The rich, diverse, free web that I loved so much, for the years I spent in an Iranian prison, just died. Why no one will stop it?

Seven months ago, sitting at a table in the kitchen in my old apartment located in a lively area of ​​Tehran, I repeated what I had already done thousands of times. Opening the laptop, I posted another entry on my blog. This was the first entry in the last six years - my heart was breaking.

A few weeks earlier, I was unexpectedly amnestied, and released from Evin prison, in northern Tehran. I thought that I would spend most of my life here: in November 2008, I was sentenced to almost 20 years in prison, for the most part, for writing to my blog.

But the amnesty came at a time when it was not expected. I was smoking a cigarette in the kitchen with one of my cellmates, and returning to the room joined a dozen other guys. We drank a mug of tea when the announcer’s voice flooded the whole floor: “ Fill the rooms and corridors with all the prisoners .” In a calm voice, he continued: " Dear, comrades, prisoners, the bird of luck once again sat on the shoulder of one of your cellmates. Mr. Hossein Derakshan, from now on you are free. "
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It was the first evening when I came out of those doors, as a free man. Everything was for the first time for me: the chill from the autumn breeze, the noise from the neighboring bridge, the smell, the colorful city in which I lived most of my life - everything is new.

As I noted, Tehran, which I am used to, has changed a lot. The influx of new shamelessly luxurious mansions replaced the charming little houses, so familiar to me. New roads, highways, heaps of SUVs. Huge billboards, with Swiss watches and Korean TVs, with flat screen. Women with multicolored scarves and robes, men with dyed hair and beards, and hundreds of charming cafes with Western music and female staff. Changes have affected people; changes, noticing that, all ideas of normal life are crumbling.

Two weeks later, I started writing again. Some friends agreed to give me a blog as part of their magazine. I called it Ketabkhan - which is translated from the Persian " reader ".

Six years is a big prison sentence, but it's a whole era in the web world. Publication in the network itself has not changed, but the reading, or rather, the format of the presentation of the publication - has changed dramatically. I was told how important the social networks became while I was away, therefore, to draw attention to my notes, today we should use them.

So, I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. It turns out that Facebook doesn’t care much about this format. The thing was that my post looked like a boring newspaper advertisement. There is no description, no images - nothing. Such a post scored three likes, as many as three!

It became clear that everything had changed here, I was not ready to play on this field - everything that I had once achieved in this field was simply burned. I was devastated.



In 2008, when I was arrested, blogs were web gold, and bloggers were comparable to rock stars. At that time, despite the authorities blocking access to my resource, domestically, I had 20,000 attendance every day. Everyone whose resources I mentioned in publications was threatened with a sharp increase in traffic; I could calmly exalt or embarrass someone if I wanted.


People read my articles carefully, leaving a lot of valuable comments, and even those who radically disagreed with me still remained my readers. Other blogs posted links to my resource to discuss my statements. I felt like a king.

The iPhone existed for just over a year, but most smartphones were used to make a phone call, send an SMS, process mail, or just browse the web. There were no applications to which we have become accustomed now, just as there wasn’t Instagram, 132, Viber, or WhatsApp.

Instead, there was a network, and there were blogs in it: the best place to look for alternative thoughts, news, or analytics. Blogs were my life.

It all started 9/11 . I was in Toronto; my father just flew in from Tehran to see you. We had breakfast when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. I was perplexed and confused; the desire to find at least some explanation led me to blogs. After I flipped through some of them, I thought that I also needed to start a blog, and moreover, call on all Iranians to also acquire such a resource. So, using Notepad on Windows, I started experimenting. Soon, I finished, and posted on hoder.com , using the Blogger publishing platform, not yet owned by Google.

Already in November 2001, I published a guide on how to start blogging step by step. That was something! Later this article was called a blog revolution . Soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians brought our homeland into the top five countries by the number of blogs, and I was proud to have contributed to this unprecedented democratization of journalism.

In those days, my resource headed the list of all blogs in Persian , for a while. I was the first person that all new bloggers in Iran wanted to contact, thus securing a place on this list. They called me “the father of blogs ” in my twenties — it was a stupid pseudonym, but hinted at how much I cared about blogs.

Every morning, from my small apartment in downtown Toronto, I opened my computer and promoted new blogs, helping them gain popularity and audience. There were a great many of them, ranging from exiled authors and journalists, women's diaries, technology experts, to local journalists, politicians, clergymen and war veterans — I pulled in more and more people. I also invited strongly religious people, as well as men and women from the pro-Islamic republic who lived in Iran to join, and start introducing blogs.

The breadth available in those days struck us all. This was partly due to the fact that I so seriously promoted the introduction of blogs. Having left Iran at the end of 2000, I left for the West to gain experience, but now I was frightened by the fact that I was missing out on all the rapidly developing trends at home. And just reading Iranian blogs in Toronto, I got closer, and could listen to the conversations of a talkative driver and occasional passengers in a public taxi.



There is a story in the Quran that I thought about a lot during the first eight months of imprisonment. It tells about several persecuted admirers of the One God (Sura Al-Kahf), who found shelter in a cave. Being inside, they, together with the dog, fall into a deep sleep. When they woke up, they didn’t even imagine that they had actually slumbered for “three hundred and nine” years. One of the versions of the story says how one of them leaves the cave to buy food (I can only imagine what kind of hunger they had overcome after 300 years). But it turns out that his money is something of a museum piece. It is then that he understands how long their sleep lasted.

Six years ago, the hyperlink was my currency. Based on the hypertext idea, the hyperlink introduced diversity and decentralization, which the real world lacked so much. The hyperlink seemed open, interconnected by the spirit of the world wide web, its treasure, discovered by Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to decentralize your content; all links, lines and hierarchies - all this could be replaced by something distributed, a system of nodes and networks.

Blogs gave the necessary form to this spirit of decentralization: they were a mirror of the soul , and were exceptionally bridges connecting the life lines of people, thereby changing them. Blogs acted as a cafe, where people could exchange any ideas; absolutely any topic could get into account. It was Tehran taxis with a capital letter.

Coming out of prison, I realized how much my currency has depreciated.

Now, almost all social networks lead links in publications to a uniform format, merging them with images, or fragments of text, instead of providing an opportunity to paint texts more colorfully, with their help. You place a single link in the article, and that is subjected to a supposedly democratic processing of taste; adding multiple links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. And hyperlinks are presented to the reader as isolated objects deprived of all their capabilities.



At the same time, social networks, as a rule, process simple text or an image (objects directly inserted into a publication), with a much greater preference than content located on external network resources. A friend of mine, a photographer, explained to me how he posts images directly to Facebook to get more likes (by inserting a direct link that automatically attaches the image to a publication ).

Thus, his photos will appear in other people's news feeds. On the other hand, if he places a link to the same photo outside of Facebook, for example, in an article from his old blog, the image will become less noticeable for the social network itself, with the link to the article indicated, and as a result, it will not gain enough likes. . Flywheel spins!

Some social networks, like Twitter, handle hyperlinks a bit better. Other, less secure social services, in this case, behave simply paranoid. Instagram owned by Facebook doesn't even allow you to add them. You can set any url with your photos, but it’s not going anywhere. A lot of people start the morning with these dead-end social services, and on the same journey, the embedded hyperlinks end. Many do not even realize that they use the Internet infrastructure when they like photos on Instagramm, or leave a comment on a friend’s video. For them, this is just an application!

But hyperlinks are not only the skeleton of the network. These are his eyes , the path to the soul . A web page becomes faded, without using hyperlinks, it is impossible to see or see another web page, which has serious consequences for the dynamics of the Internet.

More or less, all theorists thought about the connection between their service and external web pages, but this was not done in the best way: the loaders cut the contents, and return an impotent object, devoid of any interactivity. But on the web, web pages look different: with a wider range of options. When, say, a powerful website, such as Google or Facebook, embeds another web page, or a link to it, into publications, it doesn’t just connect it — it breathes life into it. Figuratively speaking, loaders, unable to give interactivity to plug-in pages, simply shut off oxygen to it. No matter how many links you put on the page, until the reader opens it, it will remain half dead for him; and, therefore, he will not enjoy the energy that the external page carries in him.

On the other hand, the most prominent web pages are those that are in the attention of the public. Like celebrities who attract the attention of millions of people, so web pages can enchant and capture you using hyperlinks.

But apps like Instagram just don't see them. Only links inside have close attention, reluctantly transferring their authority to external resources. As a result, web pages outside of social networks simply die.



Even before I went to jail, all the power of hyperlinks was also held back. The greatest enemy for them was philosophy , filled with two bloated and slightly overestimated values ​​of our time, namely, novelty and popularity , reflected by the domination of young people in the real world. This philosophy is called tape.

The tape is now dominant, and is the only source of information on the web for many people. Few of the readers directly refer to the source, instead, most thoughtlessly absorb the flow of information selected for them by search algorithms.



The tape does not require you to open multiple sites. You also do not need an infinite number of tabs. And you don't even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook, on your smartphone, and voila - you are already rushing in the stream. The mountain itself has come to you. Following from the fact that once you or your friends have read and viewed, the algorithms themselves will select the recommended information. It's great, you don't even need to spend time looking for interesting things on the Internet.

But what if some information did not get into the tape? What now, we cease to be "in the subject"?

In most applications, we give our support in the form of likes, pluses, asterisks, hearts, which in fact relate only to the cute avatars of celebrities, than to the essence of the publication itself. The brightest part of the article of an ordinary person can never get into the tape, while the next nonsense celebrity immediately enlists the support of the network.

But that's not all; under the hood, algorithms equate novelty and popularity with the usefulness of publications; they also tend to show us more of those sources whose records we once liked. Algorithms carefully monitor our behavior and delicately finish building our tape with publications, images or video recordings, which, in their opinion, we want to see.



Popularity as such is not a worldwide evil. In a market economy, low-end products are simply doomed to failure. No one will be upset when an inconspicuous cafe, with bad lattes and unconfigured servers closes. Opinions are the cheapest commodity, not equaling material goods or services. But they do not disappear, whether unpopular or unacceptable. In fact, history has proven that a lot of big ideas ( not only good ones ), being very unpopular for a long time, only raised their marginal status. A minority of views take root when they cannot be expressed and accepted.

Today, digital media tapes dominate the form of information organization. This is implemented in every social network and mobile app. When I was free, everywhere, on whatever resource I was, I was haunted by the tape. I think it will not last long before we see news sites that use the same principles in organizing their content. The “special merits” of the tapes are not only that they pull some of the content out of context, but their use can be interpreted as a cruel betrayal of the whole variety, which was originally laid out for the Internet.



I can say without a doubt that the diversity of topics and opinions on the web has already shredded, compared to the past. New, unlike, interesting ideas are simply suppressed by social networks, because their rating is higher, and strategies are more popular and more familiar. ( It’s not surprising why Apple hires people as editors for its news apps ). But the variety is shrinking in another way and for other purposes.

For example, in a format. Yes, it is true, all my posts to Twitter or Facebook really look like a personal blog: they are arranged in chronological order, on a separate page, with a direct link to each of them. But I do not have the authority to take care of how they all look - I can not quite adjust them. My page should adhere to the uniform format invented by designers of social networks.

The centralization of information also worries me; this makes it easy to hide everything at once. After my arrest, the hosting service closed my account due to the fact that I could not pay bills monthly. But at least, I have all the backups of publications in the database located on the server. ( Most of the blog platforms allowed you to transfer publications and archives to your own space, but now most platforms do not allow this process ). Even if I did not configure this process, the Internet could store a copy of the archive. But what if my account on Facebook or Twitter is blocked for some reason? These services alone will not die in the near future, and what if the day comes when many US services will simply block access to all people living in Iran due to the current sanctions regime. If this happened, I would have the opportunity to download all the publications to another service, or suppose the backup could be imported to another platform. And what about my unique social media url? Can I regain it if someone already possessed it? Domain names are switched manually too, but the management process is simpler and more transparent - especially because there is a financial connection between you and the seller, who is less inclined to sudden and unspoken decisions.



And this is not the worst thing that can arise from the centralization of information during the period of social networks; all their use makes us less vulnerable to government and corporations.

Observation is superimposed on civilized segments of society, which only worsens the situation. The only way you can not get into the field of the “all-seeing eye” is to go to the cave and doze off for 300 years .

Being supervised by any network, we all end up getting used to it, sadly, of course, that we cannot influence the state in which we live. , , Facebook Twitter, , , , , , - .

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