September 25, 2024 • 38 mins
Chloe Bordewich joins host Melissa Gismondi for a conversation about the role of secrets and information in shaping political relationships and historical narratives. Bordewich reflects on her experiences in Egypt during the 2013 coup and the spread of rumours during times of political turmoil. This episode also explores the history of information control in Egypt and the impact it has on public understanding and trust, emphasizing the importance of understanding the circulation of information and its relationship to historical and contemporary inequalities. Chloe Bordewich was the JHI's 2023-24 JHI-CDHI Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow and her research focused on the gaps between what the public has the right to know, and what the state is entitled to conceal; between official propaganda and what members of the public know to be true. Host Melissa Gismondi (she/her) is an award-winning writer and audio producer. She holds a PhD in American history and was the 2020-2021 New Media Public Humanities Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Music Intro
Chloe Bordewich (00:06):
These moments of great potential are also often moments of great disillusionment.
Melissa Gismondi (00:11):
This is historian Chloe Bordewich.
Chloe Bordewich (00:14):
There was a sense among everyone, I think that this was a moment with incredibly high stakes, historically speaking.
Melissa Gismondi (00:23):
Chloe was in Cairo in July 2013 when Egypt's first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown in a coup.
Chloe Bordewich (00:34):
I was living in Dokki, a neighbourhood of Giza. So it's on the West Bank of the Nile, pretty close to Tahrir Square, where the revolution had taken place. And there were protests mounting in the weeks before. And then there was an ultimatum made by the leading general who subsequently became the president, continues to be the president to this day, President Sisi.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
[Arabic].
Chloe Bordewich (01:04):
And Sisi announced that if President Morsi did not step down, he would be forced to do so. And so we were anticipating, in fact, myself, my roommates, my friends, everybody was talking about it and wondering what this was going to look like.
(01:26):
On June 30th of 2013, there was a massive protest against President Morsi. Millions, truly millions of Egyptians, went out to protest against Morsi, begging him also to step down. And I watched people streaming towards Tahrir Square from the balcony of my apartment. Indeed, it was something unlike anything I had seen before. An incredible amount of energy, and again, a sort of, and hope, anticipation. But a few days later, the military did in fact step in and overthrow President Morsi in a speech that was given on television. And I was watching that again from my apartment.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
[Arabic].
Chloe Bordewich (02:10):
The morning of the coup, I went to withdraw money from the bank. Everybody stockpiled water and food, not knowing of course what would follow. And I remember seeing an APC, a military vehicle, parked a few blocks from my apartment. And this feeling a sort of strange sense, both of fear and also of calm. I mean, the streets were really quiet in anticipation of what was going to be happening that night.
(02:43):
We followed on Twitter as tanks moved into the streets around our house, but then by later that night, things appeared to be calm and people went back outside and were celebrating to a large extent. So it made me think a lot about what similar moments had been like in the past, including, for example, the popular coup of 1952 that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Which indeed like this moment, like this coup in 2013, had at the time quite a lot of popular support. And so I witnessed that in 2013, and that was certainly true in 1952 as well.
Melissa Gismondi (03:20):
I'm Melissa Gismondi, and this is Humanities at Large from the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Over the course of this season, we're exploring the theme of Absence through the work of JHI researchers.
Chloe Bordewich studies the Absence of Information in modern Egyptian history. She was last year's Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow. And in this episode, Chloe's going to tell us about a rumour that helped change the course of modern Egyptian history.
(03:56):
As Chloe will tell you, rumours tend to emerge when crucial information is withheld. Or to put it more bluntly, when secrets are being kept.
Chloe Bordewich (04:07):
Well, I often refer to the historian Luise White, who says that, you know, secrets are ways of valorizing information. Withholding information is a way of saying, "This is really important, it's worth actually concealing." Of course, not every absence of information is a secret. Not every piece of information withheld or every absence is intentional in the same kind of way.
(04:32):
But I do think that secrets, and by which I mean the intentional withholding of information, they shape political relationships, they shape historical narratives, they shape the production of knowledge. And secrets also, as we've seen from time to time throughout history, also shape events. History... or when people don't have information, events may play out differently.
(04:58):
So this is something that came to really interest me. What are the consequences of, let's say, blackouts or brownouts? Or blank spots in what we know?
Melissa Gismondi (05:08):
If you're like me, you're probably wondering how does a historian go about researching a subject like secrets? So when I spoke to Chloe at the JHI studio in April, I asked her to talk about her process.
Chloe Bordewich (05:23):
Yeah, I think a common misconception is that researching secrets means trying to figure out what they are. But I think, as I said, that often what's most interesting about secrets is not their contents. Often the contents are banal, actually, but it's to figure out why is information being withheld in the first place? What's interesting about studying secrets is to construct the social and political worlds around them.
(05:48):
So I think by understanding a secret as something, a piece of information that's valuable in some way, that then becomes a starting point for understanding the world around it and the reasons for its valorization, the reasons for its concealment. That's certainly a more practical, I think, approach than particularly in a politically sensitive situation. Authoritarian, to be clear, when working in an authoritarian context, you have to be very careful about research in general and about looking for information where that is unwelcome.
(06:27):
And so my approach has been to think about what are the strategies that people use when faced with information withheld? And by people, I mean, I could mean the state and I can also mean the public. So for instance, the state may substitute information that's withheld from the public by disseminating disinformation.
So we can study disinformation. That's often information that's present. We can study that. We can study newsreels, we can study false news reports, we can study speeches. Those are out there in the world. And then at the same time, perhaps even more interesting to me, are the ways that the audience from whom information is withheld deal with this. So how do people navigate through and around these blank spots?
(07:22):
One way certainly is the spreading of rumours, and rumours are not necessarily lies. I think often, in fact, almost always, it's true that rumours have a significant element of truth to them, right? But they're a kind of way of dealing with partial truths and trying to piece together what might be plausible based on the information you are able to access about what's going on.
Melissa Gismondi (07:45):
It's become an integral part of many political cultures, this idea of access to information or what the public has a right to know. But Chloe says it wasn't always a given.
Chloe Bordewich (08:00):
The idea that the public has a right to information, the idea that information is a public good, where does that come from? And is it, I think there's sometimes an assumption here, say in North America or in the West, that this is an idea that's tied to say Western democracies. And that's not entirely true.
In the late-19th century, we have a really interesting debate taking place in Egypt about what the state has a right to conceal and what the public has a right to know. And it's very much embedded in a local context.
Melissa Gismondi (08:34):
Just a note on that local context. In the late-19th century, Egypt was occupied by the British. It was also part of the Ottoman Empire.
Chloe Bordewich (08:43):
Yes, there's an element of British colonialism. This is the setting. And a layer of French law, Egypt adopted basically the Napoleonic Codes, a version of them, into the legal system. But what's actually going on here?
Well, in 1896, there is a telegram that leaks. It's a telegram sent by General Kitchener here in Canada, quite familiar with him, who's at the time the head of the Egyptian Army. His goal is to reconquer the Sudan for Egypt. So in the trial, the trial is over the leaked telegram.
(09:21):
Does the public have a right to know what's in a leaked telegram that deals directly with a conscript army full of members of the public? Directly concerns the public interest? What is the public interest? Where does the law lie? And so basically, here's a case about a leak, but it becomes something much, much bigger. And so this is only one example, but I think what we can see coming into play in the 1890s is a discussion about media, technology, politics, secrecy, and the public interest all at once.
(09:58):
Of course, in the years that followed, we see a sequence of political changes taking place in Egypt. But the big question of what does the public have the right to know? Is information a public good? And what does the state have the right to conceal? Those questions remain largely unanswered and continue to surface again and again over the decades that follow.
(10:22):
Secrecy itself is not an invention certainly of the 19th or the 20th century. In fact, until the 19th century states basically concealed everything from people. So the demand itself to know more and to know better. The idea indeed that people have a right to know what the government is doing, I mean that itself is kind of a novelty. But then what becomes quite interesting is how the state responds to these new demands. Do those demands get fulfilled or not?
Melissa Gismondi (10:51):
The newspaper that published the leaked telegram won its case in the 1896 trial. And the decades that followed, they were tumultuous. Egyptians fought British rule and gained victories like the Granting of Independence in 1922. Although this didn't necessarily mean the end of British influence.
Chloe Bordewich (11:12):
And so what we see here, and I think it's a really, one of the periods I'm most interested in, is actually between 1922 and 1952, which is a period sometimes it's called semi-colonial. I like to call it late colonialism. Where there are still British advisors and experts and they call themselves all kinds of things, but who are embedded within the apparatus of the state, and yet the country is technically independent.
(11:37):
So it's decades of tension and of resentment and distrust. On the surface, we have a king, and the monarchy is increasingly criticised for being decadent, corrupt, and out of touch with the public. So you have the British occupation still there in a slightly different form.
(12:00):
You have a monarchy criticised for being corrupt and out of touch. And you have a kind of general climate of resentment and distrust. That what was supposed to have been a moment of great change has in fact yielded a sustained period of basically continued colonial relationship.
Melissa Gismondi (12:18):
In a climate of disillusionment and distrust, rumours can spread like wildfire. And that's exactly what happened in Egypt during and after the country's defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Nakba for Palestinians, the War of Independence for Israelis, and the Palestine War for Egyptians.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
At Flushing, Long Island, the General Assembly of the United Nations has made its decision on Palestine.
Melissa Gismondi (12:47):
But first, a bit of context. In 1947, Britain announced its intention to end its mandate in Palestine and left the question of jurisdiction over the region to the United Nations.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
This is the delegate from Saudi Arabia arguing against partition. [inaudible].
Melissa Gismondi (13:06):
In November, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of a plan to divide Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Saudi Arabia, no. Soviet Union, yes.
Melissa Gismondi (13:21):
All six Arab member states, including Egypt, voted against it. Protests and violence escalated in response. And on May 14th, 1948, Israel declared independence. The next day, British forces withdrew from the region, and Egyptian troops crossed the border at Rafah.
(13:42):
The official word from the palace of Egypt's leader, King Farouk, was that they'd be victorious in no time. But it soon became clear that the reality on the ground looked a lot different.
Chloe Bordewich (13:55):
How did people grapple with the gap between the information that was reported by soldiers at the front and the information that was being disseminated by officials and in the news? Because they didn't square.
The beginning of the war, Egyptian officials, and when I say officials, I mean the officials representing the Egyptian monarchy, the king, announced that the Egyptian Army would be in Tel Aviv within two weeks. And they announced that this would be so easy that one could not even consider it a war. It was going to be just a quick mission.
(14:32):
After two weeks, this was not the case. And so different kinds of explanatory rumours began to take shape. And the most salient in the Egyptian context was the rumour that the reason for the defeat, as it soon became clear it was, the reason was the purchase by palace officials, so the entourage of the king, of defective weapons, faulty and defective weapons.
(15:00):
And these weapons supposedly came from Czechoslovakia, from Italy, from Spain, a little murky in the rumours. But when used on the battlefield, resulted in casualties to the Egyptian Army rather than to the enemy. And so basically, the soldiers were killed by their own weapons, and this was the direct fault of the palace officials who had corruptly acquired defective weapons that didn't work.
(15:28):
So the defective weapons rumour, as I call it, began circulating widely during the war itself. But took shape more clearly about two years later, in the summer of 1950, when an editor, soon to be popular novelist and screenwriter, named Ihsan Abdel Quddous published a series of exposés in the journal of which he was the editor, which was called Rose al-Yūsuf. It still exists today. And in these exposés, he documented the rumours that he said had been circulating among the Egyptian public, beginning in '48 through '49 as an explanation for the loss.
(16:10):
He didn't have particularly concrete documentation in many instances, and he acknowledged that. He said, "Look, there are rumours circulating. They deserve to be aired. The rumours themselves will be the starting point for further investigation, and we'll be able to determine which elements are true and which are false, but they deserve to be heard. These aren't just lies. Something is amiss."
(16:33):
And so again, the argument here, the rumour, let's say the logic of the rumour, was not just that corrupt deals had occurred and that bad weapons had been acquired somewhere along the line, but that these were in fact the cause of the defeat. And I think it's important to think about not only what are the contents of the rumour? But what are the implications of the rumour? What are the consequences of it?
(16:56):
There are many other researchers, not me, who over the years in Egypt have investigated the, let's say, the truthfulness level of how truthful these rumours were beginning really at the time. I mean, there were a series of officials were put on trial soon after in response to Abdel Quddous' calls for investigations, and they kind of fizzled out.
(17:20):
I mean, there were some penalties applied, but basically the trial in the court of public opinion was ultimately so much more significant than the trials of these officials who were supposedly involved in corrupt deals in the court of law. And what do I mean by that, right? Well, I've said these exposés were published in 1950. In 1952, we have a military coup in Egypt led by a group of officers who themselves had participated in the war in Palestine.
(17:51):
Now, you might ask, "Well, why is it then that a military loss would prompt public support for a military coup?" Well, and this is where I think the rumours play a really interesting role. So the rumours that circulated about the defective weapons in effect served to place blame, the culpability for the loss, on the political leadership of the country, the monarchy, King Farouk and his entourage.
(18:23):
And in fact, to absolve the military generals, the Army generals who had been in the field during the war for that loss. Because the idea was, well, they had been outfitted with completely inadequate weaponry and failed by the political leadership. So in essence, the military was seen to have suffered the loss, and the political leadership to be culpable for it.
(18:49):
And that is one of the reasons that this rumour has, I think, maintained so much currency over the years. And we've seen it filter into popular culture, into a number of films subsequently. Because it actually, it's not only a relic of a past moment of 1948, but very much a part of the founding narrative of the regime that then took power in '52.
Melissa Gismondi (19:11):
I guess my first question is, so is there, within the logic of the rumour, did the regime, did the king and his officials know that the weapons were defective when they were purchased and then given to the military?
Chloe Bordewich (19:25):
Right. So this comes back to the question of how truthful were the rumours to begin with? Did the king and his entourage actually purchase defective weapons or not? According to my reading of a number of different Egyptian historians who've parsed this over the years, there were... That the Army was poorly outfitted. This is true. They weren't really prepared. They hadn't been fully trained, they weren't fully prepared. And there was corruption among the kind of monarchy's entourage, the King's entourage.
(19:51):
But what wasn't so much true was that these weapons were the cause of the defeat. There were a lot of other reasons that were much more salient. That really the scale or extent to which actually defective weapons were deployed in the field, a little shaky. So yeah. So did they know?
Yeah, I mean, I think that there was corner cutting that happened. This is absolutely true. Was there kind of a concerted effort to undercut the Army? No, I don't think that's true. It's true that the leadership, political leadership was not particularly competent.
(20:28):
And so I think the truth is often kind of partial and messier and sort of somewhat less interesting actually than the rumour. The rumour is much more compelling than, well, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Yeah, people lose battles for the reasons you kind of expect at the end of the day. Yeah.
Melissa Gismondi (20:45):
So in terms of the plausibility for Egyptians, you mentioned, so it sounds like it's the cognitive dissonance between expecting the swift defeat. I think like you said "two weeks we're going to be in Tel Aviv". Expecting the swift defeat. That not happening, but then still having the officials say that this is going to be successful, it's going to be a swift defeat. What else was sort of making this rumour plausible, I guess?
Chloe Bordewich (21:13):
Yeah.
Melissa Gismondi (21:14):
Because a rumour doesn't make sense...
Chloe Bordewich (21:17):
Yeah.
Melissa Gismondi (21:18):
If it doesn't seem plausible.
Chloe Bordewich (21:19):
If it's not plausible. Yes, absolutely. I mean, rumours tell us what is plausible. And to people, and they may seem implausible subsequently, they may seem implausible to people who aren't living within that ecosystem. They may seem implausible, if we look back on rumours probably that we've participated in spreading at some point in the past. They may seem implausible later on. But no, at the moment, they're plausible given the circumstances.
(21:43):
And indeed, I think a major reason was that there was a huge amount of resentment towards the monarchy, which was considered to be decadent and inept and out of touch. And so people were trying to square what they could see as a political leadership that was failing them, with what they were seeing in the field, which was the failure, their failure.
(22:05):
But how then do you put those pieces together when the details are missing? And so that's where you end up with fragmentary truths and fragmentary fabrications and half-truths, kind of all mixing together in a way that becomes then quite complicated to parse truth from falsehood.
Melissa Gismondi (22:23):
You mentioned some of the ways that this rumour was starting to sort of circulate, but tell me a bit about how Egyptians were getting information. Official information about the war while it was happening?
Chloe Bordewich (22:38):
Sure.
Melissa Gismondi (22:39):
We know that the official story was, it's going to be quick.
Chloe Bordewich (22:41):
Easy.
Melissa Gismondi (22:42):
We're going to be victorious. What sorts of information were people getting? And how were they getting it?
Chloe Bordewich (22:48):
So the Army released daily communiques, sometimes more than once a day, that were published official statements basically, of how they were carrying out the war. They were published in the newspapers.
And I talked about, I study absences and so forth. I mean, there actually was not a dearth of information at this particular moment. There was a dearth of reliable or accurate information, but there wasn't a dearth of information.
(23:11):
So we have newspaper communiques, we have photographers who are working for, say, the newspaper Al-Ahram, who are being sent embedded with the Army. This is the first time we see that, Egyptian journalists being embedded with Egyptian soldiers. So this is new. Riding in planes, circling in planes above Palestine, which gives people a sense of immediacy. I mean, the distances we're talking about here are not huge either. This is close and also feels close when you see pictures of it in the paper the next day.
(23:49):
And then there are also newsreels, I wouldn't say a huge number, but there are quite a few newsreels that are produced mostly from Gaza where the Egyptian Army was staked out. The king makes a newsreel reviewing the troops to reassure viewers back home when they go to the cinema. They'll see the newsreel say before they watch the main feature. And they can see, "Oh, okay, wow, it looks safe out there. The king is himself calmly reviewing the troops and so forth."
(24:19):
So there were these very, I think, carefully constructed PR efforts, and there was a lot of reporting in the newspaper and there was radio. So yeah, those were the main ways that people found out. But this war was also being fought by an Army of conscripts, and so largely.
And so people return, there's communication, there's telephone, I mean, there's telegrams. People are not incommunicado in 1948, it's not that long ago. And so people are in touch and they come back. And this is a critical way in which information is also circulating, is through word of mouth.
Melissa Gismondi (25:00):
And so bringing all of this to the 1952 coup, and you mentioned there was a lot of popular support for the coup at the time.
Chloe Bordewich (25:08):
Yeah.
Melissa Gismondi (25:09):
As I understand it, this defeat was pretty humiliating. So was the coup sort of a way of, for the military, like a vindication? Of look at how strong we are now after this humiliation?
Chloe Bordewich (25:21):
Absolutely. I think this was. I mentioned it's perhaps on the surface counterintuitive that a military regime would come to power just a couple of years after a humiliating military defeat. But indeed, there weren't other centres of power.
I mean, you have the monarchy and you have the Army. And when other political leadership doesn't work out, the Army tends to be the one institution that's there to step in. And this was certainly the case. And I think the officers convincingly made the case that they had done everything they could competently within the constraints imposed on them. Was that true or not? It's sort of beside the point, but that was certainly the case they made.
(25:59):
And we spoke a bit about 2013. It's not exactly an analogous situation, but in 2013 when the military took over, it was also in response to dissatisfaction with non-military political leadership. That the military made the case, "We're the one institution that is still here and organised and prepared basically to run things."
(26:25):
You reminded me of a conversation I had. You asked, "What was I doing in 2013 during the coup?" I remember coming downstairs, it was just maybe three days before the military actually took over. And I was speaking with the guard, a doorman in my apartment building. And I asked him what he thought about what was going on and so forth.
(26:48):
And he said, "Well, I supported the revolution in 2011. I consider myself to be pro-revolution, pro-youth, et cetera. But look at what the political leadership this year, what a failure the regime of Mohammed Morsi has been." So he said, "I'm supporting its overthrow." And I said, "Okay, well, what do you see as the solution? I mean, who should take its place?" And he said, "Well, the Army."
(27:19):
And I said, "Okay, well you've said, but to me before you supported the overthrow of the Army before." And he said, "Yes. I said of course I don't support the Army, but they're the one institution. We know the Army, we know what we're getting. And we've known it for many, many decades." So basically it was a sense of resignation to kind of the one plausible alternative.
(27:44):
I can see that some of the rhetoric was similar, but I think there was also a lot of genuine enthusiasm in 1952 for behind the Free Officers' coup. I mean, they really did have a lot of public support. So it's not exactly analogous, but I think what is consistent is that this is the one institution that's had the level of continuity, I guess. An organisation has been able to be a consistent power base as political orders have come and gone.
Melissa Gismondi (28:22):
As you mentioned, the military, this regime remains in power today after a brief period following the Arab Spring.
Chloe Bordewich (28:30):
Right.
Melissa Gismondi (28:31):
How would you describe the military's treatment of information? How it approaches information compared to how the monarchy did before the coup?
Chloe Bordewich (28:41):
Gosh, that's a great question. I have to think about that for a second.
Melissa Gismondi (28:44):
Yeah, sure.
Chloe Bordewich (28:45):
In fact, the technologies change, but I have been struck throughout my research at how similar, in fact, the conversations that we're having today are to conversations that have happened time and time again in the past. Today, for instance, I mean here, North America, certainly the topic of fake news has been salient.
(29:11):
And I think there's often an implicit, if not an explicit connection made between the dissolution of, let's say, between the spread of fake news and the digital form and digital media. That the internet itself is somehow kind of producer of fake news on a scale that we've never seen before. But scale perhaps.
(29:34):
But there was a panic over fake news at the end of the 19th century as well, in context are quite distant from here certainly. The term itself was in widespread use in the Arab world, in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century. And so part of what I try to do through my research is also remind my readers that what we think to be unique challenges to truth, let's say in our time, are in fact not as new as we think they are.
(30:07):
And that the struggle for... I like to talk in my work about information justice, that information, access to information is part of a broader struggle for a more just society and a struggle that continues. Because the demands for information, the insistence on information as a public good, as articulated even over a century ago, did not correspond with the fulfilment of those demands.
(30:37):
So I think we see today similar techniques for controlling information. We may be seeing, we see new media, the internet in particular, and I just want to come back to some specific cases there. But in fact, this is a much longer story.
So specifically, let's talk about the internet ecosystem because I think this is something I often get questions about. How has the internet changed the way that information is controlled, particularly in this context, right?
Speaker 6 (31:06):
In the wake of the protest this week, the Egyptian government Friday took an extraordinary step, cutting off nearly all internet access and shutting down cell phone service. Internet traffic...
Chloe Bordewich (31:17):
In 2011, during the revolution in Tahrir Square, the Arab Spring, the internet was initially seen as a liberatory medium, and then subsequently came to be weaponized to suppress dissent. And we see today, for example, the weaponization of accusations of spreading fake news on the internet. For instance, the harassment and trolling of activists.
(31:45):
This tool has gone from being something revolutionary to being something that is seen as, that has been weaponized in the opposite direction. It's worth reflecting on not just what's changed, but how these histories of earlier technologies have informed, directly informed the legal histories, but also the material histories, have informed the way that these technologies are used and misused and manipulated today to control the circulation of information.
Melissa Gismondi (32:16):
So just to put a point on it, so today in Egypt, as I understand it, and you tell me if this is right-
Chloe Bordewich (32:22):
Sure.
Melissa Gismondi (32:23):
There's very little independent media left.
Chloe Bordewich (32:25):
Correct.
Melissa Gismondi (32:25):
Is that accurate?
Chloe Bordewich (32:26):
Yeah, correct. Today there is very little independent media left. There have been moments of opening and moments of closure. This is definitely a moment of greater closure. There are a few really excellent outlets that are heavily censored and have been shut down. Their journalists harassed over and over again. And it's very, very difficult actually for them to operate.
(32:53):
I think it's also worth noting the military controls a huge part of the entertainment economy. Well, of the entire economy, but also the entertainment economy. Including now much of the film, commercial TV, and film production. And so we see that shaping also popular culture and the perpetuation of some of the narratives that we've talked about today.
Melissa Gismondi (33:17):
I'm curious about the lingering effects of having to constantly fight for good, reliable information, or to consistently distrust the information that's given to you. What impact do you think that has on how people or the public understand and maybe relate to the truth? What's the impact on people's lives?
Chloe Bordewich (33:38):
Yeah, that's the million-dollar question, I think. It's a really important one. And one of the consequences that we see in a society where information, where access to information is not guaranteed, access to quality information, let's say, or truthful information is highly controlled is a climate of distrust, mutual distrust in the state, distrust in institutions.
(34:08):
For example, one specific example I'll give is distrust say in state archives as the custodians of the collective history of the people. Historians tend to think about their own antagonistic relationship to the archive, and that's a whole other conversation. And access to archives is something that's there for them.
(34:30):
But ostensibly archive is also there to preserve the collective history of the state, but also the state and its relationship with the public. And one of the challenges to actually conducting research in Egypt is that people don't trust the archive as something that relates to them. I mean, it doesn't, right? And that is for them.
(34:55):
And so for example, where do people's documents go? And so huge amounts of paper, of important documents, end up in paper markets or discarded. And there's really interesting anthropological work being done about this too. But I think there's not... So this is only one example basically, is that where the institutions where confidence or let's say trust in institutions is eroded by the lack of reliable and truthful information that comes from and circulates between them and the public.
Melissa Gismondi (35:33):
So often when we talk about information, I think we look at it from a technological standpoint or scientific standpoint. Why is it so important to put a humanities spin on the topic?
Chloe Bordewich (35:46):
I started our conversation by talking about how withholding information is a way of valorizing it. And that says something about a particular kind of social relationship. And so the ways that we either use or misuse or spread or withhold information, reflect our relationships to the audience, either the audience or let's say the audience for withholding that information. It says something about a relationship.
(36:13):
And so I think we have to approach the study of information in a way that also centres those relationships, human relationships, relationships between... Human relationships, interpersonal relationships, political relationships. That's not necessarily historical. I think that's true in the present as well.
And then I think the historical piece comes in. I mean, I'm interested broadly speaking in the terrain of knowledge production. And I think we're here today in a moment where the knowledge production remains incredibly unequal. And for reasons that we've talked about a bit today, I don't think we can fully understand why information circulates and what the particularly unequal geography of knowledge production looks like and why it looks that way? Without understanding its relationship to how information circulates.
(37:09):
So how information circulates to whom, not to whom, and why is both a product of contemporary inequalities and also historical ones. And so there's an intimate relationship between the histories we've talked about today of colonialism, of the kind of incomplete process of decolonization, and the geography of knowledge production in which we all are implicated today.
Melissa Gismondi (37:52):
Chloe Bordewich was the JHI CDHI Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow for 2023 to 2024. She's currently the New Media Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the JHI.
Humanities at Large is a podcast from the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe, share this episode, and leave us a five-star review. It really helps to get the word out. I'm Melissa Gismondi, and I'll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening.
Music Intro
Chloe Bordewich (00:06):
These moments of great potential are also often moments of great disillusionment.
Melissa Gismondi (00:11):
This is historian Chloe Bordewich.
Chloe Bordewich (00:14):
There was a sense among everyone, I think that this was a moment with incredibly high stakes, historically speaking.
Melissa Gismondi (00:23):
Chloe was in Cairo in July 2013 when Egypt's first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown in a coup.
Chloe Bordewich (00:34):
I was living in Dokki, a neighbourhood of Giza. So it's on the West Bank of the Nile, pretty close to Tahrir Square, where the revolution had taken place. And there were protests mounting in the weeks before. And then there was an ultimatum made by the leading general who subsequently became the president, continues to be the president to this day, President Sisi.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
[Arabic].
Chloe Bordewich (01:04):
And Sisi announced that if President Morsi did not step down, he would be forced to do so. And so we were anticipating, in fact, myself, my roommates, my friends, everybody was talking about it and wondering what this was going to look like.
(01:26):
On June 30th of 2013, there was a massive protest against President Morsi. Millions, truly millions of Egyptians, went out to protest against Morsi, begging him also to step down. And I watched people streaming towards Tahrir Square from the balcony of my apartment. Indeed, it was something unlike anything I had seen before. An incredible amount of energy, and again, a sort of, and hope, anticipation. But a few days later, the military did in fact step in and overthrow President Morsi in a speech that was given on television. And I was watching that again from my apartment.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
[Arabic].
Chloe Bordewich (02:10):
The morning of the coup, I went to withdraw money from the bank. Everybody stockpiled water and food, not knowing of course what would follow. And I remember seeing an APC, a military vehicle, parked a few blocks from my apartment. And this feeling a sort of strange sense, both of fear and also of calm. I mean, the streets were really quiet in anticipation of what was going to be happening that night.
(02:43):
We followed on Twitter as tanks moved into the streets around our house, but then by later that night, things appeared to be calm and people went back outside and were celebrating to a large extent. So it made me think a lot about what similar moments had been like in the past, including, for example, the popular coup of 1952 that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Which indeed like this moment, like this coup in 2013, had at the time quite a lot of popular support. And so I witnessed that in 2013, and that was certainly true in 1952 as well.
Melissa Gismondi (03:20):
I'm Melissa Gismondi, and this is Humanities at Large from the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Over the course of this season, we're exploring the theme of Absence through the work of JHI researchers.
Chloe Bordewich studies the Absence of Information in modern Egyptian history. She was last year's Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow. And in this episode, Chloe's going to tell us about a rumour that helped change the course of modern Egyptian history.
(03:56):
As Chloe will tell you, rumours tend to emerge when crucial information is withheld. Or to put it more bluntly, when secrets are being kept.
Chloe Bordewich (04:07):
Well, I often refer to the historian Luise White, who says that, you know, secrets are ways of valorizing information. Withholding information is a way of saying, "This is really important, it's worth actually concealing." Of course, not every absence of information is a secret. Not every piece of information withheld or every absence is intentional in the same kind of way.
(04:32):
But I do think that secrets, and by which I mean the intentional withholding of information, they shape political relationships, they shape historical narratives, they shape the production of knowledge. And secrets also, as we've seen from time to time throughout history, also shape events. History... or when people don't have information, events may play out differently.
(04:58):
So this is something that came to really interest me. What are the consequences of, let's say, blackouts or brownouts? Or blank spots in what we know?
Melissa Gismondi (05:08):
If you're like me, you're probably wondering how does a historian go about researching a subject like secrets? So when I spoke to Chloe at the JHI studio in April, I asked her to talk about her process.
Chloe Bordewich (05:23):
Yeah, I think a common misconception is that researching secrets means trying to figure out what they are. But I think, as I said, that often what's most interesting about secrets is not their contents. Often the contents are banal, actually, but it's to figure out why is information being withheld in the first place? What's interesting about studying secrets is to construct the social and political worlds around them.
(05:48):
So I think by understanding a secret as something, a piece of information that's valuable in some way, that then becomes a starting point for understanding the world around it and the reasons for its valorization, the reasons for its concealment. That's certainly a more practical, I think, approach than particularly in a politically sensitive situation. Authoritarian, to be clear, when working in an authoritarian context, you have to be very careful about research in general and about looking for information where that is unwelcome.
(06:27):
And so my approach has been to think about what are the strategies that people use when faced with information withheld? And by people, I mean, I could mean the state and I can also mean the public. So for instance, the state may substitute information that's withheld from the public by disseminating disinformation.
So we can study disinformation. That's often information that's present. We can study that. We can study newsreels, we can study false news reports, we can study speeches. Those are out there in the world. And then at the same time, perhaps even more interesting to me, are the ways that the audience from whom information is withheld deal with this. So how do people navigate through and around these blank spots?
(07:22):
One way certainly is the spreading of rumours, and rumours are not necessarily lies. I think often, in fact, almost always, it's true that rumours have a significant element of truth to them, right? But they're a kind of way of dealing with partial truths and trying to piece together what might be plausible based on the information you are able to access about what's going on.
Melissa Gismondi (07:45):
It's become an integral part of many political cultures, this idea of access to information or what the public has a right to know. But Chloe says it wasn't always a given.
Chloe Bordewich (08:00):
The idea that the public has a right to information, the idea that information is a public good, where does that come from? And is it, I think there's sometimes an assumption here, say in North America or in the West, that this is an idea that's tied to say Western democracies. And that's not entirely true.
In the late-19th century, we have a really interesting debate taking place in Egypt about what the state has a right to conceal and what the public has a right to know. And it's very much embedded in a local context.
Melissa Gismondi (08:34):
Just a note on that local context. In the late-19th century, Egypt was occupied by the British. It was also part of the Ottoman Empire.
Chloe Bordewich (08:43):
Yes, there's an element of British colonialism. This is the setting. And a layer of French law, Egypt adopted basically the Napoleonic Codes, a version of them, into the legal system. But what's actually going on here?
Well, in 1896, there is a telegram that leaks. It's a telegram sent by General Kitchener here in Canada, quite familiar with him, who's at the time the head of the Egyptian Army. His goal is to reconquer the Sudan for Egypt. So in the trial, the trial is over the leaked telegram.
(09:21):
Does the public have a right to know what's in a leaked telegram that deals directly with a conscript army full of members of the public? Directly concerns the public interest? What is the public interest? Where does the law lie? And so basically, here's a case about a leak, but it becomes something much, much bigger. And so this is only one example, but I think what we can see coming into play in the 1890s is a discussion about media, technology, politics, secrecy, and the public interest all at once.
(09:58):
Of course, in the years that followed, we see a sequence of political changes taking place in Egypt. But the big question of what does the public have the right to know? Is information a public good? And what does the state have the right to conceal? Those questions remain largely unanswered and continue to surface again and again over the decades that follow.
(10:22):
Secrecy itself is not an invention certainly of the 19th or the 20th century. In fact, until the 19th century states basically concealed everything from people. So the demand itself to know more and to know better. The idea indeed that people have a right to know what the government is doing, I mean that itself is kind of a novelty. But then what becomes quite interesting is how the state responds to these new demands. Do those demands get fulfilled or not?
Melissa Gismondi (10:51):
The newspaper that published the leaked telegram won its case in the 1896 trial. And the decades that followed, they were tumultuous. Egyptians fought British rule and gained victories like the Granting of Independence in 1922. Although this didn't necessarily mean the end of British influence.
Chloe Bordewich (11:12):
And so what we see here, and I think it's a really, one of the periods I'm most interested in, is actually between 1922 and 1952, which is a period sometimes it's called semi-colonial. I like to call it late colonialism. Where there are still British advisors and experts and they call themselves all kinds of things, but who are embedded within the apparatus of the state, and yet the country is technically independent.
(11:37):
So it's decades of tension and of resentment and distrust. On the surface, we have a king, and the monarchy is increasingly criticised for being decadent, corrupt, and out of touch with the public. So you have the British occupation still there in a slightly different form.
(12:00):
You have a monarchy criticised for being corrupt and out of touch. And you have a kind of general climate of resentment and distrust. That what was supposed to have been a moment of great change has in fact yielded a sustained period of basically continued colonial relationship.
Melissa Gismondi (12:18):
In a climate of disillusionment and distrust, rumours can spread like wildfire. And that's exactly what happened in Egypt during and after the country's defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Nakba for Palestinians, the War of Independence for Israelis, and the Palestine War for Egyptians.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
At Flushing, Long Island, the General Assembly of the United Nations has made its decision on Palestine.
Melissa Gismondi (12:47):
But first, a bit of context. In 1947, Britain announced its intention to end its mandate in Palestine and left the question of jurisdiction over the region to the United Nations.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
This is the delegate from Saudi Arabia arguing against partition. [inaudible].
Melissa Gismondi (13:06):
In November, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of a plan to divide Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Saudi Arabia, no. Soviet Union, yes.
Melissa Gismondi (13:21):
All six Arab member states, including Egypt, voted against it. Protests and violence escalated in response. And on May 14th, 1948, Israel declared independence. The next day, British forces withdrew from the region, and Egyptian troops crossed the border at Rafah.
(13:42):
The official word from the palace of Egypt's leader, King Farouk, was that they'd be victorious in no time. But it soon became clear that the reality on the ground looked a lot different.
Chloe Bordewich (13:55):
How did people grapple with the gap between the information that was reported by soldiers at the front and the information that was being disseminated by officials and in the news? Because they didn't square.
The beginning of the war, Egyptian officials, and when I say officials, I mean the officials representing the Egyptian monarchy, the king, announced that the Egyptian Army would be in Tel Aviv within two weeks. And they announced that this would be so easy that one could not even consider it a war. It was going to be just a quick mission.
(14:32):
After two weeks, this was not the case. And so different kinds of explanatory rumours began to take shape. And the most salient in the Egyptian context was the rumour that the reason for the defeat, as it soon became clear it was, the reason was the purchase by palace officials, so the entourage of the king, of defective weapons, faulty and defective weapons.
(15:00):
And these weapons supposedly came from Czechoslovakia, from Italy, from Spain, a little murky in the rumours. But when used on the battlefield, resulted in casualties to the Egyptian Army rather than to the enemy. And so basically, the soldiers were killed by their own weapons, and this was the direct fault of the palace officials who had corruptly acquired defective weapons that didn't work.
(15:28):
So the defective weapons rumour, as I call it, began circulating widely during the war itself. But took shape more clearly about two years later, in the summer of 1950, when an editor, soon to be popular novelist and screenwriter, named Ihsan Abdel Quddous published a series of exposés in the journal of which he was the editor, which was called Rose al-Yūsuf. It still exists today. And in these exposés, he documented the rumours that he said had been circulating among the Egyptian public, beginning in '48 through '49 as an explanation for the loss.
(16:10):
He didn't have particularly concrete documentation in many instances, and he acknowledged that. He said, "Look, there are rumours circulating. They deserve to be aired. The rumours themselves will be the starting point for further investigation, and we'll be able to determine which elements are true and which are false, but they deserve to be heard. These aren't just lies. Something is amiss."
(16:33):
And so again, the argument here, the rumour, let's say the logic of the rumour, was not just that corrupt deals had occurred and that bad weapons had been acquired somewhere along the line, but that these were in fact the cause of the defeat. And I think it's important to think about not only what are the contents of the rumour? But what are the implications of the rumour? What are the consequences of it?
(16:56):
There are many other researchers, not me, who over the years in Egypt have investigated the, let's say, the truthfulness level of how truthful these rumours were beginning really at the time. I mean, there were a series of officials were put on trial soon after in response to Abdel Quddous' calls for investigations, and they kind of fizzled out.
(17:20):
I mean, there were some penalties applied, but basically the trial in the court of public opinion was ultimately so much more significant than the trials of these officials who were supposedly involved in corrupt deals in the court of law. And what do I mean by that, right? Well, I've said these exposés were published in 1950. In 1952, we have a military coup in Egypt led by a group of officers who themselves had participated in the war in Palestine.
(17:51):
Now, you might ask, "Well, why is it then that a military loss would prompt public support for a military coup?" Well, and this is where I think the rumours play a really interesting role. So the rumours that circulated about the defective weapons in effect served to place blame, the culpability for the loss, on the political leadership of the country, the monarchy, King Farouk and his entourage.
(18:23):
And in fact, to absolve the military generals, the Army generals who had been in the field during the war for that loss. Because the idea was, well, they had been outfitted with completely inadequate weaponry and failed by the political leadership. So in essence, the military was seen to have suffered the loss, and the political leadership to be culpable for it.
(18:49):
And that is one of the reasons that this rumour has, I think, maintained so much currency over the years. And we've seen it filter into popular culture, into a number of films subsequently. Because it actually, it's not only a relic of a past moment of 1948, but very much a part of the founding narrative of the regime that then took power in '52.
Melissa Gismondi (19:11):
I guess my first question is, so is there, within the logic of the rumour, did the regime, did the king and his officials know that the weapons were defective when they were purchased and then given to the military?
Chloe Bordewich (19:25):
Right. So this comes back to the question of how truthful were the rumours to begin with? Did the king and his entourage actually purchase defective weapons or not? According to my reading of a number of different Egyptian historians who've parsed this over the years, there were... That the Army was poorly outfitted. This is true. They weren't really prepared. They hadn't been fully trained, they weren't fully prepared. And there was corruption among the kind of monarchy's entourage, the King's entourage.
(19:51):
But what wasn't so much true was that these weapons were the cause of the defeat. There were a lot of other reasons that were much more salient. That really the scale or extent to which actually defective weapons were deployed in the field, a little shaky. So yeah. So did they know?
Yeah, I mean, I think that there was corner cutting that happened. This is absolutely true. Was there kind of a concerted effort to undercut the Army? No, I don't think that's true. It's true that the leadership, political leadership was not particularly competent.
(20:28):
And so I think the truth is often kind of partial and messier and sort of somewhat less interesting actually than the rumour. The rumour is much more compelling than, well, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Yeah, people lose battles for the reasons you kind of expect at the end of the day. Yeah.
Melissa Gismondi (20:45):
So in terms of the plausibility for Egyptians, you mentioned, so it sounds like it's the cognitive dissonance between expecting the swift defeat. I think like you said "two weeks we're going to be in Tel Aviv". Expecting the swift defeat. That not happening, but then still having the officials say that this is going to be successful, it's going to be a swift defeat. What else was sort of making this rumour plausible, I guess?
Chloe Bordewich (21:13):
Yeah.
Melissa Gismondi (21:14):
Because a rumour doesn't make sense...
Chloe Bordewich (21:17):
Yeah.
Melissa Gismondi (21:18):
If it doesn't seem plausible.
Chloe Bordewich (21:19):
If it's not plausible. Yes, absolutely. I mean, rumours tell us what is plausible. And to people, and they may seem implausible subsequently, they may seem implausible to people who aren't living within that ecosystem. They may seem implausible, if we look back on rumours probably that we've participated in spreading at some point in the past. They may seem implausible later on. But no, at the moment, they're plausible given the circumstances.
(21:43):
And indeed, I think a major reason was that there was a huge amount of resentment towards the monarchy, which was considered to be decadent and inept and out of touch. And so people were trying to square what they could see as a political leadership that was failing them, with what they were seeing in the field, which was the failure, their failure.
(22:05):
But how then do you put those pieces together when the details are missing? And so that's where you end up with fragmentary truths and fragmentary fabrications and half-truths, kind of all mixing together in a way that becomes then quite complicated to parse truth from falsehood.
Melissa Gismondi (22:23):
You mentioned some of the ways that this rumour was starting to sort of circulate, but tell me a bit about how Egyptians were getting information. Official information about the war while it was happening?
Chloe Bordewich (22:38):
Sure.
Melissa Gismondi (22:39):
We know that the official story was, it's going to be quick.
Chloe Bordewich (22:41):
Easy.
Melissa Gismondi (22:42):
We're going to be victorious. What sorts of information were people getting? And how were they getting it?
Chloe Bordewich (22:48):
So the Army released daily communiques, sometimes more than once a day, that were published official statements basically, of how they were carrying out the war. They were published in the newspapers.
And I talked about, I study absences and so forth. I mean, there actually was not a dearth of information at this particular moment. There was a dearth of reliable or accurate information, but there wasn't a dearth of information.
(23:11):
So we have newspaper communiques, we have photographers who are working for, say, the newspaper Al-Ahram, who are being sent embedded with the Army. This is the first time we see that, Egyptian journalists being embedded with Egyptian soldiers. So this is new. Riding in planes, circling in planes above Palestine, which gives people a sense of immediacy. I mean, the distances we're talking about here are not huge either. This is close and also feels close when you see pictures of it in the paper the next day.
(23:49):
And then there are also newsreels, I wouldn't say a huge number, but there are quite a few newsreels that are produced mostly from Gaza where the Egyptian Army was staked out. The king makes a newsreel reviewing the troops to reassure viewers back home when they go to the cinema. They'll see the newsreel say before they watch the main feature. And they can see, "Oh, okay, wow, it looks safe out there. The king is himself calmly reviewing the troops and so forth."
(24:19):
So there were these very, I think, carefully constructed PR efforts, and there was a lot of reporting in the newspaper and there was radio. So yeah, those were the main ways that people found out. But this war was also being fought by an Army of conscripts, and so largely.
And so people return, there's communication, there's telephone, I mean, there's telegrams. People are not incommunicado in 1948, it's not that long ago. And so people are in touch and they come back. And this is a critical way in which information is also circulating, is through word of mouth.
Melissa Gismondi (25:00):
And so bringing all of this to the 1952 coup, and you mentioned there was a lot of popular support for the coup at the time.
Chloe Bordewich (25:08):
Yeah.
Melissa Gismondi (25:09):
As I understand it, this defeat was pretty humiliating. So was the coup sort of a way of, for the military, like a vindication? Of look at how strong we are now after this humiliation?
Chloe Bordewich (25:21):
Absolutely. I think this was. I mentioned it's perhaps on the surface counterintuitive that a military regime would come to power just a couple of years after a humiliating military defeat. But indeed, there weren't other centres of power.
I mean, you have the monarchy and you have the Army. And when other political leadership doesn't work out, the Army tends to be the one institution that's there to step in. And this was certainly the case. And I think the officers convincingly made the case that they had done everything they could competently within the constraints imposed on them. Was that true or not? It's sort of beside the point, but that was certainly the case they made.
(25:59):
And we spoke a bit about 2013. It's not exactly an analogous situation, but in 2013 when the military took over, it was also in response to dissatisfaction with non-military political leadership. That the military made the case, "We're the one institution that is still here and organised and prepared basically to run things."
(26:25):
You reminded me of a conversation I had. You asked, "What was I doing in 2013 during the coup?" I remember coming downstairs, it was just maybe three days before the military actually took over. And I was speaking with the guard, a doorman in my apartment building. And I asked him what he thought about what was going on and so forth.
(26:48):
And he said, "Well, I supported the revolution in 2011. I consider myself to be pro-revolution, pro-youth, et cetera. But look at what the political leadership this year, what a failure the regime of Mohammed Morsi has been." So he said, "I'm supporting its overthrow." And I said, "Okay, well, what do you see as the solution? I mean, who should take its place?" And he said, "Well, the Army."
(27:19):
And I said, "Okay, well you've said, but to me before you supported the overthrow of the Army before." And he said, "Yes. I said of course I don't support the Army, but they're the one institution. We know the Army, we know what we're getting. And we've known it for many, many decades." So basically it was a sense of resignation to kind of the one plausible alternative.
(27:44):
I can see that some of the rhetoric was similar, but I think there was also a lot of genuine enthusiasm in 1952 for behind the Free Officers' coup. I mean, they really did have a lot of public support. So it's not exactly analogous, but I think what is consistent is that this is the one institution that's had the level of continuity, I guess. An organisation has been able to be a consistent power base as political orders have come and gone.
Melissa Gismondi (28:22):
As you mentioned, the military, this regime remains in power today after a brief period following the Arab Spring.
Chloe Bordewich (28:30):
Right.
Melissa Gismondi (28:31):
How would you describe the military's treatment of information? How it approaches information compared to how the monarchy did before the coup?
Chloe Bordewich (28:41):
Gosh, that's a great question. I have to think about that for a second.
Melissa Gismondi (28:44):
Yeah, sure.
Chloe Bordewich (28:45):
In fact, the technologies change, but I have been struck throughout my research at how similar, in fact, the conversations that we're having today are to conversations that have happened time and time again in the past. Today, for instance, I mean here, North America, certainly the topic of fake news has been salient.
(29:11):
And I think there's often an implicit, if not an explicit connection made between the dissolution of, let's say, between the spread of fake news and the digital form and digital media. That the internet itself is somehow kind of producer of fake news on a scale that we've never seen before. But scale perhaps.
(29:34):
But there was a panic over fake news at the end of the 19th century as well, in context are quite distant from here certainly. The term itself was in widespread use in the Arab world, in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century. And so part of what I try to do through my research is also remind my readers that what we think to be unique challenges to truth, let's say in our time, are in fact not as new as we think they are.
(30:07):
And that the struggle for... I like to talk in my work about information justice, that information, access to information is part of a broader struggle for a more just society and a struggle that continues. Because the demands for information, the insistence on information as a public good, as articulated even over a century ago, did not correspond with the fulfilment of those demands.
(30:37):
So I think we see today similar techniques for controlling information. We may be seeing, we see new media, the internet in particular, and I just want to come back to some specific cases there. But in fact, this is a much longer story.
So specifically, let's talk about the internet ecosystem because I think this is something I often get questions about. How has the internet changed the way that information is controlled, particularly in this context, right?
Speaker 6 (31:06):
In the wake of the protest this week, the Egyptian government Friday took an extraordinary step, cutting off nearly all internet access and shutting down cell phone service. Internet traffic...
Chloe Bordewich (31:17):
In 2011, during the revolution in Tahrir Square, the Arab Spring, the internet was initially seen as a liberatory medium, and then subsequently came to be weaponized to suppress dissent. And we see today, for example, the weaponization of accusations of spreading fake news on the internet. For instance, the harassment and trolling of activists.
(31:45):
This tool has gone from being something revolutionary to being something that is seen as, that has been weaponized in the opposite direction. It's worth reflecting on not just what's changed, but how these histories of earlier technologies have informed, directly informed the legal histories, but also the material histories, have informed the way that these technologies are used and misused and manipulated today to control the circulation of information.
Melissa Gismondi (32:16):
So just to put a point on it, so today in Egypt, as I understand it, and you tell me if this is right-
Chloe Bordewich (32:22):
Sure.
Melissa Gismondi (32:23):
There's very little independent media left.
Chloe Bordewich (32:25):
Correct.
Melissa Gismondi (32:25):
Is that accurate?
Chloe Bordewich (32:26):
Yeah, correct. Today there is very little independent media left. There have been moments of opening and moments of closure. This is definitely a moment of greater closure. There are a few really excellent outlets that are heavily censored and have been shut down. Their journalists harassed over and over again. And it's very, very difficult actually for them to operate.
(32:53):
I think it's also worth noting the military controls a huge part of the entertainment economy. Well, of the entire economy, but also the entertainment economy. Including now much of the film, commercial TV, and film production. And so we see that shaping also popular culture and the perpetuation of some of the narratives that we've talked about today.
Melissa Gismondi (33:17):
I'm curious about the lingering effects of having to constantly fight for good, reliable information, or to consistently distrust the information that's given to you. What impact do you think that has on how people or the public understand and maybe relate to the truth? What's the impact on people's lives?
Chloe Bordewich (33:38):
Yeah, that's the million-dollar question, I think. It's a really important one. And one of the consequences that we see in a society where information, where access to information is not guaranteed, access to quality information, let's say, or truthful information is highly controlled is a climate of distrust, mutual distrust in the state, distrust in institutions.
(34:08):
For example, one specific example I'll give is distrust say in state archives as the custodians of the collective history of the people. Historians tend to think about their own antagonistic relationship to the archive, and that's a whole other conversation. And access to archives is something that's there for them.
(34:30):
But ostensibly archive is also there to preserve the collective history of the state, but also the state and its relationship with the public. And one of the challenges to actually conducting research in Egypt is that people don't trust the archive as something that relates to them. I mean, it doesn't, right? And that is for them.
(34:55):
And so for example, where do people's documents go? And so huge amounts of paper, of important documents, end up in paper markets or discarded. And there's really interesting anthropological work being done about this too. But I think there's not... So this is only one example basically, is that where the institutions where confidence or let's say trust in institutions is eroded by the lack of reliable and truthful information that comes from and circulates between them and the public.
Melissa Gismondi (35:33):
So often when we talk about information, I think we look at it from a technological standpoint or scientific standpoint. Why is it so important to put a humanities spin on the topic?
Chloe Bordewich (35:46):
I started our conversation by talking about how withholding information is a way of valorizing it. And that says something about a particular kind of social relationship. And so the ways that we either use or misuse or spread or withhold information, reflect our relationships to the audience, either the audience or let's say the audience for withholding that information. It says something about a relationship.
(36:13):
And so I think we have to approach the study of information in a way that also centres those relationships, human relationships, relationships between... Human relationships, interpersonal relationships, political relationships. That's not necessarily historical. I think that's true in the present as well.
And then I think the historical piece comes in. I mean, I'm interested broadly speaking in the terrain of knowledge production. And I think we're here today in a moment where the knowledge production remains incredibly unequal. And for reasons that we've talked about a bit today, I don't think we can fully understand why information circulates and what the particularly unequal geography of knowledge production looks like and why it looks that way? Without understanding its relationship to how information circulates.
(37:09):
So how information circulates to whom, not to whom, and why is both a product of contemporary inequalities and also historical ones. And so there's an intimate relationship between the histories we've talked about today of colonialism, of the kind of incomplete process of decolonization, and the geography of knowledge production in which we all are implicated today.
Melissa Gismondi (37:52):
Chloe Bordewich was the JHI CDHI Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow for 2023 to 2024. She's currently the New Media Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the JHI.
Humanities at Large is a podcast from the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe, share this episode, and leave us a five-star review. It really helps to get the word out. I'm Melissa Gismondi, and I'll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening.
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