In the mid-2000s, celebratory accounts of Persian-language blogging pervaded Western journalism on Iran. Denizens of the Iranian blogosphere, affectionately called Weblogistan (weblog land) attracted commentators in Europe and North America who noticed for the first time that ordinary Iranians were arguing politics, criticizing the state, and transgressing sexual norms. The story these journalists told was one of a defiant citizenry developing a vibrant internet-mediated civil society to challenge the authoritarianism of the Islamic Republic and prepare the ground for a democracy yet-to-come. Before long these accounts expanded to include the Iranian state's attempts to control the Persian blogosphere through intimidation, censorship, and prosecution. The narrative about blogging thus became seamlessly integrated into a larger picture that already dominated mainstream Western journalistic imaginations of Iran, wherein most things can be explained in terms of a fissure between a state stubbornly committed to enforcing its version of Islam and a population that just wants to be free.
As is usually the case, it took scholarship a few years to catch up with the journalistic representations of blogging. Among them, several critical scholarly perspectives questioned the naïve cyber-optimism of the journalists and examined the complex ways in which different kinds of power and hierarchy structured the practices of bloggers. Sima Shakhsari's innovative new book is a welcome addition to this scholarship, and the most uncompromisingly pessimistic analysis of the politics of the Iranian internet to be published to date.
It is important to clarify what Shakhsari's cyber-pessimism is not. They do not claim that blogging was destined to fail as a democratic experiment because the Iranian state was too powerful and too determined to quash challenges to its dominance. Neither is theirs an argument about the inherently nefarious properties of cyber technologies. Instead, Shakhsari argues that the common framing of Weblogistan as a civil space of democratic participation and antistate activism was misguided from the start. To supplant this framing, they highlight the ways in which bloggers’ practices and subjectivities were structured by a complex form of power that they describe, drawing on Foucault's late work, as neoliberal “cybergovernmentality.” This is a transnational ensemble of procedures, institutions, and techniques that deploys diaspora networks and relies on neoliberal economic relations. Its goal is to normalize internet-savvy Iranians into freedom-loving, democracy-practicing subjects who will remake Iran's future. Normalization here is not only a productive process, but also one that is marked by exclusion, especially of those subjectivities that do not fit nationalist framings of gender, race, and sexuality.
In Shakhsari's analysis, the exercise of cybergovernmentality conjures up even darker forces through entanglement with US imperial projects under the Global War on Terror. The production of freedom-loving Iranian subjects in Weblogistan, they argue, cannot be separated from “the politics of rightful killing,” a kind of politics in which Iranians are both valorized as subjects of rights and constantly threatened with death by bombs and sanctions. Here Shakhsari maintains an analytic separation between Weblogistan and the Iranian population, such that Weblogistan is where people can be valorized as “exceptional” citizens through democratic practice, while the population at large is subject to killing in the name of democracy and rights.
Shakhsari notes at the outset that the Iranian diaspora was at the very center of Weblogistan, with some of the most influential bloggers living in North America and Western Europe. These are the figures whose stories feature most prominently in the book, with one character in particular, the author of a blog named Sibil Tala (golden mustache), providing some of the more delightful passages in the book. In the course of their research, Shakhsari read these blogs closely, engaged with the bloggers online, and spent time with them offline in Toronto, Washington DC, Amsterdam, and elsewhere. This methodological complexity is a major strength. Shakhsari does not limit this book to online content analysis as so many studies of the internet do, but situates this content in relation to interlocutors’ offline lives, struggles, ambitions, and anxieties. They are also refreshingly attentive to the transnational infrastructural and economic flows that both made and limited Weblogistan, including such paradoxical examples as Iranian government purchasing of private US filtering technology, and US-sponsored filter-busting proxies that themselves restricted access to content like gay pornography (and, inadvertently, the websites of US “embASSies”).
Shakhsari's book can be read on one level as an attempt to complicate (rather than completely jettison) the more pervasive cyber-enthusiastic accounts of the Persian blogosphere. They show persuasively that Weblogistan was not only a space of democratic participation and anti-state activism, but also of activity by a whole range of bloggers—from government officials to religious activists—who would not fit the fantasy image of a freedom-loving civil sphere revolting against a freedom-hating state. They also make a convincing argument that the internet did not produce a transnational Iranian civil society ex nihilo, but relied on a vibrant scene of public debate and political action (by women, students, and others) that was partly fostered by the state itself, especially under the liberalizing administrations of Presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami (1989–2005). Shakhsari shows that notwithstanding the rhetoric of democracy and free speech, Weblogistan was rife with conflict and exclusion, sometimes expressed through violently racist, sexist, and homophobic discourse. Moreover, US American and European governments, NGOs, and think tanks attempted to co-opt blogging to suit their own geostrategic interests by funding democracy-promotion projects (sometimes merely code for regime change) that hired bloggers.
Throughout the book, Shakhsari is careful to highlight the multiplicity of voices in Weblogistan and the irreducibility of blogging to a single political logic. Even so, in the final analysis they see the Persian blogosphere as irredeemably compromised by the normalizing discourses of nationalism on one side, and the neoliberal cybergovernmentality and “politics of rightful killing” of US empire on the other. Between nationalism and neoliberal empire, it is the latter that dominates the book's argumentative force. This is clearest where Shakhsari argues that Iranian bloggers’ desires for “exceptional citizenship” (as practitioners of democracy) is foreclosed by the imperial powers that render them disposable and, finally, killable.
The analytic emphasis on neoliberal governmentality and US empire is salutary when read as a corrective to the rosy depictions of Weblogistan as a bastion of democratic resistance. But when articulated as an overdetermining logic, the framework crowds out certain alternative lines of inquiry suggested by the ethnography itself. For example, Shakhsari highlights the significance of “practicing democracy” as an ideal among bloggers, and correctly traces the concept to the reform movement that coalesced around President Khatami. But aside from this reference to the pre-Weblogistan reform movement, practicing democracy is treated as a rhetorical device incorporated into technologies of the self that at best functions in the service of nationalist normalization and at worst masks the nefarious workings of American empire. Treated as a rhetorical device, “practicing democracy” has no significance beyond its status as illusion. But as an ethnographic object, it would be worth tracing the ethics of democracy as a quasi-spiritual practice (perhaps even a form of political spirituality concerned with freedom and truth, to draw on Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi's recent reading of Foucault on the Islamic Revolution) that emerged in the course of the reform movement and manifested in everything from campus organizing to journalism and the conduct of protests and sit-ins. As a spiritual technology of self care, practicing democracy underwent important shifts when it was imported to the blogosphere, but to treat its cyber manifestation as a thing overdetermined by the structures of neoliberalism and empire would be to miss the opportunity to explain its social creativity and the reason it resonated with so many Iranians in the first place. Indeed, a more nuanced analysis of practicing democracy would be at home with Shakhsari's approach elsewhere in the book. For example, they describe the complex struggles of Islamic feminists to negotiate a space between a patriarchal state that acts in the name of God and a ruthless global empire that speaks in the name of democracy. Shakhsari writes that “the dismissal of Islamic feminists who challenge the Iranian state wrongly assumes that activism and resistance could be pure, and that the state could be uniform” (p. 91). I am persuaded by this statement but wonder if the same cannot be said of neoliberal cybergovernmentality (does it produce uniform effects?) and political activity in the blogosphere (is impurity grounds for its dismissal?).
Perhaps my resistance to Shakhsari's pessimism comes from a desire to see some light amidst the bleakness that pervades this book. Post-Weblogistan developments on the Iranian internet—Mojahidin-e Khalq troll farms in Albania, Israeli government Twitter propaganda in Persian, the rise of state-sponsored hacking armies, the arrest of Instagram influencers by Iranian police—seem to confirm Shakhsari's emphasis on the overriding logics of nationalism and empire. And yet the decline of Weblogistan has not spelled the end of Iranians’ experiments online, but multiplied them to a bewildering degree. Shakhsari's book has shown some of the ways in which we may understand these experiments in relation to the powers of governmentality and normalization. The richness of their descriptions may also encourage us to look for the myriad ways in which social creativity still manages to thrive.
