shoot. Two and a half years later, a military coup took place, the leader of which is still in power today.
In recent days, the experience of these Reddit speculators who use cheap and easily accessible trading applications such as Robinhood has followed the Tahrir market experience quite well, from the shocking early successes, a feeling that everyone is following, even to to a comprehensive repression. which may further promote the movement.