The Revolution Will Be Digitised
Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria
Pluto Press, 272pp, £19.99, ISBN 9780745337142
reviewed by Giovanni Vimercati
Unlike many accounts of what Western commentators referred to as the ‘Arab Springs’ and the creative insurgency that chronicled and simultaneously fuelled them, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria refrains from the acritical celebration of the alleged power of social media to undermine authoritarian regimes. Rather than simply a skeptical dismissal of the role grassroots media played in the Syrian uprising, Donatella Della Ratta has produced an in-depth study of its genesis, dynamics and implications. ‘Without wanting to downplay the incredible creativity of Syrian grassroots media post-2011 and its disruptive energy, I am wary of these celebratory readings of the creative insurgency and of its potential as an enabler of political change’, the author premises.
Della Ratta’s sobering assessment of networked communications technologies in relation to both political antagonism and contemporary warfare is all the more dependable due to her own personal involvement in the subject. As Creative Commons regional coordinator for the Arab World, not only did the author take part in the genesis of Syria’s networked activism, but, and most crucially perhaps, also gained an insider’s understanding of its fault lines. While the meteoric rise of grassroots digital productions in Syria is inseparable from the uprising against the country’s regime, the latter has cynically manipulated image making for its own repressive ends. Furthermore, oppositional images produced and circulated hoping to bear witness to the regime’s crimes have flown into an audiovisual ocean where documentary evidence often drowns. The uprising and the international civil war that followed witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of media content, turning Syria’s visual production ‘into a market good highly sought after by international NGOs, journalists, TV networks, film festivals and the global art market’. What was initially and genuinely meant to challenge the status quo and oppose a brutal regime entered a networked flow where ‘participation, access, inclusion and discussion – attributes that come as a package attached to the very idea of democracy – are just fantasies serving as the ideological infrastructure for communicative capitalism’. It is precisely the provenance and fate of these images that the author investigates. Though exclusively focused on the Syrian case, Shooting a Revolution raises and explores issues that remain central to anyone interested in understanding the emancipatory potential of media and its byproducts.
Della Ratta’s critique does not merely register the failure of (digital) dissent in Syria to coalesce into a concrete project for political change, but looks at the possible structural reasons behind this tactical lack of success. In tracing the history of Arab digital activism the author distinguishes two distinct phases: an initial one in the early 2000s when neither Western NGOs nor governments funded or supported it, and a second when funding and international exposure were granted through the protocols of humanitarian capitalism. ‘As foreseen by Ben Gharbia long before the “Arab Spring”, digital activists faced a dramatic restructuring of their ecosystem, and had to readapt to the emerging political economy of the media development industry’. The author goes on to note how ‘the main themes and concerns of Arab networked activism [. . .] have been heavily influenced by Western NGOs’ advocacy programmes implemented in the region throughout the 2000s with the aim of creating a domestic counter-balance to local authoritarianism’. Buzzwords and phrases such as ‘empowerment’, ‘capacity building’, ‘participatory development’, ‘partnership’, ‘citizenship’, ‘advocacy’ and ‘social capital’ became the indispensable vocabulary used to secure international funding. This semantic shift towards a more institutionally palatable form of dissidence mirrored ‘a trend in the region [which] emphasized the role of the market as a counter-balance to the corrupt authoritarian state, and promoted the idea of a non-state subject, civil society’. With the noble intent of fostering civil society, the benevolent forces of western humanitarianism, in some instances, ended up providing the wrong tools to the right cause, something activists in the Arab world did not fail to notice. ‘Why are we doing a training about digital storytelling if we are not even able to write a political communiqué when our main goal is to get more people to Tahrir square?’ pondered Lina Atallah from the Egyptian collective Mada Masr after attending one of those ‘workshops’ often ‘designed following the donors’ requirements rather than taking into account local needs’.
If, on the one hand, Della Ratta is always careful not to idealize the revolutionary potential of social media and their putative horizontality, on the other she never downplays the subversive energies released by Syrian activists during the uprising. Even if unable to develop into a concrete, political alternative, the uprising in Syria ushered in new forms of emancipated image making. In a radical departure from previous modes of cultural production, digital dissidents openly mocked the regime and détourned its propaganda messages. Emblematic of this is the ‘raised hand’ campaign and its subvertising at the hands of Syrian netizens. In an effort to curb the ‘unlawful’ protests that had started to shake its paranoid foundations in the spring of 2011, the Syrian regime launched a campaign consisting of ‘big white billboards featuring a blue hand which served as the first letter for the Arabic word ana (“I”), helping to compose the phrase ana ma’al qanun (“I am with the law”)’. Soon after, another set of raised hands appeared online. Built on the same visual pattern, they served to hijack the regime’s original message by forging new slogans such as ‘I am free’ or ‘I am not Indian’, the latter mocking ‘the official regime narrative depicting Syria’s street protests as having been fabricated using footage of unrest happening elsewhere’.
Significantly, some of these détournements found their way defiantly ‘from the virtual alleys of Facebook [on] to the real streets of Syria’, bridging the political gap between discourse and action. Though the western commentariat obsessed over these miraculous ‘Twitter or Facebook revolutions’, as if Silicon Valley companies alone were responsible for challenging autocrats the Arab world over, things on the ground were far from virtual. Shooting a Revolution measures the constitutive rhetoric of digital claims against the realities of revolt and the repression that always follows it. ‘While international media focused on finding testimonials to promote the idea of a “revolution 2.0” in Syria, anonymous people were being imprisoned, tortured or killed, not for having liked a Facebook page or tweeted anti-regime slogans, but for having joined actual demonstrations on the ground’. Alas, the ‘commodity activism’ promulgated by Silicon Valley moguls did not prevent the ‘coalition of the connected’ from being slaughtered in the streets. It is by looking at the political economy of digital activism that Della Ratta deconstructs the myth of tech-powered revolutions. This technologically-determined myth simultaneously denies the militant agency of local activists, and pushes ‘the latter to co-author and self-produce a new form of digital Neo-Orientalism’: the middle-eastern Other as passive victim of its own backwardness waiting to be rescued by western technological superiority. Rather than tech-fuelled or merely idealistic, the roots and causes of the Syrian uprising were of a very material kind. Though western media have predictably focused on the regime-change side of the protesters’ demands, one of the slogans that echoed throughout the Arab world in 2011 was ‘bread, freedom and social justice’.
The widening inequalities and social injustices that paved the way to the uprising stemmed from the contradictions of what Della Ratta calls the process of ‘selective liberalization’, presided over by Bashar al-Assad following the death of his father in 2000. This process entailed the liberalization of certain sectors of the economy that were entrusted to business individuals or families with close ties to the regime. So, while ostensibly in the hands of private initiative, business interests were closely monitored and monopolised by al-Assad and his inner circle. Like anywhere else, privatisation in Syria created a small, aspirational middle class, and exacerbated the material conditions of the working poor. (Tellingly, disappointed members of the former and exasperated members of the latter joined forces in the protests.) At the symbolic centre of this process of selective liberalization was the creative industry, with producers of mosalsalat (a TV series) invested with a pivotal role in the ‘seemingly reformist’ project envisioned by the Syrian president. This hierarchical initiative relied on producers of drama to stage and convey in their work the principles of tanwir, ‘a morally edifying process connected to the firm belief that Syrian society has to be healed of its alleged social backwardness (takhalluf ijtima’i) in order to progress and develop’. Intrinsic to the paternalistic premise of tanwir television was the belief that social and cultural emancipation could not possibly be initiated from below but had ‘to be gradual, engineered and managed from the top down by an enlightened minority’. Audiences were seen as passive receptacles waiting to be enlightened by a benevolent regime willing to acknowledge, albeit fictionally, the taboos and injustices of a society it presided over with an iron fist.
The wave of creative insurgency that the Syrian uprising unleashed disproved this patronising assumption. The culture of ‘commissioned criticism’ that characterised the television industry in Syria was upturned by the advent of protest DIY media, which confronted the regime. While the TV industry in Syria continued in its diplomatic effort to ‘package freedom for the sake of market consumption while failing to acknowledge the agency of those demanding that very freedom in the streets of Syria’, grassroots productions reached for al-Assad’s jugular. Masasit Mati’s Top Goon – Diaries of a Little Dictator stands as a perfect example of how the tactical manipulation of mosalsalat producers was outdone by the uncompromising satire of the new generation. Unsparing and infused with dark humour, Top Goon caricatures Assad as a paranoid weakling propped up by his loyal police and media. With more than 175,000 YouTube views and half a million likes on Facebook, the webseries was featured on the pages of the New York Times, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, Washington Post, al-Jazeera English and other international outlets. Tragically, the outbreak of an obdurate civil war scorched the earth around a new generation of media practitioners, people whose creativity was forged by political dissent, not compromise. Silenced at home, many were forced into exile. In the span of a few years, their work went from being censored by the regime to being celebrated in art spaces and festivals all over Europe and North America.
‘In a situation of civil war, daily violence and the struggle for material survival, Syrian image-makers have been obliged, at some point, to rely on the commodification of visual media subtracted from the domain of the commons, in order to secure themselves a financial subsistence’. Even in her analysis of the co-optation of insurgent culture, the author never frames the issue in romantic terms, but rather looks at the material circumstances that determined it. Many Syrian artist-activists have been faced with the dilemma of whether to continue enlisting their work in the service of an unprofitable revolution, or sell it in the art market. This quandary is one that inevitably relates to audiences, too. As the filmmaker Orwa al-Mokdad pointed out: ‘unlike the regime who aims its media propaganda towards the domestic public and the army, our images have become self-complacent of their aesthetic beauty and of their inner heroism in confronting violence; to the point that they have lost their communicative value. We are not aware of whom we are talking to when we film our beautiful images’. Not only that, but the very ecosystem in which these ‘beautiful images’ found themselves is an overcrowded space where meaning is by no means univocal. What Della Ratta calls the ‘networked image’ is no longer tied to any indexical truth; multiple meanings can be attached to it through digital manipulation, circulation and distortion. As an example, the author cites the images of Palmyra, whose symbolic referent changed over the course of a few years, going from an ancient Roman heritage site to a theatre of horrors under Daesh, and later becoming a propaganda platform when the Russians organised a classical concert there, after they had re-captured the site on behalf of their ally, Bashar al-Assad.
No longer associated with a fixed, symbolic meaning, the ‘Syrian image’ has become a fluctuant signifier onto which multiple, contrasting meanings can be inscribed. ‘As much as the uprising turned civil war is a matter that no longer concerns only Syria but, rather, a plethora of regional and international subjects, so is the Syrian image no longer the exclusive domain of Syrian image-makers’, the author concludes. This loss of authorial officialdom does not exclusively concern images produced by and during the Syrian uprising/civil war – which makes Shooting a Revolution a timely reflection on the use and function of images in a world no longer held together by a coherent, dominant narrative.
Della Ratta’s sobering assessment of networked communications technologies in relation to both political antagonism and contemporary warfare is all the more dependable due to her own personal involvement in the subject. As Creative Commons regional coordinator for the Arab World, not only did the author take part in the genesis of Syria’s networked activism, but, and most crucially perhaps, also gained an insider’s understanding of its fault lines. While the meteoric rise of grassroots digital productions in Syria is inseparable from the uprising against the country’s regime, the latter has cynically manipulated image making for its own repressive ends. Furthermore, oppositional images produced and circulated hoping to bear witness to the regime’s crimes have flown into an audiovisual ocean where documentary evidence often drowns. The uprising and the international civil war that followed witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of media content, turning Syria’s visual production ‘into a market good highly sought after by international NGOs, journalists, TV networks, film festivals and the global art market’. What was initially and genuinely meant to challenge the status quo and oppose a brutal regime entered a networked flow where ‘participation, access, inclusion and discussion – attributes that come as a package attached to the very idea of democracy – are just fantasies serving as the ideological infrastructure for communicative capitalism’. It is precisely the provenance and fate of these images that the author investigates. Though exclusively focused on the Syrian case, Shooting a Revolution raises and explores issues that remain central to anyone interested in understanding the emancipatory potential of media and its byproducts.
Della Ratta’s critique does not merely register the failure of (digital) dissent in Syria to coalesce into a concrete project for political change, but looks at the possible structural reasons behind this tactical lack of success. In tracing the history of Arab digital activism the author distinguishes two distinct phases: an initial one in the early 2000s when neither Western NGOs nor governments funded or supported it, and a second when funding and international exposure were granted through the protocols of humanitarian capitalism. ‘As foreseen by Ben Gharbia long before the “Arab Spring”, digital activists faced a dramatic restructuring of their ecosystem, and had to readapt to the emerging political economy of the media development industry’. The author goes on to note how ‘the main themes and concerns of Arab networked activism [. . .] have been heavily influenced by Western NGOs’ advocacy programmes implemented in the region throughout the 2000s with the aim of creating a domestic counter-balance to local authoritarianism’. Buzzwords and phrases such as ‘empowerment’, ‘capacity building’, ‘participatory development’, ‘partnership’, ‘citizenship’, ‘advocacy’ and ‘social capital’ became the indispensable vocabulary used to secure international funding. This semantic shift towards a more institutionally palatable form of dissidence mirrored ‘a trend in the region [which] emphasized the role of the market as a counter-balance to the corrupt authoritarian state, and promoted the idea of a non-state subject, civil society’. With the noble intent of fostering civil society, the benevolent forces of western humanitarianism, in some instances, ended up providing the wrong tools to the right cause, something activists in the Arab world did not fail to notice. ‘Why are we doing a training about digital storytelling if we are not even able to write a political communiqué when our main goal is to get more people to Tahrir square?’ pondered Lina Atallah from the Egyptian collective Mada Masr after attending one of those ‘workshops’ often ‘designed following the donors’ requirements rather than taking into account local needs’.
If, on the one hand, Della Ratta is always careful not to idealize the revolutionary potential of social media and their putative horizontality, on the other she never downplays the subversive energies released by Syrian activists during the uprising. Even if unable to develop into a concrete, political alternative, the uprising in Syria ushered in new forms of emancipated image making. In a radical departure from previous modes of cultural production, digital dissidents openly mocked the regime and détourned its propaganda messages. Emblematic of this is the ‘raised hand’ campaign and its subvertising at the hands of Syrian netizens. In an effort to curb the ‘unlawful’ protests that had started to shake its paranoid foundations in the spring of 2011, the Syrian regime launched a campaign consisting of ‘big white billboards featuring a blue hand which served as the first letter for the Arabic word ana (“I”), helping to compose the phrase ana ma’al qanun (“I am with the law”)’. Soon after, another set of raised hands appeared online. Built on the same visual pattern, they served to hijack the regime’s original message by forging new slogans such as ‘I am free’ or ‘I am not Indian’, the latter mocking ‘the official regime narrative depicting Syria’s street protests as having been fabricated using footage of unrest happening elsewhere’.
Significantly, some of these détournements found their way defiantly ‘from the virtual alleys of Facebook [on] to the real streets of Syria’, bridging the political gap between discourse and action. Though the western commentariat obsessed over these miraculous ‘Twitter or Facebook revolutions’, as if Silicon Valley companies alone were responsible for challenging autocrats the Arab world over, things on the ground were far from virtual. Shooting a Revolution measures the constitutive rhetoric of digital claims against the realities of revolt and the repression that always follows it. ‘While international media focused on finding testimonials to promote the idea of a “revolution 2.0” in Syria, anonymous people were being imprisoned, tortured or killed, not for having liked a Facebook page or tweeted anti-regime slogans, but for having joined actual demonstrations on the ground’. Alas, the ‘commodity activism’ promulgated by Silicon Valley moguls did not prevent the ‘coalition of the connected’ from being slaughtered in the streets. It is by looking at the political economy of digital activism that Della Ratta deconstructs the myth of tech-powered revolutions. This technologically-determined myth simultaneously denies the militant agency of local activists, and pushes ‘the latter to co-author and self-produce a new form of digital Neo-Orientalism’: the middle-eastern Other as passive victim of its own backwardness waiting to be rescued by western technological superiority. Rather than tech-fuelled or merely idealistic, the roots and causes of the Syrian uprising were of a very material kind. Though western media have predictably focused on the regime-change side of the protesters’ demands, one of the slogans that echoed throughout the Arab world in 2011 was ‘bread, freedom and social justice’.
The widening inequalities and social injustices that paved the way to the uprising stemmed from the contradictions of what Della Ratta calls the process of ‘selective liberalization’, presided over by Bashar al-Assad following the death of his father in 2000. This process entailed the liberalization of certain sectors of the economy that were entrusted to business individuals or families with close ties to the regime. So, while ostensibly in the hands of private initiative, business interests were closely monitored and monopolised by al-Assad and his inner circle. Like anywhere else, privatisation in Syria created a small, aspirational middle class, and exacerbated the material conditions of the working poor. (Tellingly, disappointed members of the former and exasperated members of the latter joined forces in the protests.) At the symbolic centre of this process of selective liberalization was the creative industry, with producers of mosalsalat (a TV series) invested with a pivotal role in the ‘seemingly reformist’ project envisioned by the Syrian president. This hierarchical initiative relied on producers of drama to stage and convey in their work the principles of tanwir, ‘a morally edifying process connected to the firm belief that Syrian society has to be healed of its alleged social backwardness (takhalluf ijtima’i) in order to progress and develop’. Intrinsic to the paternalistic premise of tanwir television was the belief that social and cultural emancipation could not possibly be initiated from below but had ‘to be gradual, engineered and managed from the top down by an enlightened minority’. Audiences were seen as passive receptacles waiting to be enlightened by a benevolent regime willing to acknowledge, albeit fictionally, the taboos and injustices of a society it presided over with an iron fist.
The wave of creative insurgency that the Syrian uprising unleashed disproved this patronising assumption. The culture of ‘commissioned criticism’ that characterised the television industry in Syria was upturned by the advent of protest DIY media, which confronted the regime. While the TV industry in Syria continued in its diplomatic effort to ‘package freedom for the sake of market consumption while failing to acknowledge the agency of those demanding that very freedom in the streets of Syria’, grassroots productions reached for al-Assad’s jugular. Masasit Mati’s Top Goon – Diaries of a Little Dictator stands as a perfect example of how the tactical manipulation of mosalsalat producers was outdone by the uncompromising satire of the new generation. Unsparing and infused with dark humour, Top Goon caricatures Assad as a paranoid weakling propped up by his loyal police and media. With more than 175,000 YouTube views and half a million likes on Facebook, the webseries was featured on the pages of the New York Times, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, Washington Post, al-Jazeera English and other international outlets. Tragically, the outbreak of an obdurate civil war scorched the earth around a new generation of media practitioners, people whose creativity was forged by political dissent, not compromise. Silenced at home, many were forced into exile. In the span of a few years, their work went from being censored by the regime to being celebrated in art spaces and festivals all over Europe and North America.
‘In a situation of civil war, daily violence and the struggle for material survival, Syrian image-makers have been obliged, at some point, to rely on the commodification of visual media subtracted from the domain of the commons, in order to secure themselves a financial subsistence’. Even in her analysis of the co-optation of insurgent culture, the author never frames the issue in romantic terms, but rather looks at the material circumstances that determined it. Many Syrian artist-activists have been faced with the dilemma of whether to continue enlisting their work in the service of an unprofitable revolution, or sell it in the art market. This quandary is one that inevitably relates to audiences, too. As the filmmaker Orwa al-Mokdad pointed out: ‘unlike the regime who aims its media propaganda towards the domestic public and the army, our images have become self-complacent of their aesthetic beauty and of their inner heroism in confronting violence; to the point that they have lost their communicative value. We are not aware of whom we are talking to when we film our beautiful images’. Not only that, but the very ecosystem in which these ‘beautiful images’ found themselves is an overcrowded space where meaning is by no means univocal. What Della Ratta calls the ‘networked image’ is no longer tied to any indexical truth; multiple meanings can be attached to it through digital manipulation, circulation and distortion. As an example, the author cites the images of Palmyra, whose symbolic referent changed over the course of a few years, going from an ancient Roman heritage site to a theatre of horrors under Daesh, and later becoming a propaganda platform when the Russians organised a classical concert there, after they had re-captured the site on behalf of their ally, Bashar al-Assad.
No longer associated with a fixed, symbolic meaning, the ‘Syrian image’ has become a fluctuant signifier onto which multiple, contrasting meanings can be inscribed. ‘As much as the uprising turned civil war is a matter that no longer concerns only Syria but, rather, a plethora of regional and international subjects, so is the Syrian image no longer the exclusive domain of Syrian image-makers’, the author concludes. This loss of authorial officialdom does not exclusively concern images produced by and during the Syrian uprising/civil war – which makes Shooting a Revolution a timely reflection on the use and function of images in a world no longer held together by a coherent, dominant narrative.