The Iranian Internet Freedom Bandwagon

Those three months went by too fast. But now I’m back, to write about a jumble of things that have happened in the meantime, in no particular order, starting, this time, with international internet solidarity with the Iranian “green movement.” Austin Heap started Haystack, an anti-censorship program. A few months back Heap was seen on stages rallying for Iran and speaking at events. TOR has had a spike in users (approx 3000) from Iran starting after the elections. Pirate Bay also declared their support for online Iranians and their “green” agenda... It has certainly caught on.

Maybe I’m totally off, but it all reminded me a bit of Fred Turner’s description of the ideals that the Internet was set up with in its early days in his book Counterculture to Cyberculture. These utopian notions from the 60s and 70s saw the Internet as a harbinger of “virtual communities” and global connectedness that was going to democratize the world. But according to Turner, this ideal has since morphed into an ideology of deregulating the newly-networked marketplace, empowering a technologically enabled elite, and encouraging the building of new businesses.

It's not the initiatives that people are taking to technologically empower Iranians that remind me of these early cyber-cultural ideas, but the reception they've been getting in the mainstream media and general public. Listening to the celebratory and somewhat self-congratulatory tone of the speakers at the Internet's "40th birthday" event last week at UCLA, these ideas still seemed very much in full force. Apparently not much has changed in 40 years in that respect.

But I don’t know if this sounds like what Heap is doing today with Iran. He started basic with just himself and Daniel Colascione and has now set up a non-profit. It seems things are much less shady this way than when the US State Department funds your project like with TOR, or has influence over your maintenance hours like with Twitter. Shady is definitely the world that comes to mind when considering the way McCain (and others) also jumped on the Iranian Internet freedom bandwagon with the legislation he announced would ensure Internet access to social networking sites in Iran. Is it just me or has the line between those who work towards freedoms for Iranians and those who want war with Iran become very fine?