The video below is a screen recording of the pseudonymous Egyptian meme page @kosomelkosom1’s repost on their story of a TikTok posted by an anonymous @user2513378695540. The video itself is less than a minute long, and features a group of male Egyptian prisoners sitting in an Egyptian prison cell; the inmate holding the phone beckons his fellows (“Doma”, “Mota”, “Oba”, and one other) over to the camera, instructing them to bid good morning to the people of Kafr el-Sheikh—a province and city north of Cairo, presumably the camera holder’s hometown. There is an onscreen caption that translates to “May God free the oppressed from hardship”; the word for “hardship” is misspelled.
The obvious question is perhaps the most unanswerable: who are these inmates? The Kafr el-Sheikh-based audience they hail so familiarly is unknown to the viewer but clearly known to the men themselves (one might guess perhaps friends or family?). How was the video meant to reach them? Was the idea to post on TikTok and deliver the video to them that way? Yet they do not seem to be aware of—much less interested in—a virtual audience at all, which raises the question if the video was ever intended for the internet in the first place. If it wasn’t, then who is the overstepping @user2513378695540 who took it upon themselves to post it? Why did they? How did the Instagram meme page—also anonymized—find this video? It lacks any tags or searchable keywords—so did The Algorithm decide to serve it up based entirely on the merits of its content? If so, why? What kind of user does The Algorithm identify as particularly suited to appreciate such merits?
Where is this prison, anyway? The viewer can glean only a few definite details about the space: the single white light hanging from the ceiling, a steel door at one end of the cell, and inmates sat along the perimeter. In contrast to Jasmine Ehrhardt and Lisa Nakamura’s study on the illicit TikTok presence of inmates in American prisons, this featureless concrete box goes beyond merely “decontextualized and unrecognizable”, it lacks more than “a sense of space, geography, or landscape.”1 This is a prison completely and utterly shorn of any links to the outside world; it is a temporal and spatial void, an anti-real unreachable alternate dimension, a null space.
And yet here is that null space. It is saved on my phone. I can enter it whenever.
Of course, this space is no alternate dimension and, in reality, is of expressly human origin. Following the military coup in 2013 which deposed then-president Mohammed Morsi and saw dictatorship regain and redouble its grip on power, the Egyptian state has adopted punitivity and carcerality as a cornerstone of a post-Arab Spring status quo. Alongside regular forced disappearances, imprisonment without trial (prisoners in remand comprise more than a third of Egypt’s prison population), and systematic torture, mass incarceration features as a primary strategy of the state’s practice of power. An estimated 120,000 inmates languish in concrete boxes like the one seen in the video, 60,000 of which are political prisoners (a claim the Egyptian state vehemently denies2). Over a third of the nation’s 81 prisons were constructed in the ten years since the current regime seized power.3
Yet it seems such a vast carceral system is not quite airtight. Indeed, there exist gaps wide enough for videos such as the above to slip through—an attestation of a certain structural instability: if the prison is understood as “a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent”, then this illicit artifact of the prison confirms the assertion that videos filmed inside the prison circulating online “interrupt, however briefly, the notion of prisoners as completely and wholly disappeared from social and civil life.” This video, “theoretically impossible and forbidden” fascinates the viewer.4 In this fascination, the absolute decree of the autocrat comes to be riddled with in absolutes.
Certainly, part of the fascination is in speculating about how the video came to be: how much money the corrupt warden demanded; the friend of a friend on the outside who left the phone in a bush, perhaps, right next to the prison gates; the stripped wires and the jerryrigged battery hacked to charge the thing. Yet there is a second aspect to this fascination that has less to do with the creation of the video and more to do with its consumption. There is a tantalizing affrontery residing not in the genesis of the video—not just in the “infrastructural fugitivity”, or “the technological resources that prisoners create, maintain, and repair in order to enable their participation in social media”, through which the video came to be—but also in the very fact of viewership itself: in the act of downloading, in the act of reposting. Just as the phone on which the video was taken had to be smuggled into the prison, the video as social media content must be smuggled out to complete the circuit.
The multiple veils of anonymity (the unnamed prisoner, the default-username TikTok, the anonymous administrators of the meme page) and the black market circuit of circulation between these anonymized users betray a paranoia not on the part of the prisoners in the video—who seem quite jolly, all things considered—but on the part of those users watching and disseminating who take great care to cover their tracks. It’s not the exhibitionist who feels anxious, but the voyeur. In contrast to incarcerated digital media creators in the United States consciously tagging their content with #Prisontok and replying and interacting with fans and viewers, the noninteractivity of this video and highly volatile, ephemeral nature of its spread speak to a video that has been digitally passed around in hushed tones, barely above a whisper, considered not contraband within the prison but contraband outside it, accessible only to those who know where to look.
In the context of the repressed energies of the Arab Spring, such forms of virtual transgression come to us as gothic, ghostly, spectral, “hauntological” in Mark Fisher’s sense. The movement and circulation of such images within and against regimes designed to suppress them bespeak precisely that “[w]hat haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.”5 Once the heart of revolution itself, Arab virtual cul-de-sacs remain enraptured by the sight of those utopian fantasies policed by the paranoid delusions of counter-revolutionary power, but that continue to haunt our digital neighborhoods unabated.
One imagines a user riding a crowded microbus to work or school, absentmindedly flipping through their feed to pass the time. Suddenly they pull their phone close to their chest, turn down the brightness, and angle the screen away from their neighbors. Half a minute passes. The user clears their history; they conduct a secret study on the faces nearby to check whether any of them saw out of the corner of their eye.
Following Ehrhardt and Nakamura, then, we might theorize a notion of “viewer fugitivity” to denote a mode and circumstance of viewing that corresponds to, accompanies, and is brought about by the notion of “infrastructural fugitivity” mentioned above. In the eyes of a post-Arab Spring Egyptian state, those who create that digital contraband which defies its sanctions are just as much outlaws as I am in saving and distributing it, and as you are in consuming that contraband mere moments ago. All of us are subject to the full force of authoritarian power; such are the new terms of association linking us together.
Notes
- Ehrhardt, Jasmine, and Lisa Nakamura. “Infrastructural Fugitivity: Contraband Cellphones, TikTok, and Vital Media behind Bars.” Journal of Visual Culture 21, no. 3 (December 2022): 390–409. https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129221141922.
- These numbers are estimates at best, as the Egyptian state is not transparent about its population of inmates. See https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/egypt and https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/prison-atlas-details-egyptian-cases-prisoners-and-judges/
- “Egypt Building New Prison in Sinai with Capacity to Hold 20,000 Inmates,” Middle East Eye, 2022, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/egypt-sinai-building-new-mega-prison
- Ehrhardt and Nakamura, “Infrastructural Fugitivity,” 395, 398.
- Mark Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?,” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (September 1, 2012): 16–24, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.
NOUR ELDIN HUSSEIN
Nour Eldin Hussein is an Egyptian essayist, poet, researcher, translator, and enthusiast of the written and spoken word. He lives, works, and studies in Minneapolis, where he holds an M.A. in Asian and Middle East Studies. His translations and original writing have been published in Mizna and Tawahan among others, and he maintains a small blog on Substack where he writes about digital culture and life online in the Arab world, link to view here.