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Jon Alterman: Marc Owen Jones is an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. He's the author of a new book, Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East. Marc, welcome to Babel.
Marc Owen Jones: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Jon Alterman: What’s the key argument in your book?
Marc Owen Jones: The key argument of my book is that digital technology is being increasingly used as a tool of oppression and that we're seeing the emergence of what I call “digital superpowers”—especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—who are successful at leveraging digital technology to project influence both domestically and internationally.
Jon Alterman: It feels to me like this is part of a broader context of intra-regional struggles in the Middle East, arguably starting in the 1950s. Malcolm Kerr memorably wrote about the Arab Cold War and how Gamal Abdel Nasser used Sowt al-Arab—"the Voice of the Arabs”—radio broadcasting to reach around governments and talk directly to different governments' publics. It was part of this broader rivalry between the revolutionary republics and monarchies in the Middle East. Is this similar to that, or do you think it's really different?
Marc Owen Jones: I think that the principle is absolutely similar. The use of technology to spread hegemony is one aspect of this—as you talked about with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the use of the radio, in particular, along with newspapers. In Iran, we saw people recording cassettes of sermons and then circulating those as revolutionary aids. What we're seeing now with digital technology is the same, and I think digital technology—and all technologies—have a different functionality. Digital technology is different in the sense that everyone always has a smartphone on them, which allows them to be both receivers of information and communicators of information—so broadcasters and receivers. That in many ways is a unique development. It allows people to be contacted and communicated with almost at all times. That's what really separates it in this sense—the fact that the technology has changed. What we see is the advent of a sort of political order that is obviously trying to remold and redefine the region. Combined with that, you have Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Emirati president Mohammed Bin Zayed trying to reshape the region and project influence internationally. Now they have the digital technology with which to do that. You comparison makes perfect sense. It's just that the technology has changed, and the key drivers and influencers within this shift are different than they were in the 1950s.
Jon Alterman: The technology we skipped was television, and the Saudis created MBC Group and had newspapers—another technology we missed. The Saudis in many ways had hegemony over the pan-Arab news media for decades. Then we have Al Jazeera. You're currently living in Qatar. I’m sure that you’ve watched fair bit of Al Jazeera; you may also have appeared on it, as I have. It seems to me that Al Jazeera was perceived as a deep threat by most governments in the region—not only because it gave voice to democratic voices, but because it gave voice to radical voices. It had governments lose control of the narrative, and they felt it was driving the publics into very dangerous places. It always struck me that the government of Qatar was sort of aware of it, and that it enjoyed that a small country could have a huge footprint. They didn't really see much of a particular threat to them—although other countries like Saudi Arabia saw it as a deep threat.
Marc Owen Jones: The evolution of that media approach is also interesting to foreground that discussion. You mentioned MBC, and in my book, I talk briefly about how I think there is a tendency to overemphasize the role of Mohammed Bin Salman, and this media hegemony project. But, after the first Gulf War, we saw Saudi Arabia invest in legacy media outlets—from buying up satellites to news channels—to attempt to essentially dominate or exert hegemony over the media space. As you said, Al Jazeera was the upstart that challenged the ability to control that media space, and media space control was an Arabic wide phenomenon. I think that's what was very interesting about the Arab world. We live in a place where there are 25 different countries who speak Arabic as the national language. There are not many regions in the world where you have that kind of set up. So, that investment in those media outlets was an attempt to try and exert hegemony over that space. Al Jazeera itself, obviously, posed a challenge to that, and as you said, hosting some of the radical voices posed a challenge. In particular, hosting someone like Yusuf Qardawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was seen as very antagonistic. I think the Arab uprisings were another element of that history that showed to certain Gulf regimes that Al Jazeera's influence in the media space was dangerous. I remember in Bahrain, in particular, Al Jazeera broadcast, “Shouting in the Dark”—which was a documentary filmed about the repression of Bahrain protests in 2011. Very quickly, Bahrain complained to Qatar to have it banned. I even remember the foreign minister of Bahrain, Khalid Al-Khalifa, taking to Twitter to tell people to vote against the documentary when it was up for an award. That was a huge issue. They’re just two examples of the sensitivity that Al Jazeera has had. It is seen to be a problem for a number of states, but particularly Gulf steas. The blockade we saw in 2017—where Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the UAE blockaded Qatar—was interesting because one of the key demands was that Al Jazeera be shut down. A lot of the fake accounts and Twitter manipulation that I saw was specifically directed at Al Jazeera, so I think Al Jazeera was a key element of contention in a lot of the diplomatic issues we've seen in the Gulf.
Jon Alterman: I had a memorable, and somewhat strange dinner at a Lebanese restaurant in London with Ahmad Mansour, Faisal al-Qasim, and Yosri Fouda. At the time, Ahmad Mansour had just come back from being a correspondent in Fallujah, and it was clear to me that Ahmad Mansour's broadcasting from Fallujah was meant to whip up public sentiment against the United States. I suggested that it might not actually be a role for a journalist to whip up public sentiment, and he was arguing back. Faisal al-Qasim, the host of a very hot, contentious debate program, “The Opposite Direction,” got very excited and said, “You have to do this on my show.” Al Jazeera was really trying to create dissension. It was trying to give voice to some really fringe ideas. I know, as somebody who watched Al Jazeera, whenever I see a guest described as a “writer and researcher”— “katib wa bahith”—I wonder who they work for and what they’re doing. They’re often putting forward crazy ideas. That’s what is remarkable about this phenomenon. It feels like it’s part of a 70-year battle—not a battle with Al Jazeera, with Arab radio, or with social media, but a battle between various people in the Middle East for political and social influence. That’s what’s striking. As you said, there aren’t many regions in the world like this. The other one is Latin America, which doesn’t really have any of this competition for intellectual, cultural, or political hegemony.
Marc Owen Jones: One of the issues as well is that we live in a highly authoritarian region. I know Latin America was—and still is in some ways— also very autocratic. If you have censorship, or the dominance of particularly one state over a highly sensitive media, there aren't many outlets for Arabic speaking intellectuals—whether it's in universities or media. I think that a lot of those fringe ideas have not been visible to most people because they've just not been given any platform or space, so getting that window into society can be striking in that regard—just because we’re not used to seeing it and it is unusual. Radical for whom is another interesting point. I remember again in Bahrain when Saudi prince Waleed bin Talal set up a news channel that lasted about a day because in one of their first airings, they decided to interview a member of the Bahraini opposition. That was seen as a red line by the regime, but they were still a member of the legal opposition. I think that's one of the aspects we see here. There just hasn’t been that space for opposition, and maybe the idea of opposition culture is somewhat different because with authoritarian regimes, you don’t have those decades of oppositions developing through formal institutions in the same way we might be used to them developing. I think that can lend itself to having or creating fringe groups which also thrive in these kinds of political environments.
Jon Alterman: We’ve gone from radio to television, newspapers, to satellite television, to social media. Where does this go? Do you see a continuing battle for the heart and soul of Arabic speaking publics? I don't think there is any reason to think that social media is going to be the final word any more than satellite television was the final word. It won't go away, but where do you see communication and political communication going in the region?
Marc Owen Jones: I think this happens with every new technology. There's a tendency to fetishize new technology and to see it as deterministic and offering redemption against autocracy. That was certainly the case with social media in 2010 and 2011. People had a lot of faith in it as this liberating technology that would help bring in democracy. We saw it co-opted very quickly. Regimes were able to centralize control in a number of ways through intimidation and surveillance. I'm not saying, “that's just it—that social media is purely dystopian.” But at the same time, the desire to control those spaces isn't going away. What we’re seeing in the digital world is the increased centralization of control of the internet—which I think is going to play into the hand of authoritarian regimes. Hannah Arendt said that what distinguishes totalitarianism from authoritarianism is the desire to be more and more closely involved in the private life of citizens. Digital technology now allows regimes to increasingly cross that barrier into the private life through intrusive surveillance, monitoring, and creating data profiles of subjects based on their social media consumption patterns. I fear that whatever is next is going to be the use of data, date profiles, and surveillance tools to monitor what citizens do and don’t do.
Jon Alterman: That’s the government control side, but there's also the public space and public discussion side. As you've pointed out, there has been a lot of attention paid to Russia and the Internet Research Agency and efforts to subvert public conversation by making nothing true—or nobody is sure what's true. Is there anything that can be done about that piece— the hope that you can actually have a common, fact-based discussion among publics? Or does social media just knock that possibility out of contention?
Marc Owen Jones: If people are receiving their news from TikTok, Snapchat, or Twitter, and that space is penetrated either by the state apparatus or others, then the problem is that it is very difficult for people to enjoy what has been called a “shared reality.” When political discussions take place, to disrupt them, you have to supply some form of other issue—whether it’s a fabricated story or some other disinformation. That’s a problem, but the knowledge that people have about how their government is behaving are also undermining the trust that people have in institutions. Trust between institutions is crucial in creating that shared reality because if you don't trust these key interlocutors and nodes in disseminating information—like the media or the government—then people are always going to question what they're being told. I think this is something that we are seeing now in Russia and the United States. This is maybe something we've seen a lot in the Middle East, and I don't think it's necessarily going to get any better. I've seen a lot of cross germination between different spheres of disinformation. Covid-19 conspiracy theories are pretty big in Arabic language sources. There’s even an Arabic-speaking right-wing “Make Arabia Great Again” movement. You see them breaking bread together, and you see governments exploiting these narratives. The whole “QAnon” narrative was weaponized in Saudi Arabia to demonize Hillary Clinton because Clinton was seen as supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera. I think we have the danger that a lot of these more extreme fringe conspiracies actually cross boundaries and borders.
Jon Alterman: This question goes from political science to philosophy. What is the future of trust in a world where people have endless access to information that confirms whatever they want to believe—where there is no authoritative source or governments are not relied on or viewed as reliable conveyors of information? How do societies work when you don't have a common denominator to bring people together, or for people to center around?
Marc Owen Jones: I do think this is a produce of late capitalism. When we see this with the idea of living in a surveillance society, there is an atomization of the individual, where individuals are increasingly isolated from one another in a philosophical sense. In the Arab uprisings, I saw that the use of social media led to so many people not trusting anyone they could speak to for fear that those people could be ”mukhabarat” or part of the state apparatus. That reduces peoples’ trust. The rise of former president Donald Trump was an interesting phenomenon because part of Donald Trump's appeal was that he was someone who basically appeared for many as a savior fighting against the mainstream media and this corrupt political establishment. What happens in that kind of environment is that it leaves the space vulnerable to those kind of savior roles—the populists who can try and reassert trust by riding off the coat tails of the argument that we can’t trust anyone and that the mainstream media is lying. By doing that, they seek to rally a constituency. Part of populism is a reaction to a lack of trust in traditional institutions, and that lack of trust in institutions can contribute to radicalization. It can contribute to the rise of populism, and we might see more of that.
Jon Alterman: One of the things that I've also noticed is that people are still good at telling stories, and while on social media, there's sort of an atomization that goes on, you still have mass media that brings people together. I wrote an article late in 2011 about how television was more important than social media in spreading the Arab Spring because Al Jazeera in particular had a mass audience and could frame language and frame a plot line and bring people together to share an experience and share an understanding of an experience. I find social media doesn’t really do that because everybody's going off in their own direction. You have lots of small groups, and that can help you. It keeps you from doing things, but it's hard to build something because it is so hard to have that shared positive narrative—as you point out.
Marc Owen Jones: I think this has been an issue for the demise of state broadcasting. Right now, you and I are talking a few days after the queen of England has died. When she was coronated, it was the only thing that you could watch on TV. There was one channel, so what happens in these events where you might have eight people sitting in a living room watching the one TV that they have is that there is a lot of different people's attention focused on to a singular event. Rather than the fragmentation of attention, you have a concentration of attention on a singular event. That can be used, as you mentioned, for stories to build a narrative for state building to try and reinforce those symbols of state through technology. Now, we’re seeing the opposite, to a degree. We’re seeing the atomization and the fragmentation of attention across different platforms. People are asynchronous. People are watching content when and where they please. They’re watching different content, and there's so much content. A lot of it is probably entertainment. We’re not seeing the same kind of connection between large groups or communities in the national polity directed at the same things. There are attempts to try and reconcile that. That's why we see the control of Twitter. But these things lend themselves to the fact that it's becoming hard for traditional technology to create those narratives. Who’s watching them? Al Jazeera did that in the Arab uprisings, but one of the things Al Jazeera suffers from now is the fact that its viewership is a lot older— majority men in their late 40s and 50s. I know Al Jazeera still wants to capture the youth, but how do they do that without changing the way in which they package news and stories? Younger people are increasingly looking at Snapchat and TikTok. People below the age of 30 are much less likely to use Facebook. In class the other day full of 19- to 21-year-olds, I asked who used Facebook. No one put their hand up. It's all TikTok and Snapchat, so how does that mean people are going to consume news?
Jon Alterman: And what is news in that world?
Marc Owen Jones: The whole nature of that technology—the functionality of it—is short, snappy videos. I do these Twitter threads where I analyze Twitter, and then I try and put it in a thread of about 800 words to describe to people what's going on Twitter. I was asked to do it on TikTok, where I created this short video of no more than two minutes to describe this. What we’ll see in the news is these two-minute videos—maybe shorter—in which complex issues have to be explained in verry succinct terms. They also have to catch people’s attention incredibly quickly because it only takes a couple of seconds before someone decides whether to scroll up or not. It’s going to change the way in which we produce news—not necessarily make it more sensationalist, but there is going to perhaps be some gimmicks that are designed to try and suck people in to actually get them to watch it. I can only imagine what some of those gimmicks might be.
Jon Alterman: When you used to have a state broadcast, there is a way in which you’d have to earn an audience. The audience was guaranteed. Now, you don’t earn an audience by saying something verifiable or true. You earn an audience by saying something that is memorable—that evokes an emotional reaction. It does feel to me like the region is going toward a very different place than the stock images we’re all used to of a million people in the street shaking their fist and chanting in unison. Instead, it’s a lot of people staring at their phones wondering what they should pay attention to.
Marc Owen Jones: It reminds me a bit going to concerts. If you go to a concert now, most people whip out their phone and start filming it. There is this idea that we're living through this mediatization. Even if we are co-present in physical space, we're somehow mediating that experience through the technology that we have to, say, record it. I think the idea that we need bodies in the street at the end of the day to shift regimes or lead to revolutions—that you need bodies at the ballot box—might change. I think there's always going to be a space for people going out into the street, and on the extreme level, traditionally, that might be people that can't get jobs and therefore can't pay for food when the price of bread becomes so much that they cannot afford it. If that happens, I think people are going to go into the street—particularly if they can't charge their phones. Then they literally will have no choice but to go to the streets, so I think that's going to happen. But I think digital technology gives people an opportunity to partake in those experiences remotely, or to do different things. I know from the Arab Spring, there was sometimes a criticism of what were called “keyboard warriors”—people who stay bind their phones or computers and criticize the regimes from afar—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Every revolution, army or whatever needs some sort of communications or logistics team who all perform different functions. But I do think the nature of public space might change. We’ve seen groups like Anonymous hackers who are able to bring down infrastructure. Today, Anonymous and the Ukrainian armed forces basically hacked the Russian taxi system and made all the taxis in Russia go to the same spot in Moscow, causing this kind of infrastructural gridlock. It's pretty funny. I really liked it. We’ll see more of that. If we are becoming more technologically savvy, does this mean we're going to have people whose tactics of protest are going to be more integrated with that technological world and are we going to see forms of civil disobedience that change because of that? That's very possible. Rather than going and blocking a road in a form civil disobedience, people might hack a power station to switch off power or hack a police station and wipe files. That is one interesting thing that we might see develop, and it is already happening right now, but in a far more global context. Digital technology has exposed people from different parts of the world to different struggles and causes, and I think that’s also an interesting development.
Jon Alterman: There is a lot to watch. Marc Owen Jones, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.
Marc Owen Jones: Thank you, Jon. It was great to be here.