An Internet Archive Seeks to Rekindle the Egyptian Revolution's Spirit

Egypt’s 2011 revolution was remarkable for its self-awareness. The power to photograph, film, and broadcast protests across the Internet in real time seemed to prove the emancipatory power of technology. At Tahrir Square, an independent media group formed by a handful of young activists called Mosireen collected videos recorded by smartphone-wielding protesters that documented police abuses. Mosireen hoped to use the crowd-sourced videos as evidence against President Hosni Mubarak’s brutal security forces in court. But those trials never came to pass: Egyptian courts cleared Mubarak and some of his top aides of any responsibility for the shooting of demonstrators in the revolution’s first days.

The state’s narrative—if the erasure of the revolution’s history can be called a narrative—has lurched between farce and tragedy. In January 2011, as anti-regime protesters filled Tahrir Square, state television broadcast images of empty streets. After the 2013 coup, prosecutors used Mosireen’s videos, available on its YouTube, to convict protesters in court, including at the so-called Shura Council trial, which led to the sentencing of the activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah. Earlier this year, Egypt’s government struck all reference to the 2011 and 2013 uprisings from school textbooks.