When first I met the Reddit people’s campaign that has wreaked havoc on rich hedge funds who want to take advantage of struggling companies like the GameStop video game store, my mind went back in time. Not until 2008, when many members of the WallStreetBets subreddit — and those who live subordinately through its chaos — come out of their anger against the financial system. It was the year, of course, of Too Big to Fail, when many of the most powerful and damaging banks and commercial companies were saved from ruin to keep the world economy running. Instead, I thought of the democratic protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which began almost exactly ten years to the date before the GameStop party, on January 25, 2011.
These protests, which were part of a regional movement to overthrow autocratic governments known as the Arab Spring, set a high mark for the idea that the Internet would liberate the world. At the time, it was hard not to be carried away by the belief that a gang of activists using social media tools could overthrow an oppressive regime. Ten years later, those hopes should have largely evaporated. Instead of bringing democratic institutions to countries, such as Egypt, which has long denied them, the Internet often works in reverse, destabilizing democracy around the world and widening inequality. Still, every time an online group tries to join the man, we allow ourselves to dream again.
The protests that it began exactly a decade ago against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who at the time had 30 years in power, was considered widely driven by the Internet, which was considered unusually open to an autocratic government. In the days leading up to the protest, the news spread through social media. More than 90,000 people signed up to participate via Facebook, surprising the authorities and giving impetus to the movement from the beginning.
Once the Egyptian government found out what was going on, it tried to block access to Facebook and Twitter. And when that turned out to be less than successful, he took the extraordinary step two days after “shutting down” the Internet completely. An expert quoted by WIRED at the time said it appeared that people from internet providers were making “phone calls one by one, telling them to withdraw from the air”. No wonder people began to believe that the Internet had magical powers that spread democracy; here was an autocratic government that treated the whole project as a threat to its survival, rather than as something that would turn to its own ends.
This desperate decision, which came on January 28, pushed me to write about the protests The New York Times. I had been to Egypt during a technical conference in Alexandria a few years earlier, so I called people I had met to ask me what was going on. When the closing ended, their impacted beads landed in my inbox. “It was the first time I felt digitally disabled,” wrote a 26-year-old computer science graduate. “Imagine sitting at home, without any connection to the outside world. I made the decision: “This is nonsense, we are not sheep in their flock.” I went down and joined the protests. “
Increased in this way, the protests grew rapidly during the five days of Internet shutdown and remained on the same course after the Internet returned. On February 11, Mubarak was out. There were elections, a new government and an intoxicating sense of change. Then the suspicion that perhaps the change was only superficial, with the same elites still pushing it forward. Two and a half years later, a military coup took place, the leader of which is still at the helm today.
In recent days, the experience of these Reddit-based speculators using inexpensive and easily accessible commercial applications like Robinhood has tracked the Tahrir Square experience in strong order, from the shocking first hits, a feeling that everyone is watching, to the point of blunt repression. this may end up further promoting the movement.