People Are Dying
I learned about Egypt’s revolution through a Reddit post from some anonymous guy begging people to spread the word. Twitter was already blocked. Facebook would be next. Here people are dying,
he wrote. I checked CNN and Al Jazeera and found nothing. It was strange—the only place the news existed was this scattered thread of desperate pleas.
Tunisia had just had its moment, and Egypt was ready. Tens of thousands in the streets asking for things that shouldn’t have to be revolutionary: the right to gather without permission, a president who actually had to leave after two terms, a wage that didn’t starve you, an end to thirty years of martial law. They wanted the interior minister’s head. They knew exactly who to blame.
The government shut off the internet. Shut off the phones. It was almost funny how direct it was—you can’t stop people from being angry, but you can stop them from talking about it. At least three people died that first night in Cairo, and somewhere the president’s family was booking flights to London.
What got to me was the moment the connection cut. Everything went blank. It wasn’t like the news was being censored. The actual event was disappearing. People dying in the streets, and I couldn’t see it anymore. Nobody could. The government had basically reached through the screen and switched off my ability to know what was happening.
The whole thing felt like it was supposed to prove that the internet changed everything. That connection meant power. That if people could just talk to each other, they could organize themselves into revolution. Maybe that was true for them. Maybe it wasn’t. But watching them try to erase the whole thing by just cutting the signal—that felt like the government admitting they were terrified of it.
I don’t know what happened to the guy who posted on Reddit. The revolution happened. Mubarak left. And then it got complicated in ways that don’t fit into neat narratives. But I remember checking that thread obsessively, refreshing a page that would load slower and slower, trying to see what was happening in a country where the government had decided my ability to see counted as a threat.