His core thesis is exactly what I meant with preconceived notion. These protests might have been illegible to him and government authorities, but that is exactly why they worked. The entire premise that protests need to be legible and that these protest failed to achieve what they set out to do is IMHO false.
Maybe the Brazilian ones had a certain aspect of appealing to Rusoff, but from what I gathered most people involved in the core did not consider that aspect especially important and I suspect Bevin failed to understand their point and summarized it as "they didn't know either" or something along those lines to fit it in his grand narrative of these protests failing somehow to articulate specific demands.
Anyway, maybe I am wrong about the Brazilian protests, but the Egyptian (and Tunisian) ones certainly did not want to appeal to the dictators in power, they wanted to get rid of them, and that worked very well. Being illegible to the state apparatus was a successful tactic for them and they mostly used social media to spread disinformation to intentionally confuse the state apparatus. Bevin completely fails to see that and just parrots the western media narrative that social media was somehow instrumental in mobilizing the masses.
Now you can argue that the successes of the protest in Egypt (and to a lesser extend Tunisia) where later rolled back, but that is muddling a multi year struggle with very different actors and a shift in public opinion. The initial protests where a resounding success in achieving what they set out to do, but later after the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power through democratic elections, many of the original urban liberal supporters turned back to the military as the lesser evil. In Tunesia it played out slightly different, but it is also wrong there to say that the initial protests failed to achieve what they set out to do.
Similarly for Brazil I think Bevin is muddling the initial protests with ones that happened many months later and which ultimately helped Bolsenaro to be elected as the president. But that is a bit like how MLs like to muddle the original soviet revolution with the later brutal take-over by the Bolshevik.