Not the corporate overlords you were expecting; Google and Wael Ghonim

"The heroes, they're the ones who were in the street, who took part in the demonstrations, sacrificed their lives, were beaten, arrested and exposed to danger."

Wael Ghonim was speaking on Dream 2, Egypt’s most watched television channel, shortly after being released from 12 days of confinement.  Twelve days during which he was blind-folded and badgered by police demanding to know which foreigners were financing the protests unfolding outside in Tahrir Square.

Confronted with video footage of protestors being killed, the 30-year-old wept and left the studio.

It has been a seminal moment for ordinary professional Egyptians.  Ghonim is a Google regional marketing executive.  By all accounts he is an ordinary man who, like many of his generation, turned to Facebook to express his political beliefs.

If you believe the media hype then what is happening in Egypt is a Facebook-revolution.  It isn’t.  The conditions that have led to these mass protests are similar to those of 1989 which saw the collapse of the Soviet Union.  A large population, given opportunities for education but not for self-expression or employment, living very close to wealthier nations.

Many other nations are in a similar position.  Libya, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Iran just within the Middle East.  Further abroad are China and the various “Stan’s” of Central Asia.

Each of these nations has crossed a critical threshold where more people live in cities than in their rural areas.  More people depend on functioning economies and not subsistence farming.  More people live close together and can organise and gather to express their collective rage.  Rage that they have been educated but that the best jobs are reserved for favourites of the ruling elite; rage that the elite flaunt that wealth while denying opportunities to others; rage that corruption saps investment; rage that the elite are above the law.

China flattened their last student uprising in 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall came down.  It is 22 years later.  Time enough for a new generation of students to have been born and mature, listening to the stories of parents who survived the massacres of a previous era.

Time enough in many of these petty tyrannies for anger to crystallise.

This isn’t a Facebook revolution but that hasn’t stopped many nations banning Internet access.  Egypt even shut it down entirely in the hopes that it would save the regime.  It didn’t.

People have strange beliefs about corporations and companies.  Anti-business protestors claim they’re either secretly controlling governments or “corporate overlords” bent on global destruction, yet corporations are very vulnerable.

Private enterprise is banned or curtailed in many dictatorships.

BP, recently a poster-child for corporate ignominy, has put itself in a perilous situation in Russia.  For, while the Russian government has plenty of oil-derived cash, they haven’t two brain-cells to rub together.  In order to extract the oil in their difficult northern regions they need the intellectual capacity of companies like BP.  BP is supping with the devil in the hopes of making a little money in return before, once again, their investments are nationalised.  Hardly the mark of corporate “masters”.

Google beat a hasty retreat from China.  Facebook and Twitter are banned in most of the world’s dictatorships.

The difficulty for Google is that they can no longer be seen as neutral facilitators of information flow.  On 1 February, after Egypt shut down the Internet, Google and Twitter teamed up to offer a voice-to-tweet service so that Egyptians could still get their messages out.

It’s a brave stand and a principled one.  The consequence for Google, and for many other Internet companies, is that they will be forced out of even more countries.

And the image of our corporate titans is not as masters of the universe but as young professionals thrust into the centre of tumultuous events, weeping for the victims of those conflicts.