On the margins of a slim-margin victory

More surprising than the Muslim Brotherhood's presidential victory in Egypt is the slimness of the margin that made a Brother the winner.

Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) candidate for the presidency went into the mid-June run-off against Mubarak's last prime minister with a lot to his advantage, and against his rival.

Mr. Morsi, by looks and conviction, was the more conservative candidate in a country that saw a visible turn to religiosity over the past four decades. He represented the group that suffered most (though not alone) from the excesses of Mubarak's police violations and disregard of rule of law. His group was still able to step in with the needful social services the state failed to furnish. And, having emerged as the contestant against the representative of "old regime," Mr. Morsi was the de facto "revolutionary candidate," and was grudgingly accepted, and endorsed, as such, even among the ranks of many liberal and leftist groups, such as April 6 Movement.

So a landslide victory for the MB was all but assured.

It didn't happen. Indeed Mr. Morsi has won out, but only with a slim margin, 51.7% to his rival's 48.3%. What to read into such an outcome, in terms of how it came about as well as what it tells us about political trends in Egypt?

To begin with, a win is a win, and Mr. Morsi's is (almost) as good as any. But the slim-margin victory, despite the loose (but active) coalition that stood behind Mr. Morsi, shows a common-sense feature about the MB (and any political grouping, for that matter) that seems to escape many among their detractors: there are limits to the mobilization powers of the Brotherhood.

A more precise reflection of those limits was the number of votes Mr. Morsi garnered in the first round, which stood at about 5.5 million votes, or 12% of those eligible to cast their votes (but about 25% of those who did cast their votes). In that round, Mr. Morsi ran against twelve candidates, two of whom with varied visions of political Islam. It's thus probably fair to conclude that Mr. Morsi has then exhausted all the circles of Brotherhood influence, from the innermost nucleus of hard-core doctrinaires to the outermost circles of uncommitted sympathizers.

Then came the run-off round. Obviously the MB mobilization machine was in full-throttle. Endorsements came from unlikely quarters too -- either directly, or implicitly, as in rejecting Mr. Morsi's opponent but stopping short of endorsing him outright. The result was over 13 million ballots for Mr. Morsi, placing him ahead of his rival by less than a million votes. 

There is bad news in this, as well as good news. Let's begin with the latter: apparently fallacious is the widely held perception that the MB has, not only fed or treated, but also indoctrinated the masses of Egyptians who fell outside the realm of interest of the state.

Instead, what appears to have happened is that the crowds have, rationally, assessed the performance of the MB (as well as their ideological cousins, the more-conservative/puritanical Salafis) in the Parliament and then determined to vote for others. That is reflected in the plummet from around 40% for the MB in the parliamentary elections in late 2011 and early 2012 to 12% in the first round in the presidential contest in late May 2012.

Granted, the dynamics of parliamentary elections are different from the (national) presidential ones. But it's still likely that the fortunes of the MB have dwindled in the interim.

The good news in this is that the common-folk Egyptians are practicing politics. They make choices, review the outcomes of those choices, and are then prepared to change course if outcomes are not what they intended or hoped for. That should be good news, even for the MB who are now confronting ideological outbidding from the Salafis. 

The bad news is that the propaganda machine of the "old regime," seems to have swayed many to vote for Mr. Shafiq. The problem is not that some media outlets, through high-quality, fact-based journalism managed to influence people's presidential preferences. Rather, many commentators and post-uprising TV channels have peddled egregious lies about the MB and their candidate. Most outrageous among those is the one that the Brotherhood have killed, not defended, the protesters in the "battle of the camel" in Tahrir Square in early February 2011, at the height of the uprising.

No country is immune to foolish TV or widely viewed/followed nuts (Glenn Beck comes to mind). The problem in Egypt is that mind-boggling lies seem able to penetrate easily into the mainstream consciousness.

That should serve as a reminder to the new president that democracy functions better as people become more rational, more able to tell truth from falsehoods. If/when that happens, it will serve him well too.

Tragedy at the mall

Death will unlikely feature among the expectations people harbor as they head to shopping malls. But death is never incapable of surprise, and the tragic loss this week of nineteen lives, most of whom toddlers, in a fire at one of Qatar’s largest shopping malls is a brutal reminder of that fact.

An investigation was promptly ordered into the causes of the fire. And arrest warrants were issued against, among others, the owner of the mall and the owner of the nursery that saw thirteen of its toddler customers and four of its teachers perish in the fire.

While commendable, those measures are far from adequate if the goal is to prevent such tragedies happening again.

Reportedly, the immediate cause of the fire is human error (a fire at a shop below the nursery) and technical failure (alarms not sounding off in a timely manner). To blame the tragedy on human error and technical failure, however, would be disrespectful of the dead and their families.

The underlying cause appears to be the version of “state capitalism” widely practiced in Qatar and the other fossil-fuel-rich countries of the Arabian Peninsula, whereby vast swaths of the private sector are owned by members of the sprawling royal families, their allies, or their associates. The result is an environment where corners are occasionally cut on various regulations, including on safety, to avoid offending the well-connected business owner, let alone those with the same family name as the country’s ruler.

The Villaggio fire seems to be a case in point. While the results of the investigation are yet to be announced, the facts so far known are telling. The nursery that bore the brunt of the tragedy was owned by the daughter of Qatar’s cabinet minister of culture, Sky News reported. Also, local newspapers revealed, the nursery, which had operated for years, was not licensed. The owner of the nursery is one of those targeted by the attorney general’s arrest warrants for “interrogation.” It is not clear if charges will be filed against her.

To be clear, the engagement of the Gulf countries’ ruling elites or their families into the private sector does not necessarily resemble what one can see in other developing countries where a predatory bureaucracy or a corrupt elite syphon off the fruits of market policies. Perhaps with the partial exception of Saudi Arabia, the largest of the six members constituting the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Gulf states are small emirates where the image of the state is overlaid on societies that are largely tribal in structure and relationships.

Granted, at times tribal allegiance is just bought off through grants of certain sectors in the economy (such as retail). However, absent a developed entrepreneurial class, the state sometimes has no choice but to lead the charge itself in owning and operating private enterprises in the sectors the nascent business community shows no appetite for.

This kind of “state capitalism” is nothing novel; Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, to mention just a few examples, have all adopted some form of it in the late nineteenth-century and mid-twentieth-century, respectively, as they sought to modernize their economies.

The difference between such precedents, however, and what one witnesses in the Arabian Gulf is the extent to which projects favored or partially owned by the state are exempt, fully or partially, from regulations.

This is particularly worrying in Qatar, which as anyone living here would say has witnessed a dramatic construction boom over the past six years, with tens of skyscrapers darting out of the landscape -- in Downtown Doha, towering over the Corniche, and elsewhere. And more construction fever is anticipated as Qatar prepares in earnest for hosting the World Cup 2022 games.

On the other hand, the malls in the Gulf countries are much more than shopping venues. Paco Underhil, the author of Call of the Mall, would probably say that malls have indeed transcended their shopping function everywhere. But two features specific to the Arab Gulf make the mall a particularly important component in the labor and social equation in those countries.

First, thanks to a combination of inclement weather most of the year and a conservative society that is at best uneasy about public places of social mingling, the shopping mall is the only truly public space where both nationals and expatriates can spend their leisure time.

Second, with hardly any cultural events and a paucity of entertainment options, the Gulf countries offer the mall as the answer to the routine question on the minds of expats, especially with families: where should I go on weekend? And we should remember that these countries rely heavily in their workforce on expats -- over 80 per cent in places like Dubai and Doha.

So instead of getting contented with an investigation and a few arrests, the Qatari leadership should re-envision its bureaucracy so as to ensure the latter’s autonomy and effectiveness in enforcing regulations. This would be the best way to honor those whose lives death claimed, unlikely, at the mall.

On the basic instincts of Twitter and Facebook

Many of those who use Facebook and/or Google+ are also active contributors to the Twitter chatter universe. Still it's not superfluous to ask what, if anything, distinguishes one from the other -- because they are indeed distinct.

My point of departure in thinking about Twitter on the one hand and Facebook (FB) and Google+ (GP) on the other is that they, while alike in many respects, diverge significantly when it comes to what can be termed their "core dispositions," their basic instincts. 

They are alike, crucially, in that they are massive content-screening machines that utilize human intelligence rather than algorithms to produce highly relevant recommendations regarding the stuff available on the Web. 

They are not like the Google search engine, which looks into the relationships among the pages published on the Web to suggest pertinent pages in the form or search results. And they are not like Amazon.com, which monitors the collective purchasing patterns of its users to offer purchasing recommendations ("Users who bought this item also bought that one.") 

The so-called social networks instead just make it vastly easy to build, well, a network of individuals. That network, not the algorithms, provides the recommendations regarding what in the unwieldy Web is worthy of one's attention.  Thus, to put it more succinctly, imagine a spectrum, where on one end there is pure algorithm content-screening machines (eg, Google search engine), and on the other pure human intelligence-fed content-screening machines (eg, Twitter; FB, GP). Amazon.com would be somewhere in between.

The success of FB and Twitter suggests that content-screening machines that stand on the shoulders of human beings, as it were, are gaining ground on their algorithmic counterparts.  This likely has to do with more than the precision and relevance of the recommendations from each option (human vs algorithm).  But let's steer clear from psychology, and just take this at its face value: human-intelligence networks seem to produce more precise content recommendations to their members.

Now if Twitter and FB/GP are networks of human intelligence, what sets one apart from the other? The complex configuration of how one builds a network on Facebook (and Google+) decreases the efficiency of what I take to be the core function of a social network (that is, to constantly utilize the intelligence of other humans to screen, filter, and recommend content from the Web).  On Twitter, by contrast, the imposed brevity, the comparatively austere site layout, and the simple network-building (in the binary of follow-unfollow as opposed to the degrees/rankings of "friendships" on FB) all make the former a much more efficient information-curating machine.

And this is what I meant by core disposition. Twitter's core disposition appears to be a minimal-exposure interaction. Members of the social network post their thoughts, or better yet, thoughts of others (in the form of links to articles, videos, etc.), without all the auxiliary noise (relationship status, hobbies, etc.) one sees on Facebook.  The focus goes mostly to what is actually contributed. And under the restricting 140-character limit, whatever is contributed has to be concise -- even links get to be clipped short.

Compared with Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are not minimal-exposure media.  So to the signal-delivery that Twitter seems good at, Facebook, and to a lesser degree Google+, lets into the network a lot of noise. And this makes each a less-efficient machine/mechanism for screening, filtering and recommending content. 

Granted, there are those who view the "social network" in a completely different light -- not in terms of efficiency and information-scouring, but as a tool to stay in touch with family or to combat existential boredom.  These are valid purposes too, of course. My thoughts here, however, are aimed at a different dimension of how social networks are thought about and used.