| Image by Elaine J.E. Degale
On December 17, 2010, a man in Tunisia named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after authorities confiscated his modest means of making a living as a fruit vendor. His self-immolation—an act of desperation rooted in Tunisia’s grievous wealth inequality—lit the spark that engulfed the Arab world in a wave of revolutionary mass protests. These uprisings led to the downfall of autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
In Tunisia, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was in power for 23 years, resigned. Egypt finally said goodbye to President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years. And of course, we all know how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s strong advocacy for the Benghazi attack that killed Muammar Gaddafi plunged the country into years of morbid disarray and chaos — all in the name of preventing a genocide.
Meanwhile, as if we have learned nothing, we sit with our current reality that the active genocide in Gaza is being livestreamed daily, and NATO has barely batted its mink lashes at the excruciating daily loss of life. UNICEF has estimated that it has cost the world 50,000 children’s lives.
The Arab Springs lit the movements that led to Occupy Wall Street, and it also inspired the tactics that sustained the Black Lives Matter movement. Most significantly, The Arab Spring was the first time in modern history where technology played a vital role in organizing people against the abuse of government power. To such an extent that some people referred to this era as the “Facebook Revolution.” Digital spaces have become recognized as virtual spaces of civic power and global solidarity—essentially dissolving the rigid borders of our metaphysical realm.
And perhaps this idea of the digital space bridging the gap between the economic and geopolitical silos has inadvertently led to a Trump agenda that seeks to maintain the rigid borders defined by citizenship at birth. Connectivity is a form of rebellion, and this techno-possibility made authoritarian leaders very uncomfortable because solidarity means a collective consciousness that would question the world order and disparity in resource distribution in a world of plenty.
Earlier this week in Boulder, Colorado, a man named Mohamed Sabry Soliman, reportedly of Egyptian descent, attempted self-immolation while hurling Molotov cocktails. Was it an act of isolated mental illness—or a scream from history’s grave?
Bouazizi burned in protest against systemic inequality. Soliman burned in a world where even protest is now processed through predictive analytics. However, doubts begin to surface. Perhaps this is not just a matter of history rhyming, but rather a curation of the revolutionary spirit to wake the masses into a desire to fight for change as we transition to a more digitally enhanced future. What will society look like when billionaires like Peter Thiel can create the conditions to stoke chaos and bring protesters onto the streets, thereby sharpening facial recognition technologies and other digital controls that erode citizens’ privacy in the name of efficiency and social control?
Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies and an early investor in Clearview AI, has played a pivotal role in advancing surveillance technologies in the United States. Palantir, co-founded by Thiel, has developed data integration platforms like Foundry and Gotham, which various U.S. government agencies utilize. These platforms aggregate and analyze vast amounts of personal data from sources such as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Homeland Security.
“We’ve seen this dance before. Facebook’s algorithm didn’t just recommend cat videos, it stoked voter paranoia, nudged the demos toward Trump, and called it predictive engagement. In the Philippines, digital troll farms massaged the national mood so effectively that they resurrected the Marcos dynasty .…”
Recently, under the Trump administration, Palantir expanded its federal contracts, including a $30 million agreement with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to provide real-time tracking of immigrants, to make 3,000 arrests daily – a sort of stop and frisk on a national scale with fascist undertones. According to Guerline Jozef of Haitian Bridge Alliance, the Trump administration is “using the lives of over 350,000 TPS holders from Venezuela, and potentially half a million people from Haiti, as political points to show how they are fighting and erasing whatever the Biden administration was able to put in place.”
In March, a presidential executive order urged agency heads to rescind any guidance that hindered the free exchange of unclassified information, which, in practical terms, means your data has been invited to an all-agency potluck. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), influenced by Elon Musk, has been building a centralized database to surveil and track immigrants, integrating data across multiple agencies. Clearview AI is a facial recognition company that amassed a database of over 20 billion images scraped from the internet, including social media platforms. The Trump administration’s support for these surveillance technologies aligns with his ideological stance, favoring strong state control and cultivating skepticism of historically established institutions of liberal democracy.
We’ve seen this dance before. Facebook’s algorithm didn’t just recommend cat videos, it stoked voter paranoia, nudged the demos toward Trump, and called it predictive engagement. In the Philippines, digital troll farms massaged the national mood so effectively that they resurrected the Marcos dynasty with nothing more than digital fake news, good ‘ol fame, and a touch of historical amnesia.
As Benjamin Franklin once said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” In Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he posits that liberal democracy is under threat—not just from autocrats but from technology and AI, which may render the humanist foundation of democracy obsolete in a digital future. As we continue to see jobs disappear due to AI and automation, a future where AI is fine-tuned to monitor your every move raises the question: What would freedom even mean when none of your desire for privacy is honored in the name of safety? What would you do when the tech companies know you better than you know yourself?
In the very least, we, the people, should get a universal basic income for our contributions that have enhanced AI while enriching the self-proclaimed tech gods of capitalism. While corporations are not people, in the age of AI, they have commodified human beings. Perhaps this obsession with erasing history — this unceasing attack on our freedoms — is an attempt to usher in a system update for the body politic of democracy 2.0. Perhaps there is a better future with technology if we fight for it.
A future that is up to us, the people, to decide, together.
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Editor’s Note: The Philippine Daily Mirror welcomes Elaine J.E.. Degale as a columnist. Ms. Degale’s column, The Dreamweaver, will appear every Thursday. Her articles will be in the guest column as her handle is being prepared. Her initial column, We Are Sub-Saharan, was published on March 23, 2025.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer and lecturer at community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY) and has an Ed.M. and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she studied International Relations and Development, and continues to support literacy and food programming efforts in Indigenous communities through her Community-Based organization, OperationMerienda.org.
