Over five days extending from January 28th until February 2nd, Egypt endured an internet and cell phone blackout. At exactly a time when Twitter and Facebook were being described as integral to the demonstrations, many pundits seemed to suspect that without access to social media the momentum of the protests would be in jeopardy. But as events played out, it became clear that organizing continued by other means. Crowds in Tahrir Square and across Egypt continued to swell in number, and rumors circulated that tactics borrowed from the liberation struggle in Algeria were being used on the streets. It is, in fact, out of the struggle in Algeria that Frantz Fanon discusses not Twitter or Facebook, but the role of radio from 1954-1956. He distinguishes between two critical moments. In the first, when radio broadcasts were dominated by the French, Algerians found ways of passing information over long distances “that vaguely recalled some such system of signaling, like the tom-tom,” and helped “give the impression of being in permanent contact with the revolutionary high command” (78). In the second, with the advent of the “Voice of Fighting of Algeria” in 1956, Algerians saw liberation radio broadcasts routinely jammed, interrupted and alternately communicated. As Fanon notes, “The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information” (86). In both instances, it is not technology as such, but the revolutionary context that helps create the demands for new modes of address and the circulation of information. What might be gained by reading Fanon’s reflections on radio in the context of the Egyptian revolution--and the internet blackout in particular? What does the situation in Algeria lend to an understanding of a seemingly radically different context in Egypt? For one, rather than ask what role media plays in facilitating the revolution, Fanon addresses how revolutionary movements reform and retool the media. And secondly, by addressing radio jamming and communication challenges, he helps to complicate the teleological and self-congratulatory myth of technological development. Linking colonialism and media means thinking through conditions of appropriation and transformation, whether the “Voice of Fighting Algeria” or the now-famous vlog of Aasma Mahfouz. Following this movement between radio and Twitter, Algeria and Egypt, my paper explores both the commonalities of networks past and the birth of imagined national futures.