These local events and their meanings were given a second life when translated and circulated to the international community on Twitter and Facebook, tracked by hashtags such as “#WhatsHappeninginMyanmar”. In this way, local meanings and regional and rural participation were not subordinated to the abstract discourses of the urban and educated classes and elites. THE REVOLUTION MAY NOT BE TELEVISED, BUT IT WILL BE ON SOCIAL MEDIA The Gen Z movement is distinctive for the way in which it has targeted the rhetorical messages of the military. Through social media it has made visible the military’s use of propaganda through the apparatus of the state—through broadcasting the sense of business as usual on MRTV state television, for instance—to present a veneer of normalcy. Gen Z has leveraged digital literacy to function as citizen journalists to reveal corruption, as in exposing how the military stole trustee funds from Shwedagon Pagoda to keep the government functioning in the face of civil service walkouts. This revelation forced the military to protest on national television that it was only borrowing the funds and intended to pay them back with interest! Gen Z digerati have also learned from veteran activists, for example by exposing the military’s “chaos” repertoires, used to divide and sow confusion. To this end, the digerati have circulated newspaper articles through social media describing the same tactics dating to the 1980s and before. “Chaos tropes” were first used by British colonial rulers and later by Myanmar’s military regimes to excite the public’s fears that “dacoits” or other “morally deranged” criminal elements of society would provoke murderous pandemonium in the social order. Provoking fear of the moral breakdown of society and descent into anarchy is one of the military’s well-worn tactics for eliciting the people’s reliance on the military state for security. When, in mid-February, the SAC junta emptied prisons of 23,000 criminals in preparation for the arrest of anti-coup protesters, it directed and paid many of these criminals to carry out arson and to ransack residential areas in opposition 25 21-J07648 01 Trends_2021-7.indd 25 28/4/21 9:34 AM