Alex Cocotas

Which #Brands Are #Winning The #Syrian #Uprising?

Is your brand agile enough to capitalize on a major humanitarian crisis? In the Dunk In The Dark era, #brands need to harness the power of #social to boost #engagement in the wake of wanton bloodlust. 

Let’s take a look at the #brands #winning the #Syrian #uprising:

Cinnabon: The first Syrian franchise opened in June 2011, three month after protests began in Daraa and other cities. Nothing a little #social can’t sugar coat. “We are all about having people add a little frosting to their lives,” it posted on its Facebook last year, in an obvious #brand #win.

Suggested copy: Why not add a little frosting to that shrapnel wound?

Cisco: The networking conglomerate, and Ellen Page-employer, reportedly supplies the Assad regime with high-tech surveillance equipment, along with a host of other publicity-shy companies (some people just don’t get #social). COMPLETELY UNRELATED: Cisco CEO John Chambers recently said he would no longer hire American workers or buy American companies until he has successfully blackmailed policymakers into giving Cisco a tax holiday on overseas cash, a proven failure at spurring the job creation he touts.    

Suggested copy: Perhaps a riff on its corporate slogan: Your Tomorrow Ended Here.

Four Seasons: Occupancy has sadly slumped at the venerable hospitality chain’s Damascus location. “Let’s put it this way, the Four Seasons was very excited about the mission of Kofi Annan — not because they were hopeful he’d come away with a solution to the crisis, but because they were finally getting some business. And they knew he’d be back,” a Syrian businessman told Foreign Policy last year. Priorities! But how can the #brand take advantage of the accomplished peacemaker’s patronage? 

Suggested copy: For your next vacation, or flaccid diplomatic mission, drift off to the not-so-distant rumble of RPGs in elegance. 

KFC: The colonel has an instinctive nose for conflict. Franchises in Damascus and Aleppo are serving up its distinctive take on Syrian culinary traditions. Just kidding! They serve chicken…Kentucky Fried Chicken. With food shortages wracking the country, KFC needs to take a page from Buzzfeed-certified #brand #winner and corporate cousin Taco Bell, lest someone else capitalize on the widespread hunger.

Suggested copy: Tired of bread lines? Come into the colonel, it’s finger licking good (assuming your fingers weren’t blown off in a government-sponsored airstrike)

United Colors Of Benetton: The clothing retailer has been working with the Assad regime for years, circumventing a ban on foreign garments that was only lifted in 2005. There are 16 outlets in the country, with plans for further expansion. Syrians are reportedly quite fond of sparkles and studs. Known for its provocative ads, like the Colors of Domestic Violence campaign, how can the #brand utilize 70,000 unnecessary deaths to inspire greater #loyalty among its customers?

Suggested copy: Colors of Complicity – mutilated bodies draped in the latest Spring-Summer line with limp exhortations supporting international action. Maybe a picture of Assad and Obama kissing, or something. 

Rock The Casbah: Social Media And The Arab Spring

One of the most pervasive sentiments dangerously close to becoming accepted wisdom is this notion that the Arab Spring, and particularly Egypt’s revolution, was the first “Twitter revolution” or “Facebook revolution” or, perhaps more accurately, the “I am desperately trying to justify how much time I spend on these things revolution.”

Never mind that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia with a Luddite self-immolation. Never mind that images and news of the unfolding events were primarily transmitted through TV, particularly Al-Jazeera, which has enormous influence in the region and was beamed into 50 percent of Arab homes in 2010. Never mind that usage stats just don’t bear out this disproportionate influence. 

According to Egypt’s Ministry Of Communications And Information Technology, Egypt’s Internet penetration was only 30 percent in January 2011. Even that may be misleadingly high. In countries like Egypt, many users log on to the web at Internet cafes, not the sort of personalized connection we have become accustomed to in the west—also not the sort of instantaneous connection inherent in the social media insurrectionary ideal.

In April 2011, the Dubai School Of Government found that there were 27.7 million Facebook users in the whole of the Arab world. That number was up 30 percent from January, meaning that there were roughly 21 million Facebook users in the entire Arab world at the time of the Egyptian revolution. Not a drop in the bucket, but there are over 80 million people in Egypt alone.

What’s strange, however, is that there is a technological aspect to these uprisings that is barely covered. Perhaps they have been pervasive in the west too long to penetrate our consciousness, but the arrival of mobile phones was a profound technological leap in the developing world. According to Jana, the number of mobile phone subscriptions in the developing world rose from 250 million in 2000 to 4.5 billion in 2011. Worldwide, cell phones have an astounding 85 percent penetration rate. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how cell phones can be used to mobilize thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people into action. While most the world focused on Mubarak’s internet shutdown and prepubescent hacker collectives swore revenge, many overlooked that the cell phone network was shut down as well. More than social media, it was “dumbphones” and TV that drove the development of mass movements in the Arab world.

But but but, what about all those tweets! Sure, there was a deluge of social activity surrounding the events—and journalists like Robert Mackey did an admirable job aggregating them into contextually meaningful information for western audiences—but can anyone convincingly demonstrate that hashtags move the dial? As crowds gathered in Tahrir, were Mubarak’s advisors nervously whispering in his ear, “But sir, we’ve lost TechCrunch…”  

More importantly, can we be certain that the tweets of bilingual Egyptians—a relatively privileged group, one assumes—are representative of broader domestic opinion.  Given the course of events, we can surmise that a majority of Egyptians wanted Mubarak out, but recent history suggests that sentiment may not have been as widespread as previously thought. Ahmed Shafik, a former high-ranking official in Mubarak’s regime, took 48 percent of the votes in the presidential election (he polled at 24 percent in the first round, 1 percent below current president Morsi).

Social media has supercharged the information age. Where reporters once had to harvest sources on the ground, they can now harness thousands, if not millions, of scraps surrounding a news event. However, journalists need to be especially wary of confirmation bias in the Twitterverse. In countries with limited social media penetration, usage can be dominated by a single cohort—such as the urban, tech-savvy young—and is ripe for reinforcing preformed perceptions. 

Two recent examples illustrate the pitfall.

In 2009, the “Green Revolution” swept Iran following the disputed presidential election. The foreign press latched on to tweets, videos, and pictures dribbling out of the country to portray a broad-based ferment. However, the vast majority emanated from Tehran, which, like New York, Paris, or Moscow, is a metropolitan center that stands a bit apart from the rest of the country. It also doesn’t capture the countryside, where Ahmadinejad drew his support (he brandished a populist, everyman image while campaigning). A Persian friend, who still has relatives in the country and is no fan of the regime, told me at the time, “The scary thing is that he probably won the election, even without the fraud.”

A similar thing happened again last winter when protests broke out in Moscow following fairly overt voter fraud in the Russian legislative elections. The turnouts were the largest Russian protests in years, but a casual observer could easily draw erroneous conclusions about the country’s internal power dynamics. Without any election fraud, it is very likely that Putin’s United Russia party still would have won a plurality of votes. One can argue that the election was not contested because Putin has systemically denuded the opposition over the past decade, but that’s a more nuanced narrative than most of the prevailing media coverage.

I’m not making the argument that most Egyptians would have preferred to ride with Mubarak into the sunset. Nor am I arguing that Ahmadinejad and Putin just get a bad rap from foreign media—I find them both personally abhorrent. But the overreliance on social media can create a false perception that the opposition to these regimes is pervasive. As much as it pains our western sensibilities, autocrats like Mubarak, Ahmadinejad and Putin have real bases of support.

The “social media revolution” is such a feel good narrative though, a veritable cache for all our favorite buzzwords: liberation through crowd-sourced bleep bloop citizen journalism, yeah! But underpinning this story is a typically western parochialism: Yes, we propped up your authoritarian government for decades, but we also gave you the tools to set yourself free. Why don’t you love us yet, you ungrateful bastards? The whole thing is basically a self-congratulatory circle jerk. Never mind the Egyptians getting their skulls cracked in Tahrir: We did it, you guys!

Do we really suppose there was no commonality to these people’s experience? No one ever looked up and recognized the ineptitude and wasted potential surrounding them without the benefit of a hashtag? No child was capable of reading the frustration in their parents’ eyes after the stream of small, but regular indignities?

What really gets to me, however, is that the people pushing this narrative are the same ones who regular blather on about how changes to Twitter’s API represent some deep rupture with how we interact with the world. “Twitter Mobile Stresses Follow Count Over Bio & That Makes Me Sad” is just one example of this genre’s delectable navel gazing drivel. You know what makes me sad? The murder of 30,000 citizens at the hand of their own government while the world puts on a grave face, spins the same bullshit “never again” story, sighs helplessly that nothing could be down, and then proceeds to go happily about its day like not a thing happened.

#pray4syria

Live From New York, It’s…

Hurricane Sandy is now four days in the rear view mirror and already the race is on. Most prominently, we see misty-eyed tales of New York’s resilience. Then there are others, for whom the city’s scathing sarcasm and unrelenting sideshows is a sign that everything will be all right. And finally we have the navel-gazing essayists, who probably rode out the storm in Brooklyn, but must expound on “what” it “means” to be a “survivor” of this “hurricane.”

None of these people are probably living in lower Manhattan right now because we have no power, no Internet, and no phone service. (I am writing this from a friend’s workspace just above the Mason-Dixie line on 29^th and Broadway, god bless her.) 

My Sandy experience has been nothing profound, nothing life altering, but mostly just that, an experience, a mundane one even. I was not in the hardest hit neighborhood—the flooding was about a block away—and, being young, healthy, and mobile, I’m able to make daily incursions into electrified New York in search of power and whatever else I need. I pass the nights sitting around candles, drinking cheap wine, smoking cigarettes, and jabbering over whatever minutia happens to float to the surface. I am pretty lucky, so who am I to speak to the Ave. D or Battery Park or Coney Island experience.

Like many others, my preparation for Hurricane Sandy was fairly flat-footed. On Sunday, as press conferences rolled across television screens and lines wrapped around grocery store registers, I bought my primary storm supplies: an Artichoke pie and a couple of liters of Ginger Ale. The pizza I could reheat in the stove even if the power went out, which I figured would happen for a day, maybe two. The ginger ale was an audible after the local grocery store ran out of water, my rationale being that I have probably lived out a few days of my life on worse things than ginger ale.

Monday came and the rains lashed and the winds sighed deeply and the water gurgled up on to our shores. That night, as the storm surge pushed forward, two of my roommates and I ran down to check out the flooding. We couldn’t even make it to Ave. C, now swimming under a swift current. The wind was kicking up so hard it blew you back off the street and forced you to take cover. The water was inching towards its next goal, Ave. B, and, with detritus and debris ripping past us, we decided it wise to head back indoors. We lost power about 30 minutes later. 

On Tuesday morning, the city felt like it woke up in a collective daze. Downtown residents straggled uptown in search of fabled electricity. Residents brimmed with the latest gossip and rumors. No electricity for a week, one says. Possibly no subway for a month, another hears. Go to 27^th street, another man instructs, that’s where you’ll find power.

Along the way, we found mangled trees, disembodied awnings, and the remnants of fall foliage sprawled across streets and sidewalks. A café on 19^th and Park, below the power line, was serving “hurricane coffee” to the bleary-eyed masses for $2—for another $2 they would spike it with whiskey, On 23^rd street, everyone’s phones magically sprung into action and in flowed the worried e-mails and text messages. Yes, I’m fine. No, we don’t have power. Yes, we should have enough food. No, I don’t know when its coming back on, etc etc. 

One thing is for sure: local businesses have been endearing themselves to residents in ways that I doubt will soon be forgotten. On Monday night, as the storm surge peaked, we sat in Heather’s on 13^th St., about a block from the flooding, drinking cold beer under the dim generator light as the wind whipped around us. The next morning, another bar fired up its generator so locals could juice their phones. Bodegas stayed open by candlelight, selling canned goods and crackers to residents in need.

I had two recurring thoughts as this experience unfolded. The first was how dream-like and surreal this whole episode was. I kept having to tell myself that this was my reality, and that, yes, this is really happening right now. The lashing winds, the floodwater than nipped at my feet by Ave. C, the daily migration northward, the nightly flickers—it all seemed like some bizarre phantasmagoria that I had accidentally stumbled upon. The second was more metaphysical: Hurricane Sandy was historic. I will tell my kids, knock on wood, about this experience. Yes, history was unfolding around me, but was I really taking any part in it? My inability to reconcile these two thoughts—the abstraction of the immediate and personal experience with the supposed firmness of the historical and remembered experience—nagged me throughout the week.

I have grown to hate that familiar “New Yorkers are so resilient” reflex that has undoubtedly touched the lips of many pundits, commentators, and earnest well-wishers this week. It implies a consciousness that is silly given the situation. New Yorkers are just like anyone else whose community has been ravaged by a disaster. Do the daily slights and frustrations of living in New York prepare you better for such an event? Maybe. But I doubt New Yorkers are any more resilient that residents of New Orleans, the Miyagi Prefecture, or Joplin, Missouri. Stop fetishizing New Yorker’s experience, this is just what people do: You put your best face forward, kvetch, make bad jokes, grasp at normalcy, and get on with it. Some people act like heroes and others act like idiots because they are, you know, human. I genuinely feel lucky. Despite the inconveniences, it has been a perversely enjoyable experience. It could have been worse, and for many others it is, but because we have the money and the media we are the preternaturally and eternally resilient New Yorkers.

On Tuesday night I made the eerily silent walk from my friend’s place on 4^th and B back to my apartment on 11^th and A. The streets were pitch black, save the occasional generator or headlight. I was vigilant because of persistent, but unsubstantiated, rumors of muggings in the neighborhood. Food trucks had pulled up into the neighborhood to serve warm food to cold residents. “Thanks for being open,” one man said as he grabbed his food. Two bicyclists came down the street looking like primitive Tron characters, their bikes wrapped in Christmas lights. “I don’t think we look ridiculous,” I heard one say as they passed.

Don’t we all, don’t we all.

Coup D’Etat Blues (But It Ain’t All Over Now, Baby)

Musical accompaniment: The Clash - Clampdown

In a move that seems glaringly obvious in retrospect, the Egyptian military orchestrated a magisterial consolidation of power last week. The recently elected Parliament, led by an Islamist majority, was dissolved and stripped of its power to draft a new constitution, just before the runoff in the presidential election. The army’s power grab also offers an important lesson in revolutionary politics: it is easy to focus on the alphabet soup of special interests that surface in the immediate aftermath of a revolution, but that diverts attention away from the logical heirs to the throne: those that hold the guns

With the benefit of hindsight, you can’t help but think that the army also had a hand in the disqualification of four major presidential candidates on April 14^th. Most significant was the dismissal of Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, the Salafist candidate, whose poll numbers were rising alarmingly fast. His disqualification meant the ultraconservative Salafists would have to coalesce around the main Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi. In late April, Morsi was only polling 3.6 percent, according to the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic studies. With a unified Islamist front, he would go on to win 24.8 percent of the vote in the first round and is believed to have won the runoff against Ahmed Shafik, the former commander of the Egyptian Air Force.

The liberal vote, on the other hand, never unified and diluted across a slate of candidates. However, the disqualifications still had a significant impact on liberals. The dismissal of Ismail’s candidacy insured that the largest voting bloc in the country would not splinter across several Islamist factions. Likewise, the disqualifications also ensnared Omar Suleiman, also a prominent representative of the Mubarak regime, who would have likely siphoned votes off of Shafik.

Egypt’s young liberals, the impetus behind the revolution, were left empty-handed in the runoff. Voting for an unapologetic representative of the regime they just overthrew was anathema, but they are also understandably distrustful of the Islamists. After all, it was these young activists who braved the initial crackdowns in Tahrir Square. The Islamists only moved in later, after the revolution’s cascading momentum became self-evident. The Islamists had, in effect, co-opted the liberals’ cause. Now, with even a veneer of choice eliminated for liberals, the army has essentially co-opted their frustration and fostered indifference in its place.  

The most obvious parallel for the oscillations of Egypt’s emerging democratic-authoritarian political dynamic is Turkey. The legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the state, is still the foundation of modern Turkey. All Turkish leaders must show deference to his stewardship and trace the ancestral lineage of their policies to Kemalism.

The self-appointed heir and protector of Ataturk’s vision is the institution that birthed him, the army. Any Turkish politician perceived to have strayed too far from his teachings lives in nightly terror of an anxious knock on the door.

There have been three overt coups in Modern Turkey, and another by memorandum, which was something of a post-modern coup. General Cevik Bir remarked on the occasion of the soft coup, “In Turkey we have a marriage of Islam and democracy. (…) The child of this marriage is secularism. Now this child gets sick from time to time. The Turkish Armed Forces is the doctor which saves the child. Depending on how sick the kid is, we administer the necessary medicine to make sure the child recuperates”.”

Yes, the current Turkish government under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has diverged far from Ataturk’s secular ideals. However, if economic growth were not so robust right now, the country would likely be due for its fifth coup any day now, which brings us to an important point. Turkey’s military has an atrocious human rights record, but it has implemented structural reforms in the Turkish economy, especially after the 1980 coup, that set the stage for today’s boom (Turkey’s economy is among the fastest growing in the world).   

While the revolution gave a generation of Egyptians their first taste of free expression, free assembly, and that superlative intangible ideal, freedom, even its most ardent supporters acknowledge the country still faces pressing issues that threaten the basic rhythms of everyday life. Egypt’s economy, never robust to begin with, has stagnated since the revolution. This is partly because tourist dollars, a vital lifeline of the economy, have dried up, but is also the result of the endemic uncertainty that hangs over the country’s future. 

Egyptians understandably experienced a mass outpouring of joy and optimism after the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Who could not help but be moved by the images from Tahrir Square? Unfortunately, Egyptian activists are coming to a hard realization: transformational change will be gradual and it is extremely difficult to dislodge an institution that has effectively run the country for over 50 years. In light of recent developments, my hope is that the country can weather its economic crisis under the shadow leadership of the junta. However, once the economy has regained stability, activists will be able make a renewed push to wrest power from the military. After all, if Turkey’s experience has taught one thing about political dynasticism, it’s that cash is still king.

Of Masada And Men

The prospect of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities has mysteriously and quite suddenly leaped from distant but distinct possibility to defcon-5 in the past few months. It has taken on such a baffling urgency that it carries an air of inevitability in some circles—The Huffington Post even runs an asinine live blog on the “drumbeat to war.” The Atlantic, on the other hand, only calculates a 42 percent chance of war, down from a high of 49 percent, which must be bad news for investors long Middle East war.

While I am under no illusions about the true aims of Iran’s nuclear program, where is this coming from? It’s not a new issue—it has been simmering for over a decade—and, as best I can tell, there have been no recent developments to suggest an Iranian nuclear bomb is imminent.

The existential threat to Israel looms large of course, but there are other compelling reasons to ward off an Iranian bomb. Contrary to some, I do not believe the introduction of Mutually Assured Destruction would have a stabilizing effect on the Middle East. A covert proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been raging beneath, and occasionally above, the surface for the past decade. Through the very possession of the bomb, Iran will have irreparably shifted the balance of power in the conflict, creating a fertile atmosphere for reckless political calculations.

Nonetheless, I am fervently against the prospect of an Israeli strike on Iran. Success would be a narrow victory, the potential downside, an inexorable spiral of destruction and destabilization.

First and foremost, the internal dynamics of Iranian society tilt in Israel’s favor over the long-term.  The division fermented by the 2009 election fractionalized the country, and weighs heavy on any façade of unity the regime projects. The regime courted a host of blasphemies in its response to the protests, irrevocably rupturing its divine narrative, a cornerstone of its legitimacy. Iran’s population is young, educated and, though by no means a unitary body, largely unshackled of their government’s implacable hostility towards the West. Best to let it sag and collapse under the weight of demographic momentum, or the external pressures of revolutionary fervor roiling the region.

Across the Middle East, the “Iranian coalition” is on the defensive. If they lose Syria, and it seems likely they will, their main ally in the region is gone, not to mention their conduit to Hezbollah. In the wake of the Arab Spring, the Iranian model is largely discredited across the region. This is not to say there are not troubling developments in the “liberated” countries—the rise of the Salafists in Egypt, for example—but the Islamic Republic’s theocratic system is a lot closer to the repressive regimes the Arab Street just sloughed than some future ideal. Unbridled support for the Assad regime, the emotional firecracker issue du jour, probably isn’t helping their cause either.

However, the obvious question here is one often overlooked: What does Israel actually achieve by bombing Iran? Most likely, it sets the nuclear program back a few months—years if they’re lucky—while simultaneously giving Iranian hardliners an existential threat to rally around. It would also offer a convenient pretext to clampdown on the opposition, negating one of Israel’s strongest strategic advantages.

Even if Iran does manage to create a nuclear bomb—and there are reasons to doubt the technical capabilities of a country that can barely meet its own electricity needs with one of the world’s largest oil reserves—should it be a foregone conclusion they would actually use it? It is tempting, not to mention easy, to view the Iranian regime as inherently unhinged. It is more difficult, and altogether a bit troubling, to admit that they may fundamentally be rational actors on the political stage. While many of their actions superficially confound, you can usually read into some underlying political calculus.

While much is made of Ahmadinejad’s comment that he “wants to wipe Israel off the face of the map”—and I don’t think it’s an empty threat—let’s not forget who really runs the show.  The Ayatollah Khamenei, like much of the religious leadership presumably, has grandchildren, and it is hardly a state secret that Israel operates on the head-for-an-eye karma principle.

If Iran did launch a missile into Tel Aviv, ten would make the return trip to Tehran. Despite all their delusions, I do not think the Ayatollahs are under any illusions about this. In spite of their self-stated desire to see Israel conjoined to the Mediterranean Sea, they do not want to be responsible for the destruction of one of the world’s oldest and richest cultures—and their families along with it.

However, conventional wisdom says that if you’re trying to pull off a large-scale covert attack, leaking your plans to the press everyday isn’t the most effective strategy. What accounts for the recent spate of saber rattling then? Oddly enough, I believe the sudden urgency of the Iranian question may be a function of American electoral politics.

It is no secret that Obama is in for a tougher reelection campaign than previously anticipated. The great leaves of recovery have wilted into the decomposing mulch of stagnation. Every vote matters, even a few Jewish grandmothers in South Florida susceptible to a whisper campaign alleging we have a Muslim Mau-Mau insurgent president.

It’s also no secret that Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu have an icy relationship. Netanyahu was suspicious of Obama from the moment he stepped back into office (he became Prime Minister three months after Obama was inaugurated). He even had the chutzpah to once lecture Obama, on-camera no less, about the indefensibility of the 1967 borders. (Obama, for the record, said they should be the “basis” for a peace plan, the same language used by his predecessors).

Bibi’s spiritual kin clearly lie in the Republican Party. One of Netanyahu’s biggest American backers is Sheldon Adelson, the casino tycoon who resuscitated Newt Gingrich’s flailing campaign with million of dollars in unrestricted SuperPAC money. Netanyahu also has a long bond with presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, as the New York Times recently documented.

Some of these Republicans believe a group of Jewish voters may be up for grabs this year because Obama is perceived as weak on Israel. Given Obama’s suddenly vulnerable political position, they sense they can make Israel a wedge issue, a thesis the Democrats are not keen to test.

This is not to say there is any collusion between Netanyahu and the Republican Party, far from it. Let’s be clear: he’s a much smarter politician that anyone in that clown car. However, Netanyahu knows if he pushes the Iran case aggressively the lemmings will kowtow behind him, and Obama has to accommodate to cover his flank. Obama, furthermore, is understandably eager to avoid being drawn into another war before November. Even if Obama wins, Netanyahu has already boxed him in with his pre-election promises. He has, in other words, effectively hedged his bets.

Thus far, Netanyahu has successfully exploited America’s rancorous political atmosphere to extract a carte blanche for Israeli security concerns. However, recent developments further cloud his intentions. He dissolved parliament and announced early elections, only to form a new government with the more centrist Kadima party days later.  He has significantly strengthened his political position, but is a strike imminent?

Despite Netanyahu’s shows of strength abroad, there is not necessarily pervasive domestic support for an attack on Iran; the country is war-weary and many are rightly concerned about potential reprisals from Iran’s neighborhood proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Former high-ranking officials in the defense and intelligence establishments have come out against a strike. IDF chief Benny Gantz also delivered a public rebuke to Netanyahu’s position recently.

It doesn’t matter though; the well is already poisoned. If Israel bombed Iran tomorrow, would anyone really be surprised? If we awoke to a region, or perhaps even a world, plunged into chaos, would we be surprised? The rhetoric has reached such a fever pitch; nothing will surprise us anymore. Netanyahu made a cynical political calculation, ostensibly rational, and the world unconsciously conceded its grave potential outcomes.

Talking to CNN recently, Netanyahu said he not want to bet “the security of the world on Iran’s rational behavior.” Nor should we gamble it on the best laid politics of mice and men.

DISCLAIMER: Despite his Hellenic name, Alex Cocotas is indeed a Jew. He is also an ardent Zionist, raised in a Zionist family. He was a member of the Israeli Action Committee in college. He reads Haaretz every day and is aware that it falls far to the left of the country’s political center. He looks forward to being called a self-loathing Jew.

Dearth And Taxes

The troubles started in early April.

While most Americans tend to view tax season as a decidedly grim affair, for me it is an annual act in financial resurrection. Not unlike finding a twenty in your pocket while grabbing lunch, if you replace “twenty” with “small dowry” and “grabbing lunch” with “wondering where this month’s rent money went.”

Having spent a prolonged stretch of the past year unemployed, I was due for a large and desperately needed refund. Time to kick back and reap the rewards of overpaying the government all year, or so I naively thought.

Minutes later, I received a text message from H&R Block informing me the IRS has rejected my tax return. Maybe it was because I moved last year?

After logging in, I am instead greeted by the news that the IRS has no record for an Alex Cocotas born on July 16 1987. Probably just the result of an errant keystroke, I desperately convince myself. Could happen to anyone, right?

So once again I fill out the dreaded date of birth box, this time carefully typing in each individual number. No two-handed keyboard concerto for me, I look like your grandpa taking the World Wide Web out for his first test drive on the information superhighway. I read it over so many times that I begin to question whether I actually was born on July 16. I take a cursory look at my driver’s license to double check. Yup, that’s it, no doubt about it. Click.

Five minutes later. Text message. “We detected an issue with your…”

I don’t even finish reading it. Back to the computer. 07/16/1987. Click. Text message. Computer. 07/16/1987. Click. Text message.

After getting rejected for the fourth or fifth time, the conspiracy plots multiply. My parents! They must know something about this, if they really are my “parents” that is. I fumble for my phone and call “dad” in a state of manic delirium. Ha! What a fast one this “dad” has been playing on me all these years! When a voice peeks through the other end, the accusations fly fast and furious. What do you know and when did you know it old man!

After talking me down from the ledge, the man that I have deduced is in fact my father begins to hash out the problem. He checks my birth certificate: 07/16/1987. My social security card: 07/16/1987. There must be a rational explanation for this he reckons, he’ll call super accountant Harvey to get to the bottom of the matter.

In the mean time, I slowly come to the realization that I kind of, sort of don’t exist—at least in the eyes of my own government. All those years of corrosive nihilism, and now I find out I never existed in the first place. Not even the great philosophers are equipped to prepare you for this sort of existential anxiety though: Man can will, but he cannot will when his government wills him out of existence via text message.

Day 1 of tenuous non-existence went off pretty smoothly. I went into the office and my co-workers seemed to acknowledge that I was there. My boss spoke to me like no rupture in the time-space continuum had occurred. To top it off, mysterious non-entity Alex Cocotas even managed to publish an article that day.

Day 2 in purgatory didn’t start off so bad either. I devoted much of the morning confabulating the source of my sudden descent into non-existence. Maybe I was an unwilling pawn caught in an international spy intrigue? The possibilities were endless, but they all ended with me in a John Le Carre novel.

I even bothered to call the IRS at lunchtime to see if they could help me out (cue laugh track). After working my way through an MC Escher worthy maze of robotic voice loops, I inevitably ended up in a Catch-22: I could only talk to a human being if I provided my birth date, which was my very reason for calling in the first place of course. Newman!

That afternoon, super accountant Harvey burst my espionage dreams and informed me that he had found the problem: Apparently the Social Security Administration believes I was born on January 1, 1987. The plot thickens! Call the Social Security Administration I am told, they can sort this out.

Twenty minutes of muzak later I am on the phone with Janice at the Social Security Administration trying to convince her I am whom I say I am when she says I am not. I patiently answer all her questions: name, social security number, city of birth, mother’s maiden name, father’s name, and…date of birth.

“My birthday is July 16, 1987, but you’re going to have it listed as January 1, 1987.”

“Yes, well it seems we have a problem here.”

Yes, we do have a problem here Janice!The Social Security Administration just changed my date of birth apropos nothing! No no no, that’s not what happened I’m assured. Yeah, you’re probably right Janice; I’ve just been living a lie for the past 24 years! Ok well I’m satisfied, thanks for your time. Have a nice day!

Putting aside the Social Security Administration’s infallibility for a moment, how would one go about rectifying the situation? From what I gather, a receipt for every quesadilla or cup of coffee I’ve ever purchased.

This Social Security thing clearly isn’t going to sort itself out anytime soon. Since they’ve been accepting the wrong birthday for years, one more won’t hurt them right?

To summarize: I am lying to the government to pay my taxes at a time when the richest Americans are crafting complex strategies to avoid them in the first place. What’s more, forking over my money to Uncle Sam has suddenly become something of a personal vendetta: I’ll go to any length to be a law-abiding citizen, just try and stop me!

And so I vindictively enter 01/01/1987 in the date of birth box and fire off my tax returns to the IRS for god knows what time before bursting into a fit of maniacal cackling. It’s the heist of the century!

Five minutes later. Text message. “We detected an issue with your…”

No…this can’t be.

Back to the computer. 01/01/1987. Click. Text message. Computer. 01/01/1987. Click. Text message.

At this point I am so desperate to get this refund I’ll say anything. It was me on the grassy knoll! I’m the leader of the subversive Kenyan-Muslim-Secular-Gay plot to take over America!For the love of god, tell me what to say and I’ll say it!

With every subsequent text message my refund-fueled dreams fade further into the horizon. I am slowly gripped by the horrifying realization that it will take an audit to confirm the existence of one-time citizen Alex Cocotas.

If he ever existed in the first place, that is.

History Is Not A Closed Circuit

One of the most pernicious half-truths told to budding historians is that old ditty, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”¹ There are innumerable plays on the phrase, but its core remains the same: history as circular, inherently repetitive.

It’s nice, perhaps even comforting, to think of history as a series of interlocking concentric circles, their narrative arcs racing around the follies of our willfully ignorant leaders. However, recent events do not bear out such wishful thinking.

When the depths of the Great Recession became clear, many harbored a fear that the world was due to be roiled by anti-democratic pressures. Trepidations, in turn, that were born of our last “great” economic calamity, the depression.

Although it’s easy to forget given the course of events in the 20^th century, the triumph of liberal democracy was no foregone conclusion in the 1930s. Democracy had become a dirty word, considered too divisive and inept to handle unprecedented economic upheaval. By 1935, the nascent Eastern European democracies born of Versailles had all been replaced by authoritarian regimes—except Czechoslovakia, which would later be sacrificed by its fellow democracies in the name of “peace in our time.”

While we all know what happened in Germany, Italy and Spain, the crisis of democracy was widespread. The dual rise of communism and fascism had an expansive hold on the imagination. The editors of UC Berkeley’s Blue and Gold yearbook, for example, decided it was appropriate to commemorate the graduating class of 1937 with a Nazi motif—one section even praised Germany’s “progressive commercial spirit.” 

Those students, like many others, were no doubt enamored with the perceived modern character of Fascism. It is difficult to imagine now—their horrors firmly implanted in the collective conscience—but Fascism and Communism were once thought to be progressive ideologies.

They effectively utilized emerging mass communications technologies, emphasized unity in otherwise divisive societies, and seemed to promise the revitalization of the human spirit through the creation of some ill-defined “new man.” For many it seemed a sort of logical end game to human history, the only plausible manner to corral a world of inexorable complexity. Democracy, with its fractious politics and trifles over individual rights, seemed a relic of the past.

And, indeed, this time around there have been fresh challenges to democracy in countries gripped by economic anxieties.  Hungary and Ukraine, for example, have witnessed a troubling consolidation of executive power. Across Europe in general there has been a startling rise of far-right parties with dubious democratic ideals. I would even go so far as to say the austerity regimes imposed on Greece, Portugal, and Italy harbor a conspicuous authoritarian character.

Discomforting developments sure, but there hasn’t been a return of the sort of apocalyptic fatalism that hung over the Great Depression. Rather, the central narrative of the past eighteen months has been the brazen and bloodsoaked struggle for freedom across the Arab World.

On December 17, 2010, a fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself on fire in front of a provincial Tunisian government building. Bouazizi was reportedly despondent after his wares were confiscated and frustrated with a culture of pervasive corruption. What began as an act of desperation in an all-but-forgotten Tunisian town soon resonated and reverberated in countries as distant as Russia and China—one of those sweet elusive mysteries of capricious history.

News of Bouazizi’s self-immolation spread across the world, aided and abetted by the same sort of mass communication technologies that once precipitated the rise of democracy’s would-be usurpers. Within a month, the Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had resigned and fled the country. Weeks later he would be joined by the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Muammar Gaddafi left this earth after a prolonged struggle and Syria has most recently exploded as the latest flashpoint in what came to be known as the “Arab Spring.”

In the not-so-recent past this sort of event would have been re-appropriated by a looming strongman lurking in the shadows. Instead, the event spurred a sort of a communal introspection; or to use the words of Anthony Shadid, “a people who once complained of their quiescence” had “seized control of their lives.”

What will ultimately become of all this? It is impossible to know, of course, but whatever it is it should be allowed to run its natural course—heavy-handed intervention doesn’t have a sterling track record in the region.

While there is persistent chatter about a menacing Islamist insurgency lying in wait, I think this reveals more about Western fears than a plausible outcome. The Iranian model is pretty widely discredited in the region. As a Syrian protestor recently told the New York Times, “ We are demonstrating here, very close to Iran’s embassy, to say to the Iranians, ‘Look, we are peaceful protestors who want democracy, dignity, and freedom’.”  Any Islamist government would likely be modeled on the rule of the relatively moderate Turkish AKP, which has some troubling impulses but on the whole seems committed to democracy. 

Yes, there are legitimate worries about what may follow in Summer and Autumn, but for now you can’t help but marvel at the impetuous course of history. When former CIA agent Robert Baer was asked by Terry Gross how the agency missed the Arab Spring, his answer was telling, “You can’t collect intelligence on ephemera, of a Tunisian vendor lighting himself on fire and sparking a revolt.”

What then accounts for the continued fascination with the perceived circular nature of history? 

There has been a distinctly modern desire to reconfigure history as some sort of pseudo-scientific discipline. My middle school history classes even fell under the guise of “social science.” This reclassification has always struck me as dubious or misguided at best, and downright deceitful or intellectually dishonest at worst.

Science, by definition, is the act of extrapolation through repeated observation—there is an inherent certainty of outcome. I know, for example, that the combination of sodium and chlorine invariably produces salt. But if a man were to light himself on fire tomorrow in Moscow’s Red Square, I do not know if we’d be talking of a “Slavic Spring” in a few months.

What is so strange to me is that the whole “history as science” motif finds its roots in Marxism of all places. Marx, undoubtedly taking a very dialectic view of the world, rationalized that he had cracked history’s code—there was a determinable course to history’s ebbs and flows. I’ll give you a hint: it ended with socialism. While there are certainly things to be admired in Marx’s writing (including about history), this is definitely not one of them.

Subsequent “Marxists” understood this as giving them carte blanche to engineer history’s preordained destiny. History was wielded as a blunt object against whole classes and races perceived as having an innate aversion to its predetermined fate. Lives were trampled upon and real human suffering blithely ignored in the name of “science” and “progress.” It would have been roundly condemned as barbarism except, as Vaclev Havel once wrote, “the actors are scientists, people shielded by science, possessing an allegedly scientific worldview.”

The neat contours of science, guided by a sacrosanct method and peer review, are an ill-conceived model for history—its power lies in its fickle nature.  It is in turns fascinating, terrifying, exhilarating, and exhausting. History, by its very definition, is the totality and truest embodiment of the human experience.

I once was having a discussion with my mentor about the development of the Balkan Peninsula. As we talked about its changing demography over time, he started to say, “If you look at its map throughout history…” Before he could continue, I beat him to the punch, “It’s like a living organism.” 

Like an organism, the development of history is unpredictable, perpetually evolving, and adaptable to the ever-shifting winds of time. It is guided by nothing but humanity’s unceasing ability for reinvention and reaction. To truly study history is to be enamored with spontaneity—the often-futile attempt to imbue the present with meaning through the past’s cascading chaos.

However, if the world needs a pithy quote about history to stick in Facebook profiles, I recommend this as a replacement: “The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will be no rerun, brothers. The revolution will be live.” 

¹ The original quote is attributed to Edmund Burke, but has since become so commonly used that it has seemingly become disembodied of his authorship.                      

Peter Thiel’s Humanism

George Packer recently profiled the enfant terrible of tech, Peter Thiel, for the New Yorker in a piece titled “No Death, No Taxes”.  Thiel is one of the most brilliant minds in American business; his resume should speak for itself: founder of Paypal and Palantir Technologies, hedge fund manager, and venture capitalist (where he was the first outside investor in Facebook, among other things). While he has certainly proved controversial in many regards, one thing you cannot question is that he is quite intelligent and, even more rare, has a strong vision appended to that intellect. A somewhat embarrassing personal confession: I once dreamed of working for him at Clarium Capital during the height of my libertarian delusion in college.  Despite a drastic shift in my worldview in the interluding years, I must admit that I still admire him.

In my opinion, Thiel is the most original and contrarian thinker in the tech industry today. The Founders Fund presentation alluded to in the article, The Future, is a cornerstone in my conceptualization of the relationship between technological innovation and societal transformation.  The gist of it holds that the tech industry has a myopic focus on solving incremental problems while neglecting investment in game-changing innovation to our communal detriment. I think he’s generally right: how many more consumer app companies do we really need?

Many ‘tech’ companies in fact make sparing use of ‘technology’ as we once understood it.  Think about Groupon for example: it’s essentially an offline idea that utilizes the Internet for execution. Technology is largely marginal to its success, but its herd of 10,000 salesmen sure aren’t. Facebook is certainly a tech company, but is it really a game changer?  I’m not totally certain myself, but probably not as fundamentally life impacting as the mobile phone or microprocessor.

I’ll even grant that Thiel makes some thought provoking but altogether misguided points about higher education.  Thiel’s foundation, you may recall, made waves a year ago by offering 20 very talented and driven teenagers ‘scholarships’ to drop out of college and start companies instead.  It spawned a brief debate about the ultimate utility of higher education and earned Thiel a spot on Talk of the Nation to rail against the ‘education bubble’.  The blatant hypocrisy of his position is clear: Thiel is himself a graduate of Stanford and Stanford Law School.

He’s right though that onerous student debt laws assign many young people to a de facto debtor’s prison and that the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world don’t need to go to college. For the rest us, however, skipping college guarantees a lifetime of middling career opportunity and stagnant wages.  The unemployment rate stood at 4.0% for college grads last month, jumping to 8.7% for high school grads and a whopping 14.3% for those without a GED.  Furthermore, all of the gains in last month’s much touted jobs report were among the college educated, those with high school education and below shed 204k jobs.

As Churchill supposedly said, to put the numbers aside for a second, “Statistics are like a drunk with a lamppost: used more for support than illumination”.  Why is higher education really important? Because plenty of people, quite wonderfully and unexpectedly, intellectually bloom in college—discovering and nourishing all sorts of crazy interests and passions. I, for one, did not foresee the development of an obsession with Yugoslavian history on my horizon when I first matriculated at Berkeley. Most disturbing to me was the Thiel posse’s dismissive response to Packer’s suggestion that young people should be given the opportunity to read the great works of literature and the like.  Should our intellectual curiosity really be restricted solely to the realm of human advancement through technology?

Where I sharply diverge from Thiel, you may have guessed, is politics. Thiel takes the idealistic image of the entrepreneur as ubermensch and extends it into a bizarre libertarian vision-quest political theory. Lets step back for a moment.  Thiel’s basic complaint is that investors don’t have the balls or the vision to spur transformative technologies.  Well, who is the one ‘investor’ deep-pocked enough to tolerate, as these sort of technologies often require, a prolonged development period with massive upfront costs? That’s right: the government!

Many of Thiel‘s detractors dwell on his oxymoronic status as a gay Republican to be indicative of some inherent character flaw, but this strikes me as misguided. The main problem with his politics, more than his contradictory identities and beliefs, is that he cares about advancing Humanity (with a capital H) but is largely indifferent to humanity. Thiel and his ilk can’t empathize with people’s real sufferings, only metaphysical struggles. This is Thiel’s fatal flaw, and despite all his brilliance, he is completely blind to it (and not willfully so in my opinion). While he dismissively acknowledges to be ‘aware of what’s happening twenty miles east of [San Francisco]’, Packer correctly points out that he touts an innovation largely beyond the hands of the foreclosed masses. I don’t think any Stockton residents will soon be taking a cosmic vacation through the Thiel-funded SpaceX anytime soon for example.

Packer sees this as cause to dismiss Thiel’s vision carte blanche, likening him to a young science fiction fan that never ceased suspending disbelief, impervious to the harsh realities of the outside world. He’s right that Thiel probably never shed his adolescent buoyancy, but I actually find his neoteny refreshingly forward thinking in a culture permeated by corrosive cynicism.  Yes, Thiel has drawn some wildly erroneous conclusions, but it doesn’t mean we should disparage those few lucky individuals who’ve managed to retain a juvenile certainty in their ability to change the world—I just hope they don’t lose sight of humanity while assiduously advancing Humanity.

A Paean to Vaclav Havel

On Sunday I was saddened to awake to the news that one of my heroes, Vaclav Havel, had passed away.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given his voluminous smoking habit (he was first diagnosed with lung cancer in 1996), but his specter has haunted me nonetheless and, for the first time in my life, I found myself slipping into an idle melancholy at the passing of a public figure.
 
I was a bit mystified, to be perfectly honest, by the histrionic outpourings of grief that followed Steve Jobs’s death few months ago.  Yes, he was an innovator of sorts. Yes, I can now listen to music while mindlessly riding the subway. Yes, I can now ask my phone what a weasel looks like. But to me these joys are material and invariably ephemeral in nature. (I don’t discount that they may be something more for others).  
 
Havel, on the other hand, gave me a new way to see the world.
 
I came to his writings through an unhealthy obsession with Eastern European history and the development of Czech national consciousness in particular.  I was a senior in college, the year was 2009, and, no, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to properly explain how this interest came to be. I found Havel or, more accurately, was first assigned Havel at a crucial period of my intellectual development, at a time when a nascent nihilism had begun to take root.  Reading his writing was an exhilarating experience for me, like finding a fellow traveler in the dark.  Everyone (I hope) knows the experience: furious nods of agreement, legs flailing in excitement, inchoate expressions turning and twisting up your face as truths of the I-felt-I-always-knew-that-deep-down-inside-but-could-never-fully-articulate-it variety are laid bare in passage after passage after passage…
                                                                                                 
Havel’s seminal essay, “The Power of the Powerless” would become a cornerstone of my personal thought. In it, he articulately demonstrates that totalitarianism is sustained in no small part through the silent cooperation of its citizens (a system he deemed ‘post-totalitarianism’). Using the parable of the greengrocer, Havel explains how the seemingly innocuous act of placing a “workers of the world unite!” placard in the window forces the shopkeeper to live within a lie by enforcing a perception of harmony, thereby perpetuating the system.  Havel’s critique struck me as novel for its emphasis on the withering moral effect of totalitarianism; the greengrocer is not simply a passive victim of the system’s broad incriminations.
 
In the face of seemingly insurmountable repression, the ‘power of the powerless’ is the ability to opt out of the system completely—to reject the role of submissive conspirator and ‘live in the truth’. The beauty of the ‘power’ lays in its simple yet earth-shattering insight. Havel recognized that the strength of totalitarianism, or all systems for that matter, rests on the myriad minutia and gesture that form the basis of its legitimacy.  Through the small act of taking the placard out of the window, the greengrocer, however slightly, hastens the de-legitimization of the regime.  Havel writes:
 
The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety… .
 
Havel’s ideas, of course, would play out on a grand scale during 1989.  While I am not going to recreate the events of 1989 for you, I would highly recommend reading Timothy Garton Ash’s The Magic Lantern (named after the theater where Havel and other leaders of the Velvet Revolution held their meetings). Ash, who by some miracle of God was present at all the major events of ’89, vividly captures the raw emotion that propelled million of citizens to simultaneously rise up against a seemingly intractable system.  For the skeptics, I offer one note: historians have observed that a major turning point in the fall of the GDR was the adoption of the slogan “Wir Sind das Volk” (“We Are The People”) by the Leipzig protesters. Why? A state that claimed to speak for the people could no longer account for millions denouncing its stewardship.  In other words, the world of appearances had shattered, the state had ceded its legitimacy.
 
Why do I love Havel? Above all else and above all odds, he fervently believed in the efficacy of the individual in an otherwise indifferent universe.  Effectively disbarred from society as a youth, forced into menial work after the Prague Spring, and repeatedly jailed for his political activities, Havel had every right to hate this world.  And yet he never doubted our ability to affect positive change.  His personal slogan, “love and truth must prevail over lies and hatreds,” would have sounded childish and naïve had he not lived it with such vigor.
 
He sensed the fickle nature of our existence.  For Havel, human life was sacrosanct and abstract ideologies that did not acknowledge this truth as central tenet were not to be trusted.  During the Prague Spring, he was one of the few members of the Czech intelligentsia who wanted to end the socialist experiment, not just graft a human face on it. It should be mentioned he was no great fan of unbridled free market capitalism either. On an early presidential tour of Czechoslovakia, worried citizens pressed forward, eager to know his plan for the country.  His answer was telling: “For every village, a different face.”
 
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Havel’s writings are still as relevant as ever today.  Although the ‘evil empire’ has fallen, we have not forged a timeless temporal utopia in its place.  More worrisome to me, however, is the ‘apocalypse culture’ that has gripped our collective imagination, especially in this country. We have come to accept a discourse dominated by paralyzed complacency, a pervasive conclusion that we are lumbering on an ineluctable drift towards disaster. While there is an undeniable allure to cosmic fatalism, this self-satisfying malaise is a discreet endorsement of the prevailing status quo we superficially abhor.
 
As Havel discovered, the basic strength of the individual in the unrelenting abyss of our modern life is to opt out; to live a life in truth independent of prevailing systems. There is no swift panacea, only proactive pursuit of an unfailing moral life. Or, as the Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki put it: only “sissies stick shit under their nose and say the world stinks.”
 
Thank you for everything Vaclav, rest in peace.