Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Across the Egyptian Twitterverse

Tonight I attended a “Tweet Nadwa” in Cairo. This nadwa (which translates into English as “seminar” or “conference”), as its name suggests, was organized via twitter and facebook and brought together Egyptians for a discussion about social justice and the future of Egypt. Try as I might to summarize the meeting in 140 characters or less on twitter, I simply cannot do it. Instead, I’ve turned to the blog, which gives me much more space to discuss and analyze tonight’s nadwa in detail.

The event was held in a theater nestled in the alleyways of downtown Cairo, and the room was already packed when I arrived a few minutes before 6:30. I was one of the lucky ones who was able to find a spot on the floor – a few minutes after I sat down, the theater was filled entirely to capacity with people in seats, on the floor, and in the aisles. This being my first twitter-organized event I didn’t quite know what to expect…I assumed that everyone might be spending the entire time with their noses buried in their blackberries, focusing more on their tweets than on the actual content of the discussion. As the moderator explained, however, the event was meant to be much more of a town-hall style meeting and, while a projector screen displayed a live feed of tweets from the audience members, audience members who wanted to contribute would be given a microphone instead of a smartphone. The moderator posed a topic for discussion, and then passed the microphone around to audience members and five prominent tweeters who were sitting on chairs in the front of the theater. Each person could speak for no more than 140 seconds (a nod to Twitter’s 140 character limit). Knowing what sort of rhetorical gems town hall meetings in the U.S. have yielded (e.g. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare”), I was quite excited to see how this concept would play out in an Egyptian context.

Before getting into the actual content of the discussion, a few observations about the overall feel in the room. The audience was generally young, quite politically and socially liberal (both from the nature of the discussion and their preferred styles of clothing), and clearly very tech-savvy. As far as I could tell, there were no Salafis (who often sport long beards and traditional robes called galabiyyas) and no one who publicly identified with the Muslim Brotherhood. A sense of excitement pervaded the room as the discussion began, and as an outside observer it was hard not to get swept up in the moment. I never imagined last year when I was in Alexandria that this sort of discussion would be taking place just one year later in a post-Mubarak Egypt. It was impossible not to be inspired by several hundred people voluntarily coming together to talk about the future of their country. The level of energy and passion in the room – fed by the feeling that there is a real window of opportunity right now to shape Egypt’s political and economic future – was infectious.

Tonight’s topic was social justice, and the conversation mainly focused on economics. The microphone swiftly changed hands in the beginning of the meeting, with most of the attendees striking idealistic notes about the necessity of improving healthcare and education, raising the minimum wage, etc. Nothing revolutionary, but nevertheless a good way to start the program. After a brief digression in which the attendees argued amongst themselves about how the stock market functioned and whether it was or wasn’t necessary for the country’s future, the discussion heated up when a proud Communist stood up and admonished the crowd for not focusing on the real issues. “You all are forgetting the critical problem here,” he declared, “we need to stop talking about the minimum wage and the stock market and start talking about how to end the capitalist plague that is destroying our country! We must return to the basics and realize that capitalism is inherently unfair!”

The crowd’s attention instantly turned to broad, ideological issues. Instead of clapping, the moderator told the audience members to raise their arms and wave their hands when they agreed with a certain point, and judging by the amount of raised hands and smiles after that mini-Communist manifesto, the man had many allies in the room. Several like-minded thinkers expressed their support for the idea of completely overhauling Egypt’s system, inveighing against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (among other foreign countries and institutions) for making the rich richer and the poor poorer while tacitly approving the pervasive corruption in the Mubarak regime.

The capitalists in the room were not as vocal, but a few brave souls did stand up to defend their position. “What we had in Egypt for the past 30 years,” one said, “was not capitalism. It was simply despotism.” Another chimed in: “we’ve tried socialism and it didn’t work!” While nobody endorsed the Mubarak regime’s version of capitalism, the capitalists did win a fair amount of head nods and raised hands during their responses to the communist and socialist salvos.

The back-and-forth debate between the capitalists and the communists/socialists continued for some time, but there were two speakers who I found particularly engaging. One man stood up in the middle of the debate and, quite calmly and skillfully, attacked both the capitalists and the communists at the same time: “This question of whether we should have a capitalist or a communist system here in Egypt is not as important,” he declared, “as this question: who will administer the system? If there is anything we have learned in the past 60 years, it is that no matter what ideology we follow, we are ultimately doomed to fail if we have bad leaders. Pick either one of these ideologies, but remember that our success or failure will ultimately be determined by who is making the decisions and not some theoretical framework for how things should work.” While I didn’t speak at the meeting and generally refrained from reacting to any of the statements from one side or the other, I couldn’t help but raise my hand in support of that statement. Soon afterwards, another man stood up and brought up an equally important point: “While it is important to talk about macroeconomics and large companies,” he said, “we also have to focus on small-scale issues. So many young people have business plans or inventions that they want to capitalize on, but our system makes it unbelievably hard for anyone to open their own business. Why should we have to get 15 permits from the government to open a small shop, and why is it so hard for us to get any start-up capital? Change has to come from the bottom, too, and we need to start by completely overhauling the system to make it easier for us young people to go into business for ourselves.” I, and many of the other people in the room, raised our hands in support of this point, too.

Finally, I was very interested by the constant comparisons of Egypt to other countries. Many people backed up their statements by saying “in America they do this” or “in Scandinavia they do that,” and there were several points in the discussion when people used specific examples from American political or economic history. Many of the moderates in the room advocated that Egypt look to northern European countries as models for how to balance capitalism and social justice, but just as many people shook their heads emphatically whenever someone said that Egyptians should look to foreign countries as they design their own system. One speaker garnered a sea of raised hands when he declared simply: “screw capitalism and communism, let’s invent a new and better system here in Egypt!” Nevertheless, America was certainly the most commonly referenced foreign country throughout the discussion. Interestingly, while there were occasional mentions of developing countries such as Brazil and Korea, no one said anything about the Chinese model.

As a whole, I would characterize the discussion as decidedly more focused on social justice and closing the gap between the rich and the poor than most discussions about economic issues in the U.S. Despite a rising culture of consumption here in Egypt and a tendency for the rich to flaunt their wealth, I think people are very conscious of the huge class divide that emerged during the Mubarak regime, and they want to take definite actions to solve the problem. “We must judge our government,” one woman declared, “on the basis of how it treats the weakest people in our society.” If this twitter nadwa is actually representative of the Egyptian liberal movement as a whole, I would expect to see a definite shift to more populist policies if they liberals gain a significant amount of seats in the parliamentary elections.

As I have written before, someone walking the streets of Egypt these days who didn’t know about what happened in January and February would probably not think that this country is undergoing dramatic changes. There are specific times, however, when the gravity of what is happening in Egypt hits you like a tsunami. Tonight was certainly one of those times, and I will certainly be returning to the next twitter nadwa. The attendees’ enthusiasm, optimism, and genuine desire to change their country for the better was truly inspiring.

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