Victory for Egypt's
Leaderless Revolution
By Michael Hais and
Morley Winograd
As jubilant young
Egyptians danced in the
streets of Cairo and
Alexandria, celebrating
the departure of their
82 year old former
president, American
television commentators
immediately began
discussing two issues
that seemed to them to
be of greatest
importance: who were the
leaders of the uprising
and how did they use
social media to bring
down the reign of a
30-year dictatorship? In
doing so, they revealed
the same type of
inter-generational
misunderstandings that
cost Hosni Mubarak his
presidency.
The revolution was
successful because it
had no leaders, only
coordinators of bottom
up energy. Its use of
social media was
brilliantly conceived to
meld online organizing
with offline
action, not
supplant it. The
inability of older
generations to
understand the power of
this new form of
leadership among
Egypt's, and ultimately
the world's, young
people suggests there
will be many more such
surprises in the future,
both at home and abroad.
One of the first
celebrities to emerge
from the uprising, Wael
Ghonim, made this point
as emphatically as he
could to CNN in the
midst of the
celebrations. "I am not
a leader. The leaders
are in Tahrir Square."
Not to be dissuaded, the
interviewer then asked
him if he was planning
on entering politics.
Ghonim wisely responded
that all he wanted to do
was go back to work for
Google and some day meet
Mark Zuckerberg, whose
creation had enabled the
activists to gain
support for their
revolution. That answer
of course set off
another media frenzy,
especially on Twitter,
about how this was only
the first of many
Facebook revolutions to
come. It may be, but
only if other young
people read Ghonim's
promised new book,
Revolution 2.0, and
learn the organizational
lessons it promises to
teach.
This group of Egyptian
under-30 organizers
learned an important
lesson from the failure
of their fellow
generation's protest in
Iran. That uprising was
shut down by Iran's
secret police, who used
the protesters' tweets
and Facebook messages as
a primary source of
information on who
should be arrested and
imprisoned. In Egypt,
the roughly one dozen
technologically
sophisticated middle
class young organizers
assumed the police were
monitoring their
communications and
deliberately sent them
scurrying to false
protest locations,
announced on their
Facebook sites, even as
selected members of
their group were sent
quietly into poorer
neighborhoods to
organize the groups who
were ultimately
successful in taking
over Tahrir Square.
All of these plans for
offline action were
hatched in secretive, in
person meetings, many in
the homes of their
loving parents. In the
same way that the 2008
Obama campaign used a
social media site to
provide a way for
millions of its American
millennial generation
supporters to organize
the on-the-ground voter
interactions that
propelled it to victory,
these young Egyptians
knew both the value and
the limitations of
social networking
technology to effect
huge social change.
Since 2008, these
organizational lessons
have been available to
older leaders willing to
see beyond their own
generation's perceptions
of what it takes to lead
change, but few have
absorbed them. Malcom
Gladwell continues to
belittle the power of
social media to create
tipping points, as if
demonstrating in the
streets like it was
still the 1960s is the
only tactic to bring
about change with any
value. His fellow
Boomer, Tom Friedman,
who had previously
mislabeled American
Millennials as
"Generation Q[uiet],"
was hobnobbing with
other clueless elites in
Davos when the Egyptian
revolution broke out and
was completely surprised
by events in the region
of the world where he
first developed his
reputation as an astute
observer. And of course
the most obviously
out-of-touch older
leaders were President
Mubarak and his
sidekick, Vice President
Omar Suleiman, who
continued, right up to
the day they lost power,
to underestimate the
ability of the youth of
their country to channel
the pent up desire of
the Egyptian people for
freedom and a new way of
life.
It's not surprising that
the facility of young
people in using new
technology is the first
thing older generations
notice and comment upon
when talking about "kids
today." Many older
people, however, fail to
look beyond those
surface behaviors to the
deeper values that now
animate young people
around the world. The
belief of the emerging
generation in democratic
values, in the ability
of people to govern
themselves, free from
dictation from above,
and in the power of
individual initiative to
inspire collective
action on behalf of the
community's greater
good, determine the way
young people use
technology, not the
other way around. All of
those attitudes and
values were in clear
evidence in Egypt over
the last few weeks,
reminding those clinging
to power and outdated
perceptions of how to
hold onto it, that a new
generation has arrived.
Like their
civic-oriented
counterparts in America
eight decades ago, this
century's emerging
generation has a
"rendezvous with
destiny" and will lead
the world in entirely
new ways into a new era.
