You Have Not Yet Been Defeated by Alaa Abd el-Fattah review – a message to the world from an Egyptian prison

The jailed activist's writings, some of them smuggled out of his cell, keep the spirit of the 2011 revolution alive

In early 2011, a generation of Egyptians took to the streets, faced down the security forces and defied the old rule that Egypt's citizens could never be more than cowed, obedient children of a military state. I am addressing the youth of Egypt today ... from the heart, a father's dialogue with his sons and daughters," the 82-year-old dictator Hosni Mubarak said as he clung to power. In Tahrir Square, tens of thousands of his sons and daughters" - most of them not yet born when he inherited power from Anwar Sadat in 1981 - found this new intimacy unconvincing after the teargas and bullets, and chanted for his downfall.

By the next day Mubarak was gone, and the protesters were being hailed by the world leaders who had helped keep him in office for so long. (Egypt will never be the same," said Barack Obama, whose administration gave the country's military $1.3bn each year.) One of the best known was the 29-year-old programmer Alaa Abd el-Fattah, already a veteran of street protest and imprisonment, and a champion of the online spaces that gave young Egyptians a virtual escape from the stifling political and social repression within their own borders. To many, he personified the narrative of a fresh start made possible partly by the new tools of global information sharing - what the international media labelled a social media revolution".