Introduction

This chapter explores state responses to citizen empowerment in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait in order to add a more complete analysis of the increasing costs of resistance in the Middle East. While a strong case has been made for the ways in which citizens in the Middle East leverage new media to create voice and agency to solve problems and promote opportunities in their everyday lives (society-centric cyber-optimism), what has yet to be explored in detail are the strategies Arab states use to discourage citizens from fully exercising their powers (state-centric cyber-pessimism). Whereas cyberoptimists stress the liberating effects of new media use for the marginalised (Shirky 2011), cyber-pessimists focus on the ways in which these same tools strengthen the coercive capacity of the state (Morozov 2011b). This chapter is a bow to the cyber-pessimists.

As a recent text on the ways in which digital power increases state surveillance capacity observes, ‘before anybody can be disciplined and punished, they need to be identified and sorted’ (Ansorge 2016). There is a lot of digitally enabled identifying, sorting and punishing going on in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait, as explored in this chapter. The same digital media tools which help citizens to have a voice likewise empower the state to isolate these voices, and to police and punish those who dare to challenge the status quo. For example, reflecting on state responses to bloggers in Iran, Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany argue that ‘because the state is increasingly wary of losing control’ it ‘does its best to suppress the potential of new communications technologies’ (Sreberny and Khiabany 2010: 86).

In spite of the disruptions people have caused in the region (or perhaps because of them?), the Arab state has leveraged digital tools to discourage oppositional behaviour, with great personal harm to individuals who rebel. For example, a digital surveillance tool called Scout ‘uses about 60 algorithms and tracks a vocabulary list of about 10,000 words’ in order to locate potential ‘insider threats’ (Parloff 2016).