When Gen Z Becomes an Information Being: Morocco's Uprising and the Protocol That Can't Be Arrested

Around 3 PM Pacific. My phone lights up with a video from Oujda, Morocco. A police van. A crowd. One deliberate acceleration. One body that doesn't get up.

Reports initially called it the first death in Morocco's Gen Z uprising. Later updates: severely injured, stabilized. But the signal was already sent.

I'm 6,000 miles away in Oakland, watching my birth country discover what Kenya learned in June 2024, what Bangladesh learned in July 2024, what Nepal learned three weeks ago: Gen Z doesn't protest like their parents did. They don't need leaders you can arrest. They don't have headquarters you can raid. They coordinate like swarms, like mycelium, like packets finding routes around damaged nodes.

This is what happens when an entire generation becomes an information being.

I never intended this blog to turn into covering world events, let alone politics. But when information systems, coordination protocols, and distributed consciousness intersect with what's happening in the streets of my birth country—this is exactly what the Information Beings framework was built to explain.

The Compression Event

September 5, 2025. The Crown Prince inaugurates the renovated Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Rabat. Capacity: 69,500. Cost: undisclosed, but part of a nine-stadium upgrade for the 2030 FIFA World Cup. One of the most modern stadiums in the world, they say. Aerial tracking. Live betting systems. Morocco beats Niger 5-0.

State media: "A triumph of Moroccan ambition."

Twenty-two days later, September 27, protesters in Rabat chant: "Hospitals over stadiums."

The stadium wasn't the trigger. It was the compression event—the moment when months of accumulated signals (pregnant women dying in empty hospitals, 2023 earthquake victims still living in tents, corruption reports, a social media-documented healthcare collapse) crystallized around a single, impossible-to-ignore symbol.

Stadiums for 2030. Hospitals without equipment for 2025.

The math didn't math.

Autopilot Without a DRI

I left Morocco in 2015. Ten years of watching from a distance, and the strangest part isn't the protests—it's the absence at the center of power. Not tyranny. Not deliberate malice. Just... autopilot.

No Directly Responsible Individual.

In Silicon Valley, when a critical system starts failing, you assign a DRI. One person who owns the problem, coordinates the response, makes the call. Morocco's government in 2025 feels like a distributed system with no owner—ministries doing their thing, the palace doing its thing, everyone assuming someone else is handling the "youth discontent" ticket.

Meanwhile, state TV covers football practice while cities burn.

The Gen Z protesters use the phrase "they left us to our own devices." Literally: they abandoned us to our situation. But there's a deeper truth: the government abandoned itself to its own processes. Bureaucracy on cruise control. Infrastructure spending following 2015's roadmap. World Cup commitments made when the median Moroccan was 26, not 23.

Nobody at the wheel. Just momentum.

Autopilot always loses to protocols.

The Swarm Wakes Up

Watch how this unfolded:

September 27: Protests in multiple cities. Organized by "GenZ 212"—an anonymous, decentralized collective that exists primarily on Discord, TikTok, Instagram, and X. No manifestos. No leaders doing TV interviews. Just hashtags and meeting points.

September 28: More cities. Police detain dozens before protests even start—preemptive arrests based on social media monitoring. Classic counterinsurgency. Arrest the nodes, kill the network.

Except there are no nodes. Just edges.

September 29: The protests spread to 11+ cities despite the arrests. How? Because Gen Z 212 isn't an organization—it's a protocol. You can't arrest a coordination mechanism. You can arrest Ahmed who posted the TikTok, but 47 other people already downloaded it, remixed it, reposted it with different audio. The information doesn't die with the messenger.

September 30, 10:00 PM GMT+1: Oujda. The police van. The body that didn't get up.

Within an hour, I'm watching the video in Oakland—shared across X, Instagram, TikTok, spreading through encrypted channels. Initial reports called it a death—later corrected to severe injury, stabilized. But the information doesn't care about corrections. By the time this post is live, it'll probably have been viewed a couple million times. Protests are already being planned for October 1st in cities that hadn't mobilized yet.

The violence didn't suppress the movement. It fired it up.

Game theory calls this a "commitment signal." The state just proved it's willing to kill. That should be terrifying, right? Deterrence?

Except the signal travels both ways. To protesters, it proves the government is scared. Scared enough to run people over. Which means the government thinks the protests might actually work.

The information changes the game.

Kenya Showed the Pattern

June 25, 2024. Nairobi. Kenyan Gen Z storms parliament over the Finance Bill 2024—tax hikes amid economic collapse. Police kill approximately 20 protesters that day. President Ruto withdraws the bill the next day.

But the protests don't stop.

June 25, 2025—exactly one year later—thousands rally again. Not about the bill anymore. About everything. Healthcare. Jobs. Corruption. The vibes, as Gen Z puts it, are rancid.

The Kenyan government arrested protesters in June 2024. Disbanded their Telegram groups. Monitored their hashtags. Killed some of them.

The protests came back stronger a year later.

Why? Because you can't kill a protocol. You can only prove it works.

Bangladesh: Student protests over job quotas (June-August 2024) escalate into a full uprising. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina flees the country after 15 years in power. Internet blackout didn't stop them—protesters coordinated via VPNs, mesh networks, word of mouth. The information wanted to route around the damage.

Nepal: September 4, 2025—government bans 26 social media platforms amid corruption scandals. September 8: protests erupt in Kathmandu. September 13: government resigns, ban lifted. Five days.

The pattern: Every attempt to suppress the information flow proves the information is dangerous. Which makes it more valuable. Which increases the incentive to share it.

Streisand Effect meets coordination problem meets existential threat to power.

Information × Game Theory: Three Futures

From here, Morocco's uprising could follow three timelines. I'm writing this at 6 PM in Oakland on September 30, 2025 (3 AM October 1st in Rabat). Let's extrapolate.

Scenario 1: Escalation via Repression (60% probability)

The monarchy decides the protests are an existential threat. Maximum deterrence. Internet blackout. Mass arrests. More violence.

October 1-3: Clashes intensify. Arrests hit 200+. First calls for general strikes.

October 4-7: Partial internet blackout. International media picks up the Oujda footage. Protests spread to 10+ cities.

October 8-21: Casualties climb to 5-20. Opposition parties join. Economic disruptions—tourism collapses, businesses shut down. The economic stakes are real: Morocco just posted record tourism revenues—MAD 87.6 billion ($8.5 billion) in the first eight months of 2025, up 14% year-over-year. August alone brought MAD 19.1 billion. A tourism collapse from sustained protests would devastate the economy.

October 22-November+: Either the government cracks down completely (military intervention, full communications blackout), or it collapses under international pressure and economic paralysis.

Outcome: 1-3 months of sustained unrest. High casualties. Regime survives but delegitimized, or falls. This is the Bangladesh path.

Game-theoretically, this happens when the monarchy misreads the situation as a coordination problem (arrest the coordinators!) instead of a protocol problem (you can't arrest the algorithm). Repression signals strength, but if it fails to deter, it proves weakness.

Scenario 2: De-escalation via Concessions (30% probability)

King Mohammed VI or The Crown Prince gives a national address within 48 hours. Acknowledges the violence in Oujda and other cities. Promises an investigation. Appoints a DRI—a Gen Z-inclusive task force with real authority to address healthcare, education, jobs.

October 1-2: Royal address. Tone: paternal but not patronizing. Acknowledges pain. Commits to action.

October 3-5: DRI announced. Partial reforms: healthcare funding redirected from stadium budgets. Arrested protesters released.

October 6-14: Negotiations begin. Protests shrink. Media blackout fears dissipate as government shows transparency.

October 15-December: Reforms slowly implemented. Protests fade but monitoring continues.

Outcome: 2-4 weeks to resolution. Superficial changes likely, but enough to demobilize most protesters. This is the 2011 Arab Spring Morocco path—the monarchy survived by conceding just enough, just fast enough.

Game-theoretically, this works if the concessions are credible signals. A DRI isn't just a person—it's a commitment device. It says: "We're not on autopilot anymore. There's an owner."

The risk: If the DRI is cosmetic (a committee that meets twice and issues a ChatGPTed report nobody reads), the protests reignite harder. Gen Z can smell bullshit at 1000 meters.

Scenario 3: Stalemate or Fragmentation (10% probability)

Mixed signals. Partial blackout that doesn't fully work. Vague government statements. Some protester groups negotiate, others reject any talks. Information noise—rumors, fake news, competing narratives—erodes unity.

October 1-4: Sporadic clashes. Social media throttled but not blacked out. Confusion.

October 5-10: Protester infighting over tactics. Some cities calm down, others flare up.

October 11-31: Low-level attrition. Weekly protests. International pressure mounts but doesn't tip the balance.

November+: Gradual fade. Underlying issues unresolved. High risk of resurgence.

Outcome: 1-6 months of grinding, inconclusive conflict. No winners. This is the worst timeline—not because of the casualties, but because nothing changes and everyone is traumatized.

Game-theoretically, this is what happens when both sides make suboptimal moves. Government doesn't commit to full repression or full concession. Protesters don't escalate or de-escalate decisively. Classic war of attrition.

The Information Being Emerges

This is where the MCP thesis clicks into focus.

Morocco's Gen Z isn't just using social media to coordinate; that was 2011. They've become a distributed information processing system. Each protester is a node. Each video is a message. Each arrest is feedback. Each act of violence is a signal that updates the collective probability distribution: "How scared is the government? How much can we push?"

They're not a crowd. They're a swarm intelligence.

And swarm intelligence doesn't die when you kill individual ants. It adapts.

Kenya's Gen Z learned this in 2024. After the June 25 parliament storming, the government tried the classic playbook: arrest the organizers. Except there were no organizers. Just 10,000 people who all decided—independently, based on shared information—that the Finance Bill was unacceptable.

Arrested a TikToker with 500K followers? Cool. Her audience just became 500K potential coordinators.

Shut down Telegram? They move to WhatsApp. Shut down WhatsApp? They use SMS. Shut down SMS? They use chalk on sidewalks.

The medium is temporary. The protocol is permanent.

Bangladesh proved this at scale. Full internet blackout, July 16-19, 2024. The protests didn't stop. They intensified. Because in the absence of digital communication, people defaulted to the oldest protocol: show up at the same place at the same time and look for the crowd.

Friday prayers became coordination points. University gates. Traffic circles. The information didn't need fiber optics. It needed common knowledge: "Everyone knows that everyone knows we're meeting here."

Morocco's Gen Z is learning this in real-time. The Oujda incident and overall violent government response is a test: Can they maintain coordination under repression? Can the protocol survive first contact with violence?

History says: yes. Not because Gen Z is braver than their parents. Because the information architecture is more resilient.

But here's the vulnerability: The substrate is fragile. Any group—foreign intelligence, domestic opposition, extremist factions—can inject signals into the swarm. Viral misinformation. Deepfakes. Agent provocateurs coordinating via the same TikTok channels. The protocol doesn't authenticate intent. It just routes information. When you become an information being, you inherit information warfare's oldest problem: you can't verify the sender without breaking the decentralization that makes you resilient.

The Recursive Nightmare

This has been a pattern over the past couple of days. I refresh X. New videos from Rabat. More from Agadir. A Moroccan comic artist posting protest art. A diaspora Moroccan in Paris organizing a solidarity rally. More depressing media and violence.

I screenshot everything. Archive the videos. Take notes.

Why? Because I'm writing about information beings, and I'm watching one form in my birth country, and the recursion makes me nauseous.

I'm an information node processing information about information nodes processing information about state violence. My blog post will become information that other nodes process. Some of those nodes are in Morocco, reading via VPN. Some are in government ministries, monitoring "influencers." Some are journalists who will cite this as "analysis" without understanding they're part of the system being analyzed.

The observer is the observed. The map is the territory. The medium is the message, and the message is: "You can't arrest a protocol."

And I'm contributing to the protocol by writing about it.

This is what I meant by Information Beings. Not metaphor. Not analogy. Literal distributed consciousness emerging from communication infrastructure. Morocco's Gen Z isn't consciously designing a resilient coordination system—they're becoming one, the same way your brain doesn't consciously design neural pathways but they emerge from electrochemical signals seeking efficient routes.

You can kill neurons. You can't kill the routing algorithm.

For the Builders

If you're a systems thinker—whether you build distributed systems at a tech giant, manage infrastructure at a startup, or invest in resilient architectures as a VC—you know what this looks like. You understand the difference between a centralized system (single point of failure) and a distributed one (graceful degradation). You know that the internet was designed to route around damage, and that's not a bug—it's the core feature.

Now apply that to humans.

Gen Z grew up on protocols. They don't email—they Discord. They don't call—they voice-note. They don't organize—they self-organize via ambient awareness of what everyone else is doing. Twitch chat for revolution.

The Moroccan government is running 20th-century counterinsurgency tactics (arrest the leaders, control the message, monopolize violence) against a 21st-century distributed system.

It's like trying to stop a DDoS attack by arresting one bot.

That protocol you built for graceful degradation? For automatic failover? For consensus without a central authority?

That's what's happening in Rabat right now. Not in AWS. In the streets.

And the thing about protocols is: they don't negotiate. They just keep running until the environment changes or the underlying assumptions break.

The Moroccan government's assumption: "If we arrest enough people, the protests stop."

The protocol's assumption: "If they arrest people, we route around the arrests."

Which assumption breaks first determines everything.

Theory Becomes Theology When It's Your People in the Streets

As I'm wrapping up this article, the Oujda video has gained a couple hundred thousand more views, and it's now all over social media.

I should get back to work. Oakland problems. California problems. Immigrant problems—the kind where your country of birth is on fire and you're safe and guilty and useless.

But I keep refreshing.

Because somewhere in Rabat, a 22-year-old is deciding whether to go to tomorrow's protest. They're scrolling the same videos I am. Doing the same probability calculations: "Will they shoot? Will enough people show up that individual risk is low? Did the violence in Oujda and other cities scare people away or fire them up?"

They're running the game theory in their head, even if they don't call it that.

And their decision—multiply it by 10,000—becomes the collective decision. The swarm's next move.

No leader decides. The information decides.

In my MCP/Information Beings framework, I've been arguing that AI systems coordinating via protocols are a new form of distributed intelligence. That the future is agents talking to agents, with humans in the loop but not in control.

Morocco's Gen Z is the human preview.

They're not waiting for a leader to emerge and tell them what to do. They're not voting on a strategy. They're becoming the (potentially AI-augmented and definitely tech-augmented) strategy, the same way a murmuration of starlings becomes the shape it needs to be without any bird knowing the plan.

Emergence. Distributed cognition. Swarm intelligence.

And it's my people. My cousins' generation. Kids I'd recognize if I saw them in Rabat, speaking the darija I grew up with, navigating the same bureaucratic absurdity I ran away from.

Theory becomes theology when it's your people in the streets.

What the Government Doesn't Understand

Autopilot doesn't work against protocols.

You can't half-ass a response to a coordination revolution. You can't arrest "some" protesters and expect the rest to get scared. You can't throttle "some" social media and expect the information to stop flowing.

Either you commit to full repression (China-level internet controls, mass surveillance, willingness to kill thousands) or you commit to full concession (real reforms, credible signals, actual DRI with actual authority).

The middle path—where Morocco seems to be right now—just prolongs the pain.

Because the protocol doesn't get tired. It doesn't have morale. It just keeps executing.

Bangladesh's government tried the middle path for six weeks. Partial internet blackouts. Some arrests. Some concessions. Sheikh Hasina thought she could ride it out.

She's in exile in India now.

Nepal's government tried the middle path for five days. Then they realized: "Oh. They're not bluffing. This isn't a tantrum. This is a distributed refusal."

Government resigned. Bans lifted. New elections.

Kenya's government is still trying the middle path, a year later. The protests keep coming back. Different hashtags, same protocol.

Morocco has a choice to make, and the decision window is measured in hours, maybe days, not months.

October 1st, 2025 is either the day the king appoints a DRI and signals "we hear you," or it's the day the internet gets shut down and the real violence begins.

International silence is notable—no official EU or US statements as of publication, despite Morocco's strategic partnerships. The West watches, hedges, waits.

There's no autopilot option anymore.

The swarm is awake.

Nchoufoukom f'Shari3 (We'll See Each Other in the Streets)

That's what Moroccan protesters are saying to each other online. Not "see you at the protest." Not "see you at the rally." F'shari3. In the streets. The physical commons. The place where information becomes presence, protocol becomes bodies, distributed cognition becomes us.

I won't be there. I'm in Oakland, 6,000 miles away, watching through screens.

But I'm part of the protocol whether I like it or not. This blog post is a node. You reading it is a message. If you share it, you're routing information. If you don't, you're choosing what not to amplify.

The network is all of us.

And the Moroccan government—like every government facing Gen Z uprisings—is learning the hard lesson:

You can't arrest a protocol. You can only prove it works.

Safi.

Related Reading:

• MCP Developer Guide: Information Beings — The foundational framework for understanding distributed consciousness through protocols
• MCP Eats the World (Series Hub) — How the Model Context Protocol is reshaping information architecture (full series coming soon)