There’s No Stopping It

For years, opponents of globalisation have called for an end to a system accused of bringing only misery and Western domination. But aside from sporadic and partial attempts by countries in the grip of turmoil such as Nepal, Myanmar and China, few have attempted to cut themselves off from the global information grid. Last week, however, as thousands of Egyptian protestors took to the streets, President Hosni Mubarak pulled the plug on the 21st century, only to discover the futility of the move.

In the early hours of 28 January, his government hit the equivalent of a ‘kill switch’ to turn the country into a black hole for users of cellphones and the World Wide Web. Mubarak hoped to kill two birds with one stone: deprive the demonstrators of their favoured means of organisation — via Facebook, Twitter and other social network tools — and limit the world’s ability to monitor the repression planned against the protesters. The ploy failed miserably, but proved once again that there is no escape from the interconnectedness that envelopes the world.

The Internet was designed specifically to act as an autonomous network in which information would flow to its destination bypassing any obstacles that might arise. Many were, thus, surprised at how Egypt could disconnect itself in one fell swoop. As it turns out, that part was easy. Simply order the Internet service providers to change their gateway addresses so that data packets flowing to Egypt would not find their way. The government did not anticipate — indeed, could not have anticipated — the consequences of this. It angered everybody, without isolating the protesters from the world. With the world’s media watching, the stockmarket went into a tailspin, ATMs ran out of cash as banks remained shut, tourists (a critical component of the economy) fled by the thousands, businesses were shuttered, and foreign workers and investors left in droves as the country descended into chaos.

Mubarak had perhaps forgotten that in order to take his country out of the global information network, he would have to return it to the dark ages. Using the still functioning landlines, protesters continued to communicate with the world, receive faxed instructions from foreign supporters on how to turn their cellphones into modems and set up functional, if rudimentary, dial-up connections. Google started a new service that allowed telephone calls from Egypt to be turned into Tweets. Satellite phones and video uplinks run by international television channels kept the world glued to the live streaming of the mayhem unleashed by Mubarak’s supporters. When the government pulled the plug on Al-Jazeera, the channel continued its live broadcast from its London studio, using stringers and citizen journalists in Cairo.

The example of nearby Tunisia showed that even a technologically sophisticated dictatorship can only do so much. The Ben Ali regime — more Net-savvy than Egypt in its hacking and stealing of Facebook passwords — was ultimately undone by the unstoppable force of Tunis’s street protestors. Egypt’s more heavy-handed approach to strangling the Internet had to be abandoned as the costs mounted, not the least being Mubarak’s own ability to know what was going on. When after five days of Internet darkness, the government restored Internet connections, Facebook and  Twitter surged back with searing images and news from Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the international ‘hactivist’ group Anonymous showed solidarity with the protesters by mounting denial of service attacks on Egyptian government websites.

By the time the turmoil finally ends and the contours of post-Mubarak Egypt begin to take shape, the dictators of the world will have learned a vital lesson. The Egyptian regime sought to keep Egypt connected to global economic networks while restricting information flows. Sure, some countries such as Iran, Russia and China have managed it successfully, at least for now, by mastering the information technology, building effective firewalls and turning Internet technology against their opponents. But it is far too late for the likes of Mubarak to try that approach. Its brutish but ultimately futile attempts to cut Egypt off have shown disastrous results. Businesses will shun Egypt if they are denied the oxygen of free-flowing information. By failing to appreciate that globalisation comes as a package deal — bringing economic opportunities as well as information that empowers the citizenry — Mubarak put his regime, his legacy and his country at risk.