Inside the Authoritarian Playbook: What They Learned from the Arab Spring (Part 1)

Dr. Jim: [: 00:00:00

The Arab Spring terrified authoritarians in the billionaire class. It pushed them to collude with social platforms, to recentralize control, and it evolved now into a model of informational autocracy that extends power without having tanks in the street.

The reason why we are here today, and the reason why you see more and more countries around the world take an authoritarian stance is because of the intersection of billionaires, social media platforms, and informational autocracy coming together to create a surveillance state. This isn't. Science fiction.

llison tell you exactly what [: 00:01:00

Larry Ellison: The truth is we don't really turn it off. What we do is we record it so no one can see it, but no one can get into that recording without a court order. So you get the privacy you requested. But a court order, if you get a court order, we will, you know, judge, you know, can order. I, I wanna look at that.

This so-called bathroom break. We won't listen in unless there's a court order, and, but we transmit the video back to headquarters. So headquarters and, and AI is constantly monitoring the video. The police will be on their best behavior because we record, we're, we're constantly recording, watching, and recording everything that's going on.

ave a drone, follow the car. [: 00:02:00

Dr. Jim: that's the future that Ellison wants a constant sustained surveillance state that.

Watches every single thing that you do and that future state. Has its grandparents in the Arab Spring and the social media platforms that allowed for the Arab Spring to take hold and rattle many of these autocrats, many of these dictators and oligarchs, and rethink their relationship with social media platforms.

int that going forward, they [: 00:03:00

Being swayed into their point of view and maintaining their status quo and maintaining their hold on power regardless of how bad things get . That's what we're staring down the barrel of today. But the whole reason why we're staring down that barrel is because of the Arab Spring and what happened as a result.

that began in Tunisia in late: 2010

Saw it Libya, saw it, Bahrain, Syria, and beyond in 2011. The reasons why the populations rose up against these dictatorial regimes was because of everyday things that we even have seen in our own experience. Lack of jobs, high prices, corruption, lack of human [00:04:00] dignity, and all of that was mobilized through cheap technology, primarily cheap phones, social media platforms, satellite TVs, and all of that linked to.

A frustrated population and a shared story. It wasn't just one movement or one ideology. It was a cascade where seeing others act and seeing others have the courage to mobilize, lowered the risk of acting yourself, and that allowed people to take to the streets. Now, the regimes in power at the time tried everything they could to.

Had this off at the past. They tried censorship, throttling, crackdowns, and sometimes it yielded some results in the short term, but oftentimes it backfired and also accelerated the resistance.

nments was that social media [: 00:05:00

Something needed to be done where these social media platforms and these media platforms needed all sorts of back doors so that government could re exert power and control and stifle any uprising. So that their grip on power was never lost. That was what came out of the Arab Spring.

Now, the other thing that we have to understand is what we're talking about when we talk about informational autocracy.

contrast to the world in the: 1980

During the Cold War, you'll had roughly half of the [00:06:00] world. Less than half of the world that was under dictatorial control. That's shifted. Now, what's different is that you're not seeing tanks in the streets and mass executions like you saw in Tiana and Square and other places. What you're seeing though is the Victor Orban model of dictatorship, the Vladimir Putin model of dictatorship, where reality is bent and warped into a particular point of view.

Through the use of all sorts of media and social media platforms.

Now, what you see in these different dictatorships around the world is that there's still elections. There's still courts, there's still economic growth stats that are pushed out, but media is shaped to. Fit the narrative that the government dictates and what you have with this sort of governing model.

tive was put into place. You [: 00:07:00

What you see when you have informational autocracy implemented is that it's manufactured apathy, it's manufactured weakness, it's learned helplessness that's brought to a national scale, and the way you achieve that is by flooding the zone. All of the media channels with narratives that are either misinformation, disinformation, or favorable to the regime. The other side of that coin is that all of these regimes nudge their willing media and social media platforms to adjust their algorithms and their models to bury descent.

Does that sound familiar yet?

to keep things quiet in the [: 00:08:00

And that's actually what we're seeing in the US

now that we know what the Arab Spring involved and how social media platforms played a critical role in those uprisings. And we also know how. The vast majority of dictatorships operate today through informational autocracy. It's time to bridge the gap and understand the role of social media platforms and media platforms today in expanding the role of the oligarchy, the billionaire class, and their puppets in government to maintain control.

ou see from Musk to Bezos to [: 00:09:00

Now, a decade ago when these protests ripped through Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and others, social media wasn't what started the fires.

aid of social media was that [: 00:10:00

retweet.

Governments in that time lost their monopoly and control on information, at least for a little bit. They tried to censor, they throttled, they're arrested, they cut the internet off. But all of these networks who didn't have a leader reassembled anyways, and were able to push forward. And at the same time that all of this was happening, what we saw in the post-Cold War era was a new kind of strong man rising to power all across the world.

d feeds, compliant media and [: 00:11:00

all of these upstarts in the new dictatorships, they allowed for democratic practices to take place, but they gamed every element of it so that they could gain power and maintain power.

And when you look at that dynamic, it's those playbooks that the current regime, and particularly Steve Bannon and others around this regime deployed.

To gain power in the us. When you think about those uprisings, it taught everyone that was on the ground floor an important lesson that there's more of us than there are of them, . But there were lessons learned by the oligarchs and those in power as well, and those lessons they learned was that you cannot have democratized communication.

rely on getting messages out [: 00:12:00

So how did they actually do that? When you think about how the Arab Spring happened, the first thing that social media platforms allowed was that it crashed the barrier to protests Before social media platforms, people were isolated and operating in silos. You would have pockets of resistance here and there, but it was generally disconnected and there was no way to.

re having to consolidate and [: 00:13:00

And those communities created momentum and traction into whatever you wanted to push forward.

Yeah, and as you saw your friends, your neighbors, and people across the country align with you, you started to recognize that, hey, what I'm feeling in my little town over here is the same thing as they're feeling halfway across the country and halfway around the world.

There's more to this than just what I'm feeling, so maybe it's time for me to take action. And that's how social media allowed for. Mass protests to take hold.

The second thing that happened, as you saw social platforms accelerate the Arab Spring and other protest movements was that these networks beat hierarchies.

udent unions, worker groups, [: 00:14:00

Oftentimes, these movements accelerated on Fridays after prayers. They met after the prayers, and they marched from there. And what made that effective was that there wasn't a single throat to choke. Police could go after one segment, and you still had multiple other segments that were moving in unison, all over the country.

So when you have pockets of decentralized resistance, coalescing and mobilizing, it becomes difficult to control.

etwork shut down visibility, [: 00:15:00

People like to downplay all of this as slacktivism and movements by hashtags, but all of these things combined together acted in a lot of ways, like a pressure cooker. Every little drop of engagement counted and it created a critical mass, which set off. The Arab Spring and it made it impossible to control. What did you see from the regimes that were experiencing this? The regimes panicked.

puppets in government around [: 00:16:00

An important lesson when you try to beat down the crowds on a live feed that's expensive, that creates martyrs, it makes markets unstable, it creates a lot of ill will, and it actually accelerates the movement against you.

So what did they do? They updated their operating systems. They realized that they could never win another war or an uprising by completely.

Crushing the opposition in full view of all of the assembled masses and live streams.

So they had to take a different approach and they had to play a long game. And what happened was a shift in tactics by all of these autocrats where they're creating the appearance of competence. They're creating the appearance of growth.

shouted down as radicals or [: 00:17:00

So rather than the quick flashy tanks in the street approach, these people started playing the long game

And the intent of the long game was to make you too apathetic to care and make you numb instead of angry. Because the goal is to keep the lights on and make sure that the elites continue to get paid and you do all of your disappearing off camera and unnoticed. And what did you actually see?

ng departments of justice or [: 00:18:00

You still have violence, but it's off camera and it's targeted. And it's wrapped in language of anti extremism or national pride to protect the brand that these autocrats are trying to push forward into their countries. So why did you see the switch from what we're used to Jack booted thugs in the street?

Throwing people into train cars to more talking points or a soft dictatorship.

The reason why you saw that is because the global economy runs on protecting and expanding shareholder value. Education markets, stock markets, those all get global attention. And when you're crushing descent under the treads of your tanks, shareholders don't like that, that spooks investors, and it invites sanctions.

gorithm. Control ad budgets, [: 00:19:00

In Peru, you have Montesinos paying off TV stations to shape the coverage in. The view that he wants that bribe is cheaper than the battalion rolling through the streets, dealing with riots and halfway around the world.

From there in Singapore, Lee Kwan Yu, who is talking about restraint, doesn't make a spectacle, manages the optics. You have two different geographies using the same playbook. Appear competent. And operate methodically, keep the blood out of the streets and you maintain power,. So you see that model in play and now what you've seen is social media platforms making a shift where they're acting as agents of the state.

lesson. It showed that open [: 00:20:00

Essentially what they did is that they turned private platforms into soft deputies of state power,

and if they didn't do that. They turn these platforms into risk averse gatekeepers to make sure that the billionaires don't lose their money.

And when you think about it, all of these tech oligarchs want the same thing. They want a future where they're in charge, all their resources sit within their bank accounts, and everybody else is depending on them for survival.

So in order to do that, you need quiet streets. You need steady revenue, and you need a calm political environment.

centralization of all sorts [: 00:21:00