|Around the world, people are wondering what kind of example
Egypt will provide in their future struggles for democracy and
equality, says Tarak Barkawi [GALLO/GETTY] To listen to the hype
about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution,
one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian
people who overthrew Mubarak. Via its technologies, the West
imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising.
Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department
research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along
with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los
Angeles. Most narratives of globalisation are fantastically
Eurocentric, stories of Western white men burdened with
responsibility for interconnecting the world, by colonising it,
providing it with economic theories and finance, and inventing
communications technologies. Of course globalisation is about
flows of people as well, about diasporas and cultural fusion.
But neither version is particularly us