What's Up with Tahrir Square?

Every report I get from Tahrir square is that it's become a sort of impromptu community, a tent city that sings songs, chants, dreams of a better future, and is surrounded on all sides by tanks. I hear stories of harassment by thugs, especially at night, but by and large it looks like the regime is perfectly happy to let the Tahrir protest go on peacefully, at least for now: if it dwindles down to a small core, they may decide that it's worth sending in the thugs. Their goal is to restore order everywhere else, and hope that the international media, and the protesters themselves, get bored. Tahrir is rapidly becoming an enclosed space.

What to Do?

I research the politics behind building up and planning cities, and the use of urban space. This doesn't make me an expert in how to run a revolution, but it does give me a particular way of looking at these things, and a specific piece of advice for the protesters: Don't stay in Tahrir square. Move!

Go someplace you're not supposed to be.

I'm not talking about turning violent here. Just leave Tahrir, and go, non-violently, to someplace the government doesn't want you to be. March peacefully to one of the Presidential palaces, or a major ministry. Assert your ability to go anywhere, on any street. Claim not just one symbolic piece of the city - Tahrir square - but any and all of it.

Why?

Street protests seem to be the sole source of leverage the opposition has. To the extent they diminish, I think it's more likely that my most pessimistic predictions will come true. To the extent that the protests continue, and to the extent that they keep life from returning to normal, the opposition has more leverage to get real concessions, doubly so if, as often happens, the government tries too brutally to contain them, or doesn't contain them well enough, and regime elements may panic and splinter. This is why I look at reports from Tahrir square, and hope against hope that they keep protesting and keep pushing.

What the Government may be Up to?

Personally, I think the [regime] strategy is this: Move slowly. Move as slowly as possible, to diminish momentum, and so that the international media gets bored, moves on to something else, and relieves most of the pressure. Then, negotiate, slowly, with the elements of the opposition that the government chooses, and use a mix of repression and tolerance to break the protest movement. Keep it confined to Tahrir square, restore normalcy elsewhere, and don't do anything so flagrantly violent - like opening fire indiscriminately - to attract global attention and sympathy. Instead, quietly harass protesters with hard-to-confirm small-scale thuggery, arrest them here and there, and let the people in Tahrir get frustrated by the lack of progress until they dwindle down to a smaller core of activists. try to divide the opposition by dealing with some elements (the ones who will get forever bogged down in bad-faith negotiations) while labeling the remainder dangerous Islamist radicals. Thus isolated, they can then be repressed brutally.

Stereotypes of Revolution and People

When you hear about a revolution, in the Middle East or elsewhere, some assumptions and images pop automatically to mind. You probably imagine gangs roaming the streets, people using the anarchy to take personal grudges out on each other, or steal some stuff, or beat people up just because they're sixteen and drunk on power. You expect the movement factions to start maneuvering for to turn on each other as soon as the tyrant is gone. You expect scenes out of Hobbes. And around here, you expect people to start targeting Westerners.

The images fit so naturally together because they're from a script, one that's been developed and elaborated in reportage over decades, in several countries. It's an extremely polished, high-resolution image, backed by decades of examples, tastefully aggregated into a narrative so that details of actual countries and events fall away, and what's left is a sort of higher-amplitude Truth.

But so far it just isn't so. No “death to America”, no-one calling on anyone to hurt foreigners, and nobody actually doing it. There's looting – half of which I still think is being orchestrated by the government to scare people – but people organized neighborhood watches out of nowhere to prevent it. I admit I'm a little creeped out when teenagers with furniture fragments offer to walk me home, but I also have to admit that my neighborhood is quiet and safe.

Twitter Doesn't Kill Tyranny, People Kill Tyranny

It's amazing to me that despite the fact that the internet blackout here is near-total, people on the news are still asking if this, too, is a Twitter Revolution ™ , leading me to wonder if there's anything talking heads and e-literati do not think is a Twitter Revolution. In the early stages, sure, lots of people were communicating by facebook, but the major action happened after the internet went out. Much of the protesting was organized the old-fashioned way, by word of mouth, and, once service came back on, by phone. I'm not sure if it's an irony, or a straightforward rebuttal to the people who think that technology is an agent rather than a tool, that Egypt, among the most social media-savvy of Arab countries, finally rose up after the internet went dark.