The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Recent history has seen cycles of superficial reforms to open up the system, followed by hardened repression. The inner core of the regime, that is, the people and institutions who really hold the levers of power in Iran—the clerics, the militia, the revolutionary courts—remained unreformed and unreformable. But it was during one of the moments of relative calm that the young Hoder began his career as an observer of the digital universe, writing for a reformist newspaper which was soon after closed by the courts.

By 2000, he was in Canada. Because he wished to start a blog, he tinkered with code and in September 2001 succeeded in adapting blogging software to the requirements of Farsi script. This minor innovation by an ordinary twentysomething was to have long repercussions, not just for Hoder’s life but for public expression in Iran. Iranians took to blogging with abandon. At a time when Arab countries had only a handful of blogs, almost all of them in English, Iran’s “Blogistan” quickly reached tens of thousands of active sites and continues to grow to this day. Most Iranian blogs were trivial personal diaries. That happened to be the case in every country on earth. Many blogs, however, commented on political news, advocated feminism, or criticized the obvious corruption of regime officials.

The phenomenal expansion of Iran’s blogosphere was a nonlinear event, possible only under the conditions of the Fifth Wave. A space abruptly opened for expression that was not under the absolute control of the censor. Vital communities formed online, splintered along the usual divergence of interests but sharing a common wish to defend and expand that virtual public space against the predations of the regime.

In consequence, the ruling class confronted what has come to be called “the dictator’s dilemma”—a frequent affliction of authority in the new environment. The dilemma works this way. For security reasons, dictators must control and restrict communications to a minimum. To make their rule legitimate, however, they need prosperity, which can only be attained by the open exchange of information. Choose.

Along a spectrum of possible choices, North Korea, for example, stands at the restrictive extreme. Three generations of North Korean dictators have bet big on famine and poverty in exchange for silence and control. As we’ll see, the Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, lost power in part because of his vacillations on this question. He wanted to toggle between communication and control, but instead betrayed his own panic and an old man’s ignorance of the information sphere.

Iran’s rulers chose differently. Formally at least, they embraced blogging and the internet. They promoted connectivity (though keeping bandwidth artificially low), and encouraged regime supporters to get online—an attempt to nullify the anti-regime unity of the online communities. Whole swaths of Blogistan are thus dedicated to “conservative” political and religious views. High government figures are expected to communicate online. The most famous blogger in the country is ex-president Ahmadinejad.

Of course, the regime also blocked many websites, and currently holds the world record for bloggers thrown in jail. At least one of them died from the admonishments of his wise Platonic guardians.

In a very nonlinear but, I believe, real way, all of these contortions had been forced on the brutal authoritarians of Iran by an insignificant young man tinkering with code in Toronto, Canada.

AN INSIGNIFICANT MAN THREATENS THE SANCTITIES OF A VERY LARGE NATION

It was the surprised discovery by the West of the Iranian blogosphere that raised Hoder to the status of a minor celebrity. He was invited to an endless round of conferences to speak about that shadowy realm, the internet, which he did with some zest and skill. By the time I ran across him in Nashville, he seemed less a blogfather than an orphaned techno-gypsy, drifting from conference to conference. In January 2007, he attended a conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. He knew perfectly well this barred his return to Iran, but gave idealistic reasons for the visit. Then, in the fall of 2008, Hoder travelled to Tehran. And so it happened that, on the first day of November, the Iranian authorities at last caught up with the insignificant man: they arrested Hoder at his father’s home and ushered him into Evin prison, an unfriendly place within the Islamic Republic’s merciless penal system.

Two years passed before his trial. An additional eight months lapsed before the Alice-in-Wonderland sentence was announced: 19½ years of incarceration for the crime of blogging.

Idle to speculate why Hoder returned to Iran: he was, as I noted, of a naïve and unrealistic temperament. Far more useful—far more honest and to the point, if we wish to understand the character of the age in which we now live—is to aim our questions about this wanton injustice at the men who perpetrated it. Why did they arrest Hoder? Why the inordinate punishment? What did they, in full possession of great power and authority, fear from this ordinary person? What did they hope to gain by burying him alive in Evin prison?

On the surface, these questions may appear no less naïve than Hoder himself. By Western standards, the Islamic republic was a lawless and despotic government. Despots punish those who express politically unorthodox views or engage in offensive behavior. Hoder fit that profile on both counts.

Moreover, repression aimed at internet dissidents has become so commonplace that it hardly excites attention. Throwing bloggers in prison seems to be the way of the world: it isn’t news. In February 2007, for example, an Egyptian court condemned blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, who was all of 22 at the time, to four years in prison for “insulting the president” and “vilifying Islam.” That was under the old Mubarak regime. In June 2013, another court in Egypt condemned blogger Ahmed Douma to six months’ imprisonment, also for insulting the president. That was under the new elected government formed by the Muslim Brotherhood. I cite these two men as random bookends: other Egyptian bloggers were persecuted and jailed in between. ²

China employs a veritable army of internet censors and is the only nation in serious competition with Iran over the all-time record for bloggers jailed. In Cuba, dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez was thrown in the back of a car and beaten by agents of the regime. In Vietnam, blogger Nguyen Hoang Vi was knocked off a motorcycle, had the windows of her car smashed, and was stripped and subjected to a body search by the police, before being arrested. And in Iran, Hoder was only one of many bloggers abused and jailed during a hardening of the regime in recent years. ³

Life is bad if you’re a blogger in many parts of the world. That can be the simple story of Hoder’s private Calvary. He angered the wrong people in the wrong country, then, inexplicably, he put himself in their hands.

This account is accurate enough but superficial. It asks us to accept as given many things we could well question: for example, that powerful authoritarians are angered by, or fearful of, information. Yet the relationship between power politics and information is, and always has been, opaque. The cause for anger or fear in a person of great material authority confronted with information generally —with information as information—is thus never a given, I maintain, but rather is a mystery in need of analysis and interpretation. This is very much the case when “information” is represented by an insignificant man posting his thoughts on a blog.

Along with countless trivial subjects, Hoder posted his opinions of the Iranian regime, for and against. But he had no standing in Iranian politics, no political standing anywhere. He wasn’t really much of a dissident, in any sense of that word. His one claim to influence was technological: almost accidentally, he had opened a space for public discussion and made it available to ordinary Iranians. And, being an idealist, he had become a sort of traveling salesman on behalf of blogging and self-expression.

A way forward into the mystery, then, would be to hypothesize that for Iran’s rulers, Hoder—blogfather, blogger—stood for something larger and more threatening than himself. In fact, he stood for the loss of monopoly over information, the loss of an absolute control over public communications.

My preferred method of analysis—I have said this before—is to examine a story from every possible perspective. Understandably, Hoder’s story is always presented by news media and human rights activists from the perspective of the youthful victim. But to penetrate to the heart of this particular mystery, to make sense of the terms of the asymmetric struggle between great power and mere information, we must shift our point of view to that of the unattractive mongrels —half gangsters, half ideologues—enthroned at the top of the political pyramid in Iran.

A good place to start is with the formal charges lodged against Hoder. These formed a confused hodge-podge of accusations, including making propaganda against the Islamic Republic and “cooperating with enemy states,” a reference to the visit to Israel. The most revealing charge, however, was “insulting the sanctities” of the Iranian nation. No doubt religion was meant, but the words expressed a more profound and generalized concern by the authorities, and show us the way into their perspective.

Bloggers, and in general all dabblers in digital communication, are often accused of insulting sacred things: presidents, religion, property rights, even the prerogatives of a democratic majority. They speak when there should be silence, and utter what should never be said. They trample on the sanctities, in the judgment of the great hierarchical institutions which for a century and half have controlled, from the top down, authoritatively, the content of every public conversation. The idea is not that some forbidden opinion or other has been spoken. It is the speaking that is taboo. It’s the alien voice of the amateur, of the ordinary person, of the public, that is an abomination to the ears of established authority.

So to arrive at the destination mapped out by our hypothesis, we must set aside the salient characteristics of the men in charge in Tehran. What matters is not that they are thugs, or that they oppress their own countrymen. That simply speaks to the range of actions open to them. The meaningful bit is that they belong to a larger class or category of people, found in every country and in most walks of life, who long ago persuaded themselves that they alone have the authority and legitimacy to speak and act within their own domains. This—not from selfish motives, no, not in the least—for the good of humanity. Their authority rests on the moral order of the world. Any challenge, however insignificant, isn’t just a potential threat to them but a violation of that order, a perversion which must be crushed utterly in the name of all that is good and true.

With regard to Hoder and his 19½-year sentence, what counted was less any political dissidence on his part than the perception by the men in authority in Iran that the young blogger was a moral monstrosity.

Democratically elected governments have reacted in the same way. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is his country’s most popular politician in generations, having comfortably won several national elections. His influence and that of his party has spread to a soft, but effective, control of mass media. Erdogan speaks and acts within an echo chamber of great authority— legitimately so, by democratic standards.

When protests broke out in Istanbul over government plans to build a shopping mall on the site of a park, then spread throughout Turkey and acquired a definite anti-Erdogan edge, the Turkish news media ignored the events. CNN Turkey, partly owned by Turkish interests, famously showed a documentary about penguins. (The visual joke of protesting penguins spread through the web with astounding rapidity.) The authorities had decreed silence. Anti-government forces—the protesting public—turned to Twitter to exchange information, with a preference for vivid photos showing the size of demonstrations and, more importantly, the violence of the police in repressing them. These images were persuasive. The West’s perception of Turkey as a benign Muslim democracy suffered a sharp jolt.

Erdogan headed a democratically elected government. His presence on Twitter had attracted 2.5 million followers. But when he spoke about the June 2013 protests, it was not as a democrat or a participant in social media. His was the voice of authority, in the grip of moral outrage no different from that experienced by the despots in Tehran: “There is a curse called Twitter, all sorts of lies are there. This thing called social media is a curse on societies.” Turkish tweeters had insulted the sanctities. Dozens were arrested. A few days later, Erdogan’s minister of interior announced that “provocations on social media” were to be targets of criminal investigation. ⁵

This visceral repugnance, amounting almost to nausea, toward the intrusion of the public into the domain of authority, is by no means restricted to government. I noted that people in the news business have converted the economic failure of the daily newspaper into a danger not just to their own livelihoods, but to the fabric of democratic life. When, for example, Nicholas Kristof brooded on the “decline of traditional news media” which pays his salary, he evoked a dismal future of “polarization and intolerance.” ⁶

The classic case of insulting corporate sanctities involved the file-sharing program, Napster. The story of Napster is that of Shawn Fanning, prototype of the many young men, like Hoder, who stumbled on a formula to leverage information technology in ways that threatened the established order. Fanning released the first version of Napster in June 1999. He was 18, an unknown teenager without money or business connections, yet the shock of that beta release would send the profits of a mighty industry on a downward spiral, from which it would never recover.

Napster invited Fanning’s fellow teenagers to exchange song files without first stopping at the cash register to pay the recording companies.

The noise of condemnation by defenders of the music and allied industries was Erdogan-worthy. In a Friend of the Court statement for the 2001 lawsuit against Napster, Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, portrayed the corporate interests he represented as “the backbone of America’s creative community” and the Napster business model as “theft.” “If the courts allow Napster and services like it to continue to facilitate massive copyright infringement,” he added pointedly, “there is a grave risk that the public will begin to perceive and believe that they have a right to obtain copyrighted materials for free.”

The best summation was delivered by Hilary Rosen, head of the Recording Industry Association of America: “What Napster is doing . . . is legally and morally wrong.” The immoral act in question, let’s recall, consisted of teenagers exchanging music files. ⁷

Few incidents better illustrate the pervasiveness of authority as a belief system which anoints the chosen few, or the implacable fury of the anointed against a trespassing public. If Jack Valenti had had the power to convict Shawn Fanning to 19½ years in a Federal penitentiary, I’m fairly certain he would have done so.

A BURNING MAN ON FACEBOOK LIGHTS THE WAY FOR POLITICALCHANGE IN TUNISIA

You could object that this has been a tragic tale, signifying nothing. Even if Hoder threatened the Iranian authorities on the plane of morality, little was changed down here on planet Earth. The Islamic Republic rolled on, dictatorial as always, still ruled by unpleasant men. Hoder agonized in Evin prison for four years until he was pardoned in November 2014 by Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. His 19½-year sentence remains the longest ever pronounced against a blogger in Iran.

The gap between online freedom and political change was never crossed— possibly, never can be crossed, because of the fundamental mismatch between virtuality and reality.

These objections loop back to the mysterious relationship between political power and information. The word used for power is “hard,” while information is supposed to be “soft”—so it all seems like a game of Rock–Paper–Scissors, with scissors eternally cutting paper and no other structural outcome possible. Brute force beats smart talk, forever. Such a null effect interpretation of the Fifth Wave has been proposed by certain scholars, and those of us who observed digital activists being abused and imprisoned over the years could only wonder whether the contrarians were right.

I’ll return to the power–information equation in a little more depth soon enough, when I relate the story of Homo informaticus. Here and now, I want to bring up, for your consideration, real events, hard events, which were variously—and, yes, mysteriously—entangled in webs of information.

The first is the least persuasive, but it concerns Hoder’s country, Iran, and so deserves mention. The huge protests which erupted in Tehran and elsewhere in that country following the contested presidential elections of June 2009 soon bloomed into the anti-regime Green Movement, and received instant media acclaim as a “Twitter Revolution.” In a rare moment of techno-euphoria, the starched-collar worthies of the State Department intervened with Twitter to postpone a planned shutdown, ostensibly so the revolutionary tweets could continue.

The best information available, however, suggested that relatively few Twitter users could be found inside Iran—the immense spike in traffic during the protests was generated by émigrés and others outside the country. The Green Movement was almost certainly not a Twitter revolution or reliant on social media, although it was certainly a digitally-assisted revolt: protesters used cell phone texts and videos to powerful effect.

But the main lesson here was the violent repression of the Green Movement by regime militia. Scissors cut paper. While it was really impossible to say, as I did with Hoder’s incarceration, that nothing had changed, the political facts on the ground in Iran remained fundamentally the same: for the next four years, Ahmadinejad and his faction ruled.

Matters turned out differently in Tunisia with the uprising of December 2010– January 2011. Less than three weeks after the first anti-regime protests, the country’s president of very long standing, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, fled to Saudi Arabia. The question, for us, is the degree to which the Fifth Wave of information was implicated in this outcome.

The catalyst for the Tunisian uprising came in the form of a truly insignificant man: Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, who set himself on fire in despair over humiliations he had endured at the hands of regime officials, and later died of his burns. You will note that I wrote “catalyst” rather than “cause”: even the simplest human events constitute complex systems ruled by nonlinearities. Within such systems, teasing out a single episode and proclaiming it the prime mover makes as much sense as to pick a grain of sand and calling it “the beach.”