When I first met when I heard about the campaign by people on Reddit who had ruined prosperous hedge funds, which wanted to benefit struggling companies like the video game retailer GameStop, I went back in time. Not quite back to 2008, where many members of WallStreetBets, and those living through their chaos, are arousing their anger over the financial system. It was, of course, the year of Too Big to Fail, when many of the most powerful and loose banks and trading companies were saved from ruin for the sake of preserving the world economy. Instead, I thought of the democracy protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which began almost exactly ten years before the date before the January 25, 2011 GameStop hijacking.
These protests, which were part of a regional movement to overthrow autocratic governments known as the Arab Spring, were a culmination of the idea that the Internet would liberate the world. At the time, it was difficult not to be whipped up by the belief that a group of activists using the tools of social networks could overthrow an oppressive regime. Ten years later, this hope must have largely evaporated. Instead of bringing democratic institutions to countries like Egypt, they have long denied it, the internet often works the other way around, destabilizing democracy around the world and spreading inequality. But every time an online group tries to keep it to the man, let’s dream ourselves again.
The protests that exactly a decade ago against Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, who was then in power for 30 years, is widely regarded as being driven by the internet, which is seen as extremely open to an autocratic government. In the days before the protest, the news spread via social networks. More than 90,000 people signed up to participate via Facebook, which surprised the authorities and gave the movement momentum from the start.
After the Egyptian government determined what was going on, it tried to block access to Facebook and Twitter. And when it was less than successful, it took the extraordinary step two days later to eliminate the Internet altogether. An expert quoted in WIRED at the time said that people at ISPs seem to get one-on-one calls and say they need to get themselves off the air. ‘No wonder people started believing that the internet has magical, democracy-spreading powers – here was an autocratic government that saw the whole project as a threat to its survival, rather than as something for its own purpose to turn.
This desperate decision, which came on January 28, prompted me to write about the protests The New York Times. I was in Egypt a few years earlier for a technology conference in Alexandria, so I called people I met to ask what was going on. When the closing ends, their shocked bills end up in my mailbox. “It was the first time I was digitally disabled,” wrote a 26-year-old computer science graduate. ‘Imagine that you are sitting at home and have no connection with the outside world. I made the decision: ‘This is nonsense, we are not sheep in their flock.’ I went down and joined the protests. ”
In this way, the protests increased rapidly during the five days of the internet outage and they remained the same course after the internet returned. On February 11, Mubarak was out. There were elections, a new government and a sense of change. Then a suspicion that the change might have been just superficial, while the same elite still mention the shots. Two and a half years later, there was a military coup, the leader of which is still in charge today.
In recent days, the experience of these Reddit-based speculators with the help of inexpensive, easily accessible trading programs such as Robinhood, the Tahrir Square experience has neatly followed, from shocking early successes, a sense that the whole world is watching, to a comprehensive suppression. which can ultimately further promote the movement.