Interview with Alaa Abd al-Fattah, Tahrir Square, 12 pm, July 19th

Alaa Abd al-Fattah has been an important contributor to Egypt's pro-democracy movement since the early 2000s. Drawing on his technological expertise as a software developer, he played a pioneering role in shaping the online infrastructure of activism and contestation that had a crucial part in the uprising that brought down the Mubarak regime. A prominent blogger in his own right, his perhaps most significant contribution to the democracy movement lies in the assistance he has provided to other bloggers and activists in finding ways to make their voices heard. The "Egyptian Blogs Aggregator," a key hub for Egypt's political bloggers that Alaa founded together with his wife Manal Hassan, is only one of many efforts he has made on behalf of Egyptian democracy activists.

Since the announcement of Mubarak's resignation and the devolution of political power to a committee of ruling generals, Alaa has dedicated himself to keeping the momentum of the popular movement alive. His refusal to abandon the politics of street protest and entrust Egypt's political future to the ruling generals has made him a target of the country's military rulers. On October 30th, 2011, he was arrested by military authorities on a charge of having incited violence while participating in a large demonstration to protest the persecution of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority. What organizers had planned as a peaceful march to the Maspiro television station turned into a massacre when security forces attacked the protesters, killing 27 and wounding hundreds. In the aftermath, military officials sought to lay the blame for the bloodshed on the protesters themselves, and subsequently arrested a number of well-known activists who had been seen participating in the march. Alaa was at the top of their list. In response to Alaa's arrest, large demonstrations demanding that he be released were held in Cairo and Alexandria. On December 26th he was finally allowed to leave prison, most of the charges against him having been dropped.¹

For many observers, the Egyptian revolution that began on January 25th, 2011 was evidence of a new political terrain produced by social media and Internet-based technology more broadly. The fact that Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere were important sites for the channeling and mobilization of anti-regime sentiment prior to the 25th, and for the organization and coordination of the protests once they began, led many observers to speak of a "Facebook revolution." In the months after the uprising began, much of the commentary on the event, both journalistic and scholarly, remained transfixed by such a technologically-centered account of the forms of political agency propelling the revolutionary movements in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Analysts of the Arab Spring have only recently begun to explore the ways different political actors working within distinct contexts of political struggle in the Middle East sought to exploit the new infrastructural conditions and indeterminacies such media introduce.

When I went for a short research trip to Cairo in July of last year, I immediately set out to find and interview Alaa. I knew that his extensive experience with both on and offline activism in Egypt over the last decade made him uniquely capable of providing insights into the complicated role new media played in setting the stage for the political upheavals of early 2011. I had heard much about Alaa's contributions to the democracy movement a few years earlier, in 2008, when I spent ten months in Cairo working on a project concerning Egyptian bloggers and their growing role within Egyptian political life. At the time, I was interested in how the Egyptian blogosphere had become one arena wherein the oppositions between Islamist and secularist political visions were downplayed, and consequently, where new practices of cooperation and new forms of political discourse were emerging. I was particularly keen to understand the norms of self-presentation, commentary, and dialogue that had come to govern the political blogosphere and that were enabling the creation of unprecedented alliances and mobilizations both within and beyond the blogosphere itself. When I met...