Digital Hopes, Real Power: From Connection to Collective Action

This is the fifth and final installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the rest of the series here. If the Arab Spring was defined by optimism about what the internet could do, the years since have been marked by a more sober understanding of what it takes to defend it. Back in 2011, the term “digital rights” was still fairly new. While in the decades prior, open source and hacker communities—as well as a handful of organizations including EFF—had advocated for digital freedoms, it was through the merging of disparate communiti