You Have Not Yet Been Defeated Quotes

“The blame lies with the perpetrators—not with the millions of overwhelmingly unarmed activists who tried to stop these juggernauts. Yet Alaa’s model here should remind us, wherever we reside, that though it may not be our fault, it is our duty to make time in our organizing and theorizing to confront our defeats. Not to wallow, but because such confrontations are our only hope of seeing the new terrain of struggle clearly.”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“we give free reign to a tyrant and will believe him a just ruler if he meets the moment’s needs. One strikes a deal with us over ‘national independence’, another swaps it out for ‘prosperity’, another might ask us to give up freedom in return for security and safety, or the protection of minorities. In our tradition dignity is either for the individual or the nation—you can’t have both. And justice is either in the courtrooms or the market, not in both.”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“That movements must be avowedly internationalist and feminist, which means rejecting the temptations to deploy easy nationalism and the ‘trap of masculinity’ as tools of struggle.”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“Sure, it would be nice if the giants of Silicon Valley were dedicated to protecting and advancing human rights, but corporations are not really likely to do any of that.’ What they are built to do is monetize every single transaction . . . I don’t expect either Twitter or Facebook or the mobile companies to change their business models just for activists, so that is not going to happen . . . What needs to happen is a revolution. What needs to happen is a complete change in the order of things, so that we are making these”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“This critique of the ways corporate communication platforms systematically infantilize and trivialize consequential subjects carries particular”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“And you’re in these circles of people sending gifs and heart emojis . . . This medium is stifling.”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“Why, amidst the constant online chatter, was there so little actual discourse—engaged people building on each other’s knowledge”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“Still, while refusing the idea of prison as metaphor, he is, throughout, preoccupied with the ways technically free people are nonetheless confined and entrapped—by black box algorithms and, more profoundly, by the way capitalist logics constrain imaginations, preventing contemporary movements from”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“In short, national contexts differ, and some activists pay far higher prices, in blood and freedom, for political setbacks—inside our highly unequal nation states, and between them. Yet”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“Alaa had a vision for how the movement that found its wings in Tahrir Square could fan out across the country and engage in ‘intensive discussions with thousands of citizens’ to democratically develop a vision for their collective future.”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“he had watched these networked technologies—filled with so much potential for solidarity, increased understanding, and new forms of internationalism—turn into tools of aggressive surveillance and social control, with Big Tech collaborating with repressive regimes, governments using ‘kill switches’ to black out the internet mid-uprising, and bad-faith actors seizing on out-of-context tweets to slander reputations and make activists markedly easier to imprison.”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

“That opposition is politically and ideologically diverse. Alaa and his comrades are part of the left, internationalist, anti-sectarian, youth-led movement that is part of a global confrontation with transnational capital and its national organs, a movement that has seen expressions from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street. And because this strain has refused to fully surrender its hopes for a liberated Egypt, it too has faced the wrath of the vengeful regime of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.”
― Alaa Abd El-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021