Hello.
Here’s the context.

September 4

The second most foolish decision.

There is that old Roman idea of bread and circuses: you keep people entertained and distracted enough that they do not spend all day thinking about the government.

Social media had basically become that. It was where people wasted time, argued with strangers and avoided thinking about the state of the country.

So the government banned it.

The common point

It affected literally everybody.

It was not some niche political decision. People used these platforms to speak to relatives, do business, find work, watch the news, entertain themselves and generally exist in the modern world.

The government managed to inconvenience almost the entire country at once—which is actually a remarkably effective organising strategy, just probably not the one they intended.

What the ban meant

It was also control.

Most of the decentralised ways people used to communicate had suddenly been banned. The argument brought forward was about regulation, national identity and sovereignty.

But whenever governments begin relying overwhelmingly on nationality and sovereignty to explain why people should have fewer ways to communicate, it usually feels like a sign of a dictatorship somewhere in the process of arising. One could feel that.

What I did

I recognised that this was the trigger.

I started discussions on Reddit. I contacted influencers and asked them to spread the message. I contacted prominent volunteer groups and tried to bring them into the protest movement.

My role was not in the field, in front of cameras or even in front of people. I was trying to establish the discourse, connect groups and turn this very obvious point of frustration into an actual direction.

The call to action

Anger still needed somewhere to go.

The call to action was mostly spontaneous. There was no single person masterminding the whole thing. But people still had to give the anger a date, a place and a reason to show up.

I was involved through the Reddit discussions, the influencers and the volunteer groups I was contacting. People needed to move from “this government is unbelievably unserious” to “fine, what are we actually doing?”

September 8

People came, but the gathering was still concentrated.

It had not yet become a national uprising, and people were still meeting one another, taking photographs, making jokes and enjoying the fact that something which had existed mostly online had become physical.

I was scheduled to speak on September 8, but the police opened fire before the programme reached me, which, to put it very grimly, did me a favour: it kept me out of mainstream media because there was no speech for them to attach my face to.