Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

There are a number of present-day examples of state overreaction to online content, though none have yet resulted in revolution. Two examples from Saudi Arabia in 2011 stand out, and they suggest a model for the escalation path we will see in the future. The first involved a group of conservative clerics who, angered by the Saudi king’s decision to grant women the right to vote in the 2015 municipal elections, immediately retaliated against a group of women who had participated in a Women2Drive Campaign (during which several women openly defied Saudi law and got behind the wheel). The clerics decided to make an example of one of the women and sentenced her to ten lashes. As news of her sentence spread, ordinary Saudis took to the Internet to protest and stand up for her, sharing the news far beyond the country’s borders. The virtual retaliation of hundreds of thousands of people both in and outside of Saudi Arabia led the government to revoke the decision less than twenty-four hours later. In this instance, the Saudi king’s quick reaction stemmed a rising tide, but his very responsiveness suggests a genuine state concern about the threat posed by clamorous online mobs.

The second example comes from a decision to ban a satirical short film about Saudi Arabia’s expensive housing market. As with most officially prohibited material throughout history, there is no surer way to drive public interest and demand than by government ban, and this case is no different. The film, Monopoly, appeared on YouTube within an hour of the ban, and in just a few weeks had accumulated more than a million views. If the flogging story highlights the importance of swift action to reverse mistakes, this one speaks to the importance of regimes’ picking the right battles. They will never be able to predict the trigger that transforms online venting into street protest, so every decision to react or ignore is a gamble. Saudi Arabia has not seen large-scale public protests to date, but as a country with one of the most active social-media populations in the region (with one of the highest rates of YouTube playbacks of any country in the world, no less), it will surely encounter more small battles like those described above, and a miscalculation on any one of them could lead to a much larger problem.

No More “Springs”

As more societies come online, people will look for signs of regional revolutionary epidemics. Some argue that Latin America will be next, because of its serious economic disparities, weak governments, aging leaders and large populations that speak the same language. Others make the case for Africa, where state fragility is the highest in the world, while mobile-phone adoption is skyrocketing and creating the fastest growing mobile market anywhere. Or perhaps it would be Asia, which has the largest number of people living under autocratic rule, runaway economic growth and myriad widespread social, economic and political tensions. There have already been nascent attempts to organize mass protests and demonstrations in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, and surely this will continue to build with time.

But even though these regions are becoming more connected and their populations are increasingly exposed to events and the shared grievances of other nationalities, we don’t yet have evidence that there will be another iteration of the contagion effect the world saw in the Arab Spring. (It is worth noting, though, that a contagion of protests and demonstrations will be easier to achieve, as illustrated by the September 2012 reactions to the infamous video Innocence of Muslims in several dozen countries throughout the world.) The Arab world has a unique regional identity not shared by other regions, which has been solidified by historical attempts at unification and pan-Arab sentiments over the decades. And, of course, shared language, culture and similar political systems contributed. As we said earlier, modern communication technologies did not invent the networks that activists and protesters in the Middle East made use of—they amplified them.

In addition, there were established religious networks, which, in the absence of a strong civil society under autocratic rule, were by default the most organized and often most beneficial nongovernmental entity for citizens. All of the Arab leaders who lost power in this wave of revolutions—Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarak, Libya’s Gadhafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen—built and operated political systems that stifled the development of institutions, so religious houses and organizations often filled that void (in doing so, they earned the enmity of these dictators; the most prominent groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia, were either banned outright or mercilessly persecuted by the state because they constituted such a threat). Over the course of the recent revolutions, mosques became gathering points, imams and other clerics lent legitimacy to the protesters’ cause in some cases, and religious solidarity for many people was an important motivation for mobilization.

In other regions, these components are missing. Africa, Latin America and Asia are far too heterogeneous and diverse in culture, language, religion and economics to mirror the Arab model. Regional identity does not exist to the extent that it does in the Middle East, and social, business and political networks are more localized.

However, it’s impossible not to see changes on the horizon in all of these regions. They might be country-specific and include a broader range of outcomes than regime change, but nonetheless they will be profound on a political and psychological level. Every country in the world will experience more revolutionary triggers, but most states will weather the storm, not least because they will have the opportunity to watch and learn from other countries’ mistakes. A collection of best practices will emerge among states to deflect, diffuse and respond to the charges presented by newly connected publics. (This is a reasonable assumption since the interior ministers in repressive states, responsible for policing and national security, visit with each other to share knowledge and techniques.) Issues like income inequality, unemployment, high food prices and police brutality exist everywhere, and governments will have to make preemptive adjustments to their policies and messages to address public demand more responsively than in earlier times. Even in comparably stable societies, leaders are feeling the pressure of a connected citizenry and recognizing the need for reform or adaptation in the new digital age because no government is invulnerable to these looming threats.

Nobody understands this combination of political pressures and technological challenges better than Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who is both a regional leader and a computer scientist by training. “The Internet is good for letting off steam,” he told us, “but it can also be used to create new fires. The danger we face in the future is that it will be far easier to be against something than for it.” Young people everywhere, he explained, always want to be part of something cool, and “this social experience of being against authority means young people no longer need a plan. It has become far too easy for very minor events to escalate into lots of online activity that is exploited by opposition groups.”

Lee pointed to a recent event in his own country, known colloquially as “Currygate.” “A Chinese immigrant and a Singaporean of Indian descent quarreled over the right to cook curry, given that the aroma seeps through the walls,” Lee said. The Chinese man considered his neighbor’s constant curry cooking inconsiderate, and, “in typical Singaporean fashion,” the two brought in a mediator to resolve the dispute. An agreement was reached: The Indian would cook curry only when his neighbor was out of town. That was the end of it until, years later, the mediator went public with his story. The Indian community in Singapore was outraged, incensed by the idea that the Chinese could dictate when people did or did not cook curry, and the situation escalated quickly. According to Lee, “What began as the declaration of a national curry-cooking day led to thousands of ‘likes’ and posts and a viral movement that captured the attention of the entire country.” Luckily for Lee, the online agitation around curry didn’t lead to massive protests in the streets, even though the rhetoric was highly charged at the time.