On Location

Perhaps looking back on the rise of the "Twitter Revolution" nar­ra­tive can shed some light on the path for­ward, including how to approach its more subtle but per­sis­tent vari­ants such as “the Wikileaks Revolution” (Tunisia) and “Revolution 2.0” (Egypt). In Iran’s case, techno-utopianism in inter­na­tional cov­erage boomed due to for­eign jour­nal­ists being banned, cred­ited Iranian jour­nal­ists being restricted, and a young, mobile, tech-savvy, and highly edu­cated pop­u­la­tion being at the ready. Certainly, the Western audience’s recog­ni­tion of social media net­working sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as pop­ular, Western, youth-oriented, and benign also played a part. But the “Twitter rev­o­lu­tion” also caught on due to a number of nar­ra­tives that, in the Western con­scious­ness, pre-existed the uprising.

One of them was the idea, cul­ti­vated since the early 2000s, of Iranian dis­si­dent blogger-journalists being driven to the free spaces of the internet in region­ally dis­pro­por­tionate num­bers, and expe­ri­encing per­se­cu­tion for their online, anti-régime endeavors. The sto­ries of per­se­cuted blog­gers like Sina Motallebi and Hossein Derakhshan (still in jail today) come to mind, as does that of Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, the first Iranian blogger to die in prison. In the same period, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion pushed the Iran Freedom Support Act, which was passed in September, 2006. The serendip­i­tous overlap between the rise of the internet’s role in Iranian civil society and the US régime-change agenda seemed to strengthen both. An addi­tional nar­ra­tive, pur­port­edly repro­duced his­tor­i­cally by Iranian dias­pora in the West, was one of Iranians (or “Persians”, rather) as intel­lec­tu­ally and cul­tur­ally advanced, sim­ilar to Westerners, “civ­i­lized,” and proud.

But there was also a deeper story about the internet itself as a vehicle of gen­uine demo­c­ratic change that may have tipped the scales from bal­anced online/offline inter­na­tional sol­i­darity towards over-enthusiasm about internet tech­nolo­gies. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture traces internet nar­ra­tives from the technology’s begin­nings, and shows that the inter­sec­tion between the internet and visions of utopian soci­eties is as old as the Net itself. Could this utopian gen­esis nar­ra­tive be at the root of today’s internet-boosting?

“Tools of liberation”

Turner argues that early per­cep­tions about com­puters and the internet were shaped less by the engi­neers and pro­gram­mers who made them and more by an élite of jour­nal­ists and hippy ide­o­logues from 1960s and 70s San Francisco who had the access and influ­ence to write about these new tech­nolo­gies. This nar­ra­tive was intended “to create the cul­tural con­di­tions under which micro­com­puters and com­puter net­works could be imag­ined as tools of lib­er­a­tion.” Given Turner’s account, it is not hard to see how today’s internet con­jures up images of a quest for freedom.

This could be the reason why, in the summer of 2009, San Franciscan com­puter pro­grammer, Austin Heap, was moved to involve him­self in the Iranian Green move­ment without any prior knowl­edge or interest in Iran. He designed Haystack, a pro­gram which encrypts all online activity and hides this encrypted data in what looks like normal traffic. Heap’s inspi­ra­tion was seeing images from the protests — his only con­nec­tion to what he saw, the internet. The Tor Project was a pro­gram sim­i­larly used in sol­i­darity with Iranians. Tor is headed by Andrew Lewman and designed to allow people in Iran to use anony­mous proxies to hide their iden­ti­ties and online activity. The atten­tion for such sto­ries boomed and over­shad­owed the Iranian government’s cen­sor­ship, gov­ern­ment sup­porters’ hacking of oppo­si­tion web­sites, and the government’s use of online ama­teur footage to iden­tify protesters.

In addi­tion, the hack­tivist groups Anonymous and Pirate Bay sup­ported the protesting Iranians by starting the web­site, Anonymous Iran, pro­viding tools to cir­cum­vent cen­sor­ship by way of nav­i­gating with pri­vacy, uploading files through the Iranian fire­wall, and launching attacks on pro-government web­sites. The inter­na­tional involve­ment and ded­i­ca­tion of these cyber-activists fur­ther entwined utopian internet nar­ra­tives with the mes­sage of the Iranian pro-democratic move­ment, espe­cially as they coa­lesced with the Green pro­testers’ coun­ter­parts out­side the country.

Between sol­i­darity and “Statecraft”

But these acts of sol­i­darity also smuggle in ele­ments of US for­eign policy and com­merce, together with a touch of American nation­alism. Through inter­na­tional sol­i­darity actions, the lines between the inter­ests of cit­i­zens, busi­ness, and the state have become dan­ger­ously blurred, for instance, with the US administration’s “21st Century Statecraft”, spear­headed by none other than Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton (yes, she likes reminding us which cen­tury it is). The US gov­ern­ment con­nec­tions to sol­i­darity actions with Iran first came under public scrutiny in the much-covered delay in Twitter main­te­nance when the Iran protests were breaking out in June 2009.

The US State Department asked the pri­vate com­pany to instate a main­te­nance delay so that Iranians could con­tinue to use Twitter at Iran’s peak traffic hours (the com­pany denied that the State Department had a hand in their deci­sion to delay main­te­nance). State con­nec­tions are also rife around Tor, as the project was an existing one, funded by the US Department of Defense (but also other orga­ni­za­tions like the Electronic Frontier Foundation). More state links emerged on April 13th 2010, when the US Treasury Department gave Heap an exemp­tion from US sanc­tions to dis­tribute Haystack legally in Iran.

This was part of a wider policy approach that saw a ban lifted on US com­pa­nies like Google and Microsoft to export their prod­ucts to Iran in March of the same year under the assump­tion that this would facil­i­tate the devel­op­ment of Iranian civil society. But this would have little if any effect for Iranian cit­i­zens who would likely already be accessing these pro­grams ille­gally. In Heap’s case, the Haystack project fiz­zled out qui­etly as it was later found to be fraught with secu­rity holes, thus endan­gering the very people it was meant to pro­tect.

But while rushing to crit­i­cize this US nar­ra­tive of “democ­ra­tizing internet diplo­macy,” and embracing post-Twitter rev­o­lu­tion per­spec­tives, some have ended up high­lighting the spirit of American free market entre­pre­neur­ship that drives the tech­nology industry that gave birth to the internet as we now know it. When American busi­ness com­petes with gov­ern­ment to implic­itly take credit for people’s rev­o­lu­tions we are still a far cry from being moved by the power of uni­versal values of humanity. This bla­tant self-congratulation reminds us that the Twitter rev­o­lu­tion nar­ra­tive is more about a clam­oring to claim glory for our own prin­ci­ples, poli­cies, and tools. As one critic declared, “To pro­claim a Twitter rev­o­lu­tion is almost a form of intel­lec­tual colo­nialism, stealthy and mildly delu­sional: We project our world, our values, and con­cerns onto theirs and we shouldn’t.”