What Gets Broken, What Gets Saved, Part 2: Syria on Screen

This is part two in a series of blog posts about the anxious political moment on the eve of the second Trump presidency, and how it’s reminding me of Documenta 13 (in 2012) with its themes of destruction, survival, and renewal. Documenta is an exhibition that happens every five years in Kassel, Germany. Part 1 is here.

News broke over the past week that rebel forces have finally toppled the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. It’s unclear what will happen next, but this is undoubtedly good news. Assad, like his father Hafez al-Assad, was a tyrant who murdered and tortured his own people in order to cling to power. His fall comes at the end of a civil war that began as a part of the Arab Spring in 2011. The Arab Spring was a series of popular uprisings in the Middle East that began in Tunisia and spread to half a dozen countries in 2010-12. The movement was spurred by corruption and economic stagnation, and leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen were all removed. It captured attention in the West because of the way the protesters used social media to plan and document protests. Twitter was in a period of rapid growth, taking center stage as a driver of global conversation, where it would remain for a decade. The Arab Spring, as a talking point for Silicon Valley thought leaders, was optimistically painted as the culmination of all the utopian promises of the social web. Looking back 14 years later, with knowledge of what happened in those countries following the demonstrations, and knowledge of the eventual wider negative effects of social media, it’s hard to believe just how ebullient the discourse was. We were told that the era of dictatorships was over, because now that normal people had access to the communication and organizing power of social media, corruption would be unmasked and democracy would flourish. Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way.

The Arab Spring was a hot topic on the internet for a while, but then it faded. Autocrats fought back, or got replaced, or the situations became too nuanced to continue as memes. In Syria the worst thing happened: the uprising simply didn’t end. Syrian soldiers began indiscriminately killing protesters and other civilians and the conflicted morphed into a grinding civil war. Multiple groups fought for over a decade against the regime which was backed by Iran and Russia. Some of the groups we would call freedom fighters, others were literally ISIS. The recent victory of the rebels seems to be in large part because Russia and Iran declined the kind of support that would have been needed to keep propping up Assad’s regime. Combined rebel forces (not including ISIS) captured Damascus on December 8 and Assad fled to Moscow. 

Above is a video version of the first few minutes of Pixelated Revolution.

Syria suddenly making headlines again reminded me of a lecture/performance I saw at Documenta 13 called Pixelated Revolution (2012) by Rabih Mroué. Mroué, a Lebanese actor, sat on stage with a laptop and carefully controlled a multimedia presentation on a screen behind him. He began by sharing a sentence he heard which drew him to the research presented in the piece, “The Syrian protesters are recording their own deaths.” What followed was an hour-long lecture about videos Mroué discovered online which he called “double shootings,” videos where the person recording searches to find the source of gunfire, only to capture the shooter right before being shot themselves. Remarkably, he found several of these harrowing videos from the opening weeks of the Syrian civil war, and he analyzed them in the lecture. He compared the videos to the Dogme 95 film manifesto where filmmakers like Lars von Trier committed to not using artificial light, sound, or special effects in order to make raw, uncompromising pictures. Dogme 95 films never featured guns or violence, because the idea was that nothing could be faked, the camera could only record “real” things the actors were doing. Because of their veracity, the double shooting videos could be considered the first violent Dogme 95 films, but no one was acting.

Seeing Mroué’s piece in 2012, a year and a half after the first Arab Spring demonstrations, it dawned on me that social media would not save us, it would not save democracy, and it might just make everything worse. The networked protests had curdled into a networked war. The immediacy of words and images through social media did not hasten a democratic utopia, instead they just made the horrors of war more accessible, without providing any meaningful way to respond. Mroué’s Pixelated Revolution was like an anti-TED talk. I got the sinking feeling that technology was indeed changing the world, but I was not going to like what it was becoming. This seems obvious now, but in 2012 this came as a devastating revelation (at least to someone like me: late 20s, enthusiastic early adopter of social media since its inception, natural optimist, etc.)

Watching the “double shooting” videos that Mroué found is gut wrenching. The videos are also confusing, why would a non-journalist attempt to capture video of a Syrian soldier shooting innocent people? Why not just take cover? The answer lies in the hollow promise of the burgeoning digital revolution. These devices, and the networks that connect them, were supposed to be the ultimate tools for accountability. These phones were supposed to kill fascists! Alas, they did not. Assad’s regime was brought down the old-fashioned way, with guns.

The question that hangs over the present moment is just how fascistic the second Trump presidency will be. Will it resemble the dysfunction of last time, where democratic institutions are battered but not broken? Or will it look more like Syria, with one dictator passing the throne to his son, building a legacy of cruelty that will take extraordinary measures, and a long time, to finally stop? 14 years ago I would have believed that social media would be the primary weapon in such a fight. Now I’m not so sure.