Houseboats on the Nile in Zamalek, Cairo
With the evictions looming, owners and residents of the 32 houseboats slated for removal, located between the May 15 and Imbaba bridges, sent a distress call to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s office and filed several lawsuits before administrative courts in an attempt to counter the ministry decision, as several houseboat owners told Mada Masr.
However, their attempts to stay the evictions have not been heeded. Residents of 19 houseboats have already been evicted and displaced, with their homes impounded on the docks in front of Imbaba Police Station, while three of the houseboats have already been offered for public auction. The remaining houseboats are scheduled to be moved by the first week of July.
A matter of productivity and gains
The government’s motive for the removal has been made clear in statements from Irrigation Ministry officials, who have asserted that only residential houseboats are being targeted for removal and advised owners to turn toward commercial activities to avoid evictions.
In May, the government previewed a plan to withdraw from select sectors of the economy, including large swathes of agricultural and livestock production, construction industries and hospitality.
Its pathway to doing so was sketched out in the “state ownership policy document,” a framework plan that the Cabinet’s economic group has heralded in recent months as being inspired by an International Monetary Fund demand on the Egyptian government in 2021. The objective of the demand is to “centralize state-ownership in a single entity,” identify specific economic sectors in which state-owned companies or agencies can play a role, and to exit other sectors completely to “allow for private sector-led productivity gains.”
Monetization first, public interest second
At the close of his eighth year in power, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi continues to push forward economic projects that place public interest as secondary to monetization. News of forced evictions and displacements have become the opening volley for any new government project. Public opposition has in large part been unable to halt the advancement of the government’s plans. Some who have resisted handing over their homes for demolition have been arrested or detained.
“Every possible option should be explored to help communities stay in one place as long as they wish. Alternative solutions to resettlement can always be found, as long as a threat to the population is undetermined,” Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, said following her visit to Cairo in 2018.
In her statement, Farha said she was shocked to learn of communities being subject to “forced eviction contrary to international human rights law.”
Three boats belonged to members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The head of the Nile Protection Administration for Greater Cairo Ayman Nour recently said in a TV interview that “The state is determined to remove all residential houseboats in Giza.” The restructuring of the Nile banks in Cairo and Giza, Nour said, aims to “restore their civilized appearance.”
For Nour, however, "civilized" means "commercially profitable."
“We will only remove residential boats,” Nour said, “leaving the commercial ones and the rowing clubs.” Nour continued to advise residential houseboat owners, in the event they don’t want their home to be bulldozed, to “take them to the authority, change their license to commercial and pay the respective fees.”
Nour added that three of the boats that have already been removed belonged to members of the Muslim Brotherhood whose assets were confiscated by a court ruling in January 2021.
Represented by “the committee to confiscate assets of terrorists and terrorist organizations,” those three houseboats were offered for public auction by the Nile Protection Administration.
Government v. residents
“It’s become more clear to us what’s actually happening,” Omar Robert Hamilton, a houseboat resident, told Mada Masr. “The ministry wants no more residents here. They only want commercial properties.”
Hamilton explained that all houseboat residents have always argued that they have long-standing contracts with the government. “If the state wants them out,” he said, “then they should simply make them an offer. They can’t just price them out overnight, fine them relentlessly, and then confiscate their only capital as ransom.”
While the ministry has accused the residents of encroaching on state-owned lands without a license, the owners said that the ministry and other relevant state bodies have been denying them the possibility of renewing the licenses they have held for years.
Dashed dreams of life on the Nile
In a statement on Facebook, the owners explained that the Giza governorate, the Armed Forces National Service Projects Authority, and the irrigation and agriculture ministries — the four bodies handling houseboat licensing — refused to renew licenses last year. The owners added that the projects authority is “working on a unified mechanism for renewing licenses.”
Suddenly the government decides to throw me on the street.
However, last year, the authority named the Irrigation Ministry as the sole body responsible for the license renewal process, and the latter continued to deny the owners the chance to renew before last week’s sudden decision to remove 32 houseboats.
“I am 88 years old. I sold two apartments in Zamalek in order to spend the last days of my life on the Nile, and suddenly the government decided to throw me on the street, to take away the houseboat and to take my money on top of it as well,” Ikhlas Helmy, the owner of the houseboat closest to the May 15 Bridge, told Mada Masr.
Muddy judicial waters
Manar Magdy, the another houseboat owner, told Mada Masr that the Giza Governorate and the Armed Forces projects authority only began to deny her license renewals last year. She adds that she had never failed to pay the fees before then.
Magdy said she paid LE20,000 ($1,060) to renew the license for navigation within Giza Governorate in 2020 and acquired the houseboat license. But in 2021, she faced a situation similar to Helmy’s.
According to Magdy, the owners received a notice from the Defense Ministry on April 21, 2021, informing them that the houseboats, the Nile docks and everything related to them now fall under the National Service Projects Authority, after which she went to the authority’s headquarters, where she was asked to bring all the previous licenses for her houseboat, which she did.
When she asked to renew the license, authority officials told her they were working on a committee to determine and unify the mechanism for issuing the licenses, and that this committee would start its work in November 2021.
But when she asked again at the end of that year, officials told her the Irrigation Ministry was now handling the licenses, while the authority only has jurisdiction over the lands on which the Nile docks are located.
Helmy and Magdy, on the other hand, stressed that their houseboats have been in their location legally, with owners paying water and electricity bills and real estate taxes regularly, while noting that the boats do not send their waste into the water but are connected to the sewage system of the Kit Kat area.
Ahmed Abdel Hady, a lawyer representing the houseboat owners, told Mada Masr that the team has filed 32 lawsuits before the administrative judiciary against the president, the prime minister and other relevant officials demanding to halt the removal decision and oblige the government to renew their licenses.
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The Dark, Decaying Underbelly Of Online Commenting
In our dreams, it's a world of joyful sharing. In reality, Internet commenters often offer little more than cheap shots and manipulation. Researcher Joseph Reagle explores the history and degeneration of online invective.
GENEVA — Am I ugly? Hot or not? Let's not forget that sharing platforms and social networks were built on the shallowest instincts like these, and the very culture of Internet commenting that affects our everyday digital lives took shape from just such questions.
Northeastern University's Joseph Reagle explores this rumbling topic in his recent book Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web (MIT Press).
Let's go back a bit. In October 2000, two Silicon Valley engineers, James Hong and Jim Young, launched a website called "Hot or Not." The idea was to get Internet users to post pictures of themselves so other users could judge their attractiveness on a scale from 1 to 10. The pair didn't really invent anything. The websites RateMyFace and AmIHot had both launched shortly before, with the very same idea. But Hong and Young hit the jackpot on the click market: A week after their website launched, it was getting two million visits per day.
The idea was replicated in 2003 by Mark Zuckerberg to create his website FaceMash, the predecessor to Facebook, which followed in 2004. A year later, a new version of the idea was developed. "YouTube was partly conceived as a video version of Hot or Not," says Reagle. The major participatory web platforms often included teenagers and young adults filming themselves and asking the world, "Am I ugly?"
Aladin and the cheaters
But the commenting culture has been facing a fundamental crisis for the last few years. In 2012, New York software developer Dave Winer, often cited as the first to have made comments possible on a blog, deactivated the function on his own website, though has recently looked for a new way to bring them back.
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Mum's the word. Photo: Bine Bardi
In 2009, legal expert and digital activist Lawrence Lessig had already deactivated his blog comments after noticing that "a third of the 30,000 commentators were in all likelihood scams or spam."
This problem now seems to have entered a critical phase. Last Oct. 16, Amazon filed 1,100 complaints against non-identified people (who go by pseudonyms such as "bondo_man," "kingswiss" or "sohel_mama"), who are accused of writing comments for payment in praise of certain products on the e-commerce website. The recruitment and payment of these commenters were believed to have been made on the platform Fiverr, an online job market connecting digital employers and occasional workers hired for small jobs. Let's also note that, since 2007, Amazon has been officially organizing the exchange of free products for comments via its Vine program.
Two days after Amazon filed the complaints, Belgian daily L'Avenirpublished an article about Internet users accusing the cinema information platform Allocine of publishing fake comments. Considered at the time the predominant online reference for French cinema, the website was suspected of having published phony laudatory comments from supposed audience members to boost the success of the French movie Les Nouvelles Aventures d'Aladin (The new adventures of Aladdin).
Reagle is amused because he says the fraud of publishing self-congratulations under a pseudonym is a timeworn trick. It was used by naturalist Carl von Linné in the 18th century, by writer Walter Scott in the 19th century and by Anthony Burgess in the 20th century.
The sandwich technique
The relationship between the culture of commenting and freedom of expression has a long history, going back, for instance, to the edict through which England's King Charles II attempted in 1675 to ban "coffee houses," places where people talked freely about current events. But on the Internet, communities where the culture of commenting is the most widely used aren't those where expression is freewheeling, but instead is regulated by internal norms of conduct. It's the case in the world of fan fiction, stories written by fans appropriating themselves the heroes of popular sagas (Star Trek, Twilight,Harry Potter) to give them parallel lives, full of romantic-sexual plot twists.
In offering recommendations about the proper way to comment on someone else's fan fiction, a website dedicated to Star Trek mentions the "sandwich technique": compliment, criticize and compliment again.
The commenting culture has now reached a state of simultaneous triumph and retrenchment. A growing number of news websites have eliminated the comment feature, given both their tendency to trigger outbursts of hatred and their weak added value in terms of content. As for websites that use comments as a central element, such as Facebook, they have an effect that is both compulsive and repulsive. If everyone could simultaneously stop using that network, without fear of being disadvantaged compared to others, a very large majority of users would probably pull the plug without any regret.
So many malicious human behaviors have contributed to the crisis: anonymity, for one, and also the physical distance that prevents commentors from seeing the emotional distress inflicted on the recipient. From the isolated, troublemaking troll of the 1990s and early 2000s, Reagle says we've unfortunately graduated to the "trollplex" trend in which "attacks are launched by people with various backgrounds and displaying various behaviors, but sharing one target, one culture and online meeting place."
So what do we do? Cultivate your online space like a garden, Reagle suggests, pulling the weeds so flowers can grow. Or, like the great science fiction author Isaac Asimov recommended, stop reading a comment at the first appearance of a negative adjective.
*Correction: An earlier version of the article incorrectly reported that Joseph Reagle teaches at Northwestern University. He teaches at Northeastern University. Sorry!