[Reader-list] Naeem Mohaiemen on Iran - Bangladesh

[Paul D. Miller]

The revolution will bypass your filters
Graffiti on Iranian Cultural Centre, Dhaka. Photo: Naeem MohaiemenNaeem Mohaiemen

"Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran"
- Facebook status line

SOMETIME on June 12th, the official news is announced: "Landslide for Ahmadinejad". Then, just as quickly, other news starts coming out, louder, drowning out the state machine. Data analysis showing votes between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad, as announced in six waves, in a correlation ratio of 0.995, a statistical near-impossibility. Professor Mebane's analysis, showing 9 locations with abnormal outliers. Results that defy political alignments (Mousavi losing in Tehran, which is flashpoint for anti-Ahmadinejad vote), ethnic loyalties (Azeri candidate Mousavi losing in Azeri capital Tabriz, Lur candidate Mehdi Karoubilosing in Luristan) and demographic shifts (young, women, first-time voters).

So far, all this is familiar. Election fraud stretches from Pakistan to Burma to our near and far, Southern and Northern neighbours. Sometimes outrage over stolen elections is large enough to topple the government and force a re-election (Bangladesh). But other times, protests fade as the government waits until protestors are exhausted (Mexico).

June 13th to 16th, the attrition confrontation plays out differently. In 1968, protestors against the Vietnam War fought Chicago police and chanted at TV cameras "the whole world is watching". In 2009, the whole world is watching online, 24/7. The stage for Iranian activists are the streets, but also Twitter-Facebook-Flickr-Blogspot, and the censors can't stop any of it. As the Bangladesh government discovered after blocking YouTube, censorship isn't what it used to be. Just as we used proxy sites to get to YouTube (until our government gave up), Iranians are using anonymizers like Torproject.org. An Iranian tells The Independent: "The regime, can block Facebook today but they can't do it forever."

>From the moment the Mousavi protestors hit the streets, Reddit, Digg, Flickr, LiveLeak, Facebook are flooded with links. Basij thugs beat protestors, and within minutes Youtube 's Mousavi1388 channel ("Iranian professionals and students") has the mobile phone video online. Nothing is outside the camera frame. On my news feed, I see a link to protestors' "appeal to the world" reflected on eight accounts. Then sixteen, then twenty. First Iranian friends, then larger circles -- shared activism spreads in concentric circles. A campaign convinces Facebook users to change their icons to green to show support. All surfaces are overwhelmed by this protest.

With so much data pushing through pipes, aggregators are pulling feeds together to find things quickly. Google is sub-optimal in this moment, because it's searches are algorithm driven. Aggregation sites Demotix, Global Voices, Tehran Bureau, Memeorandum are all running Google-like summaries of protest news. These are more effective because they are personal, editorialised collections. Crowd-sourced, human links beat algorithm pulls.

Dominating the net media is Twitter. 160 character burst messages sent from mobile phones, the twitterverse is most effective for instant information. Hash threads like #iranelection and #iran allow us to track anyone who sends messages with those tags. I look at the feed and it says: 12,138 updates since your last refresh. But my last refresh was a few minutes ago! The volume is so overwhelming that aggregators are taking the best of twitter and re-tweeting. Iran.twazzup.com, Tweetscan, Twitterfall, TwitPic, a family of "best of" tools.

The Iranian state is getting desperate, and tries to throttle internet traffic, block SMS flow, scramble satellite TV feeds. But every few seconds there is a twitter giving new proxy addresses that can be accessed from inside Iran. Even with net speed down to a crawl, activists keep pushing information through. We will bypass all filters.

One of the high-volume tags on twitter now, besides #iran, is #cnnfail-- analysing how global news channels' have been to slow to cover this breaking news. Marshall Kirkpatrick writes on ReadWriteWeb: "Twenty years ago CNN's coverage of Tienanmen Square made its reputation. If in twenty more years it has become consensus that real-time, online, crowdsourced media is the best place to keep up with current events, [Iran] could be an important part of that history unfolding."

Technology channeled into productive, political, networked, flattening activist work. This was the idea of some early net enthusiasts, even though so much was lost in the last decade of corporate hype and takeover. The internet is continuing to be the equaliser, making a solo vlogger the equivalent of the state's Information Ministry. But the technology is only an empowering tool, the power is still from people. Iranian citizens inside the country and in the global diaspora.

Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote a memoir of witnessing revolution: "The policeman's experience: If I shout at someone and raise my truncheon, he will first go numb with terror and then take to his heels. But this time everything turns out differently. The policeman shouts, but the man doesn't run. He just stands there, looking at the policeman. It's a cautious look, still tinged with fear, but at the same time tough and insolent. The man on the edge of the crowd...glances around and sees the same look on other faces. Like his, their faces are watchful, still a bit fearful, but already firm and unrelenting. Nobody runs though the policeman has gone on shouting; at last he stops. There is a moment of silence."

Kapuscinski wrote this in Tehran. 1979.

Naeem Mohaiemen works on art & technology projects.