Edition: January 2026

• Human Thinking - When the Internet Goes Dark

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HUMAN THINKING
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Finding the human signal in the noise

When the Internet Goes Dark

Uganda killed the internet. 400,000 people had already downloaded Bitchat

In Kampala, Uganda, January 13, 2026, 5:47 p.m, thirteen minutes before the internet died, Bobi Wine posted one last message to his 4.5 million followers.

"The criminal regime has announced an internet shutdown throughout Uganda, beginning 6:00pm today. Have you downloaded Bitchat yet? If not, you have a small window to do so." — Bobi Wine, X post, January 13, 2026
At 6 p.m., the Uganda Communications Commission's order took effect. Mobile network operators and internet service providers suspended public access nationwide. Social media went dark. Messaging apps stopped working. Email, video streaming, and web browsing are all blocked.
Wine, the former pop star whose protest songs made him a youth icon before he entered politics, had been sounding the alarm since late December.

NetBlocks, an internet monitoring organisation, confirmed the obvious: Uganda had experienced a "nation-scale disruption to internet connectivity." Human Rights Watch called it "a brazen attack on the right to freedom of expression." Amnesty International demanded immediate restoration.

Two days later, more than 21 million Ugandans would vote in a presidential election, in digital darkness.

But Wine's question, "Have you downloaded Bitchat yet?", wasn't rhetorical. It was the culmination of weeks of preparation. And the answer would reveal something important about what happens when a government tries to silence its people in 2026.

• • •

The Two-Week Warning

Wine had been sounding the alarm since late December.

On Dec. 30, 2025, he posted a detailed message to X explaining exactly what he expected to happen, and exactly how his supporters could prepare. The regime, he wrote, was "plotting an internet shutdown in the coming days, as they have done in all previous elections."

This wasn't speculation. President Yoweri Museveni's government had blocked internet access during the 2016 election. It imposed a five-day blackout during the 2021 vote, a blackout that Wine later claimed facilitated electoral fraud. The pattern was established.

But Wine wasn't just warning. He was organising.

"Bitchat will enable you to communicate to thousands of people in record time," he wrote. "No internet connection is required. You will be able to send pictures of DR Forms and share any other critical information to specific or other users. No internet required. No sharing of phone numbers or email addresses. All you need to do is switch on Bluetooth and use the app."

"Download Bitchat from Google Play Store or Apple App Store today, before the internet is switched off."

The message spread. And people listened.

The Numbers

According to Chrome-Stats, a platform tracking app installations, Bitchat downloads spiked by more than 32,000 in the week before the election. The app's developers reported an even larger figure, more than 400,000 downloads in Uganda as the blackout approached, making it the country's most downloaded application.

One of the app's pseudonymous developers, known as Calle, noted on X that installations had reached roughly 1% of Uganda's population.

The government noticed.

"It Is Very Easy for Us to Switch Off Such Platforms"

On January 6, 2026, Nyombi Thembo, executive director of the Uganda Communications Commission, responded to Wine's campaign with a warning of his own.

"We have the highest concentration of software engineers and developers in this country," he told the NilePost. "It is very easy for us to switch off such platforms if the need arises."

The threat was clear: don't think you can route around us.

Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who created Bitchat as what he called a "weekend experiment" in July 2025, responded on X with a single word: "Interesting."

Calle was more direct.

"You can't stop Bitchat. You can't stop us. I invite every Ugandan developer to join the global open source movement and contribute. We don't need anyone's permission to write code. Free and open source. Unstoppable. From the people for the people." — Calle, X post, January 6, 2026

The question of who was right—whether the government could actually stop a Bluetooth-based mesh network—would matter a great deal in the days ahead.

• • •

The Physics of Talking When They Don't Want You To

To understand why Thembo's confidence might be misplaced, you need to understand what makes Bitchat fundamentally different from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any messaging app you've probably used.

Conventional messaging works like this: your phone sends a message to a cell tower, which routes it through your mobile carrier, which sends it across the internet to a company's servers, which deliver it to the recipient's phone through the same chain in reverse. Every step involves infrastructure that governments control or can pressure.

Bitchat doesn't use any of that.

Instead, it turns every phone running the app into a node in a decentralized network. When you send a message, your phone broadcasts it via Bluetooth, a short-range radio protocol, to every Bitchat-enabled device within range. Typically, that's 30 to 100 meters, depending on conditions.

Those phones then rebroadcast to phones within their range. The message hops from device to device, like a rumour passing through a crowd—until it reaches its destination.

There's no central server to seize. No cell tower to shut down. No internet service provider to order offline.

The Catch

Mesh networking isn't magic. The range is limited. The network only works where enough users are close enough together, which functions in dense urban areas like Kampala but struggles in rural regions. Message delivery can be slow and unreliable.

And there's a more fundamental challenge: the network effect works in reverse, too. A mesh network with ten users is nearly useless. One with 400,000 users, concentrated in specific geographic areas during a specific event, is something else entirely.

Wine's genius wasn't technical. It was organisational. He spent two weeks converting his political network into a communications network, one that would activate precisely when the government's shutdown did.

This Playbook Has Been Run Before

Uganda isn't the first place where mesh networking has surged during a political crisis. The pattern has repeated across a decade of protests and shutdowns, each iteration teaching the next.

Hong Kong, 2014: The Proof of Concept

During the "Umbrella Movement" pro-democracy protests, student activist Joshua Wong urged protesters to download the FireChat app in case authorities cut off cell service.

What happened next caught everyone by surprise, including the app's developers.

Between late September and mid-October 2014, FireChat was downloaded 500,000 times in Hong Kong alone, according to Open Garden, the company behind the app. CNN reported 10.2 million chat sessions and 1.6 million chatrooms during the first two weeks of protests.

"Cellular networks are overwhelmed, but those are situations where our network shines, because the more devices that are connected, the more resilient our network becomes."  -  Christophe Daligault, Open Garden CMO, speaking to The Washington Post, October 2014

The irony was elegant: the very density of protesters that overwhelmed traditional networks made the mesh network stronger.

Myanmar, 2021: The Rapid Adoption

Following the military coup in February 2021, citizens anticipated communication blackouts. Another mesh networking app, Bridgefy, saw downloads surge to 1.3 million in a single 24-hour period, according to the company.

The pre-positioning strategy that Wine would later use in Uganda was already becoming standard practice.

Iran, 2022–2026: The Ongoing Arms Race

Bridgefy reported 950,000 new downloads over 40 days during Iran's 2025-2026 protests, as authorities imposed increasingly severe internet restrictions. The pattern has repeated itself during waves of unrest since the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, which first demonstrated the government's willingness to impose near-total blackouts.

Each crisis teaches the next generation of protesters what to download, when to download it, and how to use it.

• • •

Can Governments Actually Stop This?

Thembo's threat, "it is very easy for us to switch off such platforms", raises a technical question with no simple answer.

Blocking a traditional app is straightforward: you tell internet service providers to block traffic to and from the company's servers. But Bitchat's messages never touch the internet. They hop directly between phones using Bluetooth, a radio protocol operating in the 2.4 GHz frequency band.

To jam Bluetooth, you would need to flood that frequency band with interference across the entire geographic area you want to block. Bluetooth uses a technique called frequency hopping, rapidly switching between 79 different channels, which makes jamming technically demanding.

And even if you succeeded, the collateral damage would be significant. The same frequency band carries signals for wireless headphones, contactless payment systems, many medical devices, and industrial sensors. A citywide Bluetooth jam would be immediately and visibly disruptive to everyday life.

The alternative, blocking the app through software controls, faces different obstacles. Bitchat doesn't require accounts, email addresses, or phone numbers. Its code is open source, meaning anyone can inspect it, modify it, or create new versions. The government could block downloads from official app stores, but people who already have the app would keep using it.

None of this means mesh networks are invincible. A sufficiently determined government with sufficient resources could disrupt them. But the cost-benefit calculation is different from simply ordering telecoms to flip a switch.

As one security expert told Reuters: "You can't block them all."

The Bigger Picture

What happened in Uganda is part of a global pattern—and a global escalation.

According to Access Now, the digital rights organisation that tracks internet shutdowns worldwide, 2024 saw 296 documented shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number since tracking began. Seven countries were added to the "first-time offenders" list that year, including France, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Context: France was added to the list because in May 2024, the French government blocked TikTok in New Caledonia, a French overseas territory, to suppress riots. Access Now categorises social media platform blocks as a type of internet shutdown, so this qualified France as a first-time offender despite not being a full internet blackout.

Data from Top10VPN shows 212 major government-imposed internet outages in 2025, costing the global economy an estimated $19.7 billion.

But the same period has seen the proliferation of circumvention tools. Mesh networking apps. VPNs. Satellite internet, where available. Physical "sneakernets" that transport data on USB drives. Each government escalation meets a technological response.

The arms race shows no sign of ending.

The Human Variable

What's easy to miss in the technical details is that technology alone didn't prepare Uganda for the blackout.

Bobi Wine and people like him did.

Years of opposition organising built the trust networks that enabled rapid adoption. A political leader with credibility told people what to download and why, and millions listened. The app was the tool. The organising was the strategy.

• • •

What Happened Next

The election took place on January 15, 2026, with Uganda still largely offline. President Museveni, who has ruled since 1986, faced Wine and six other candidates.

On January 18, five days after the shutdown began, internet access was partially restored. Social media and messaging platforms remained restricted.

/As of this writing, the full story of what happened during those days in the dark is still emerging. How much organising continued through mesh networks? How information moved. What a difference it made.

What we know for certain is this: the shutdown did not impose total silence. The preparation happened. The tools were in place. And at least some communication continued through the blackout.

Whether that changes the calculation for future governments considering internet shutdowns, and whether the rising difficulty of imposing digital silence will deter attempts to do so, remains to be seen.

But the question Wine asked is no longer hypothetical.

Have you downloaded Bitchat yet?

Hundreds of thousands of Ugandans had an answer ready.

Why This Matters Beyond Uganda

It's tempting to read this as a story about somewhere else, a distant country with a decades-long autocrat facing yet another contested election. But the norms established anywhere tend to spread everywhere.

Internet shutdowns are not confined to the countries Americans might dismissively categorise as "over there." France, Malaysia, and Thailand were added to the first-time offenders list last year. The tools of digital censorship are proliferating.

And the tools of resistance are proliferating too.

The same mesh networking technology that helped Ugandan activists communicate during a blackout could help journalists, whistleblowers, or ordinary citizens anywhere connectivity is restricted. The same pre-positioning strategy Wine used, download the tools before you need them, applies universally.

Editorial Notes

Download figures vary by source: Chrome-Stats reported 32,000+ downloads in the week before the election; app developer statements cited 400,000+ total downloads in Uganda. Both figures are noted.
Primary Sources

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