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Egypt's January 25 Revolution often has been viewed as an explicit contest between the Hosni Mubarak regime and its cronies, who were able to prevail by pulling the levers of a "deep state," and revolutionaries espousing progressive visions, albeit visions divided between those of Islamists and non-Islamists, and often seen by each as mutually incompatible with the other. The defeat of the January 25 Revolution's progressive aspirations can be understood, to a substantial degree, as a victory by the old regime. However, revolution understood as a Liminal Crisis allows us to see the rise of 'Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi not as a straightforward restoration of the old regime, but as both a revolutionary outcome and as an instantiation of a New Authoritarianism that has been making significant strides toward power in the wake of the 2011 revolutions. Liminality is understood here as the intermediate stage in a transition as described in Victor Turner's Ritual Process and recently reinterpreted in the context of politics by Bjørn Thomassen. The potential dangers of liminality often are controlled by ritual, but this is not the case in revolutions, which become liminal crises precisely because there is no conventionalized means for closing off the state of being in-between. In such circumstances Tricksters-beings at home in liminality and often-elaborated in myth, folklore, and literature-become potentially dangerous in politics. Sisi can be seen as a Trickster politician. But more broadly, the structuring of liminality through the global political-economic order of contemporary capitalism both creates a generalized precarity outside the most elite levels of society, and at the same time predisposes those compelled to live in precarity to be attentive to political Tricksters. Hence liminality can be seen as both the beginning and the end of revolution .

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My thoughts on the Internet were recently jogged by an experience with a slightly older medium, namely, satellite television. In late March 2007 I attended the Third Annual Al-Jazeera Forum, in Doha. Notwithstanding the attendance of a few academics like me, the forum was largely a networking opportunity for professional journalists, just as MESA is for professional Middle East studies academics. However, unlike MESA, forum presenters, as well as the audience, were handpicked. Even the expenses of the attendees were subsidized (my hotel bill was paid by al-Jazeera). This inevitably made the event an exercise in open self-promotion for al-Jazeera.