Good luck! i hope you will soon be able to call your congressman
https://archive.ph/2026.01.22-082913/https://www.aljazeera.c...
Another emerging country to watch out for is India. Sliding democracy by suppressing any form for free speech in main stream media and overwhelming propaganda on social media that drowns genuine critics is very chilling.
Hearing about this and calls about imminent genocide from the last 10 years. India never had free speech. There is plenty of propaganda on the other side too. YouTube is full of anti-govt. propagandists.
https://www.norwich.edu/topic/all-blog-posts/facade-democrac...
Though President Ebrahim Raisi’s sudden death in May 2024 prompted a new electoral cycle with six vetted candidates, all were affiliated with the regime and loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, ensuring little real policy divergence. The Guardian Council filtered out all but hardline male clerics and a nominal reformist, creating the illusion of choice while reinforcing conservative dominance. Moreover, the presidency in Iran holds limited authority — ultimate power resides with Khamenei, who, since 1989, has steadily centralized control in his hands, rendering both elected institutions and their leaders largely symbolic. In short, the article contends that no matter who wins, Iran’s domestic and foreign agendas — especially its nuclear program and regional interventions — will remain unchanged, as they are guided by the Supreme Leader's ideology.
This is why they tried to foment a movement to install a king currently living a playboy lifestyle in America with Israeli money.
Ultimately it failed because it stopped being able to coordinate and the carefully built agitator networks who exposed themselves are now getting rolled up.
America doesnt have a monopoly on messing with the electorate in this way as we discovered during jan 6th, the manufacture of antivax movement and (most humiliatingly) the arrest of the the presidential front runner in Romania because of a couple of tiktok adverts.
If, in the liberal democratic west, we dont want our own internet to get locked down china/russia style and our elections to get canceled, as people living in internet glass houses maaaaaybe we shouldnt be throwing quite so many stones.
There was even some reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989, and from Baghdad in 1991.
News media has ceased to be a meaningful investigative endeavor.
These days, I think the business model is selling influence rather than selling subscriptions and generic ads.
As of late, we’ve seen a few measures like the restoration of transit from Rostelecom and the return of routes originated by IPM, as the country appears to be moving towards a partial restoration. At the time of this writing, the plan appears to be to operate the Iranian internet as a whitelisted network indefinitely.
I’d call that digital apartheid.
This is simply turning down methods of communications to reduce protestors ability to coordinate and enable mass killings
I still stand by the term. Apartheid literally means "apartness". Even though the segregation in this case is not on a racial basis they still classify their population into two major blocks. Some have full rights, others have none.
https://eh4s.eu/publication/sino-russo-iranian-tech-cooperat...
>> Like in Europe then. :o)
"It's to protect the children"
Picture of Tehran (hybrid warfare)
https://archive.ph/2026.01.21-041206/https://www.aljazeera.c...
Parent is what we call a cyber soldier in Iran. They probably were on the streets in the past weeks shooting at protesters.
Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1] and telco infra [6][7] built out over the past decade with limited outside involvement and a severe sanctions regime, and have even started exporting Iranian IT services to Uganda [2], Kenya [3], South Africa [4], Venezuela [5], Russia [9], and China [9]
My understanding is that during the current 5 year plan in Iran, they are trying to fully transition the Iranian internet to the NIN, as all ".ir" domains are supposed to be hosted on the NIN.
If someone wants to find a techno-authoritarian state I'd say Iran is probably closer to that vision than most other countries, as a large portion of their leadership are Western-educated (Stanford, MIT, UPMC/Paris VI, Supélec, UNSW, etc) Computer Engineers and Computer Scientists by training (eg. Iran's VP did his PhD under Thomas Cover at Stanford [8] and Rouhani's Chief of Staff studied EE@SJSU). Even Iran's NSC and former IRGC head (who's daughter is a surgeon at Emory - so much for marg bar amreeka) was a CS major turned Kantian philosophy PhD.
[0] - https://citizenlab.ca/irans-national-information-network/
[1] - https://www.arvancloud.ir/fa
[2] - https://tvbrics.com/en/news/uganda-and-iran-to-boost-ict-co-...
[3] - https://mail.techreviewafrica.com/public/news/1361/kenya-and...
[4] - https://www.samenacouncil.org/samena_daily_news?news=64545
[5] - https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/08/06/752585/Iranian-fibe...
[6] - https://zmc.co.ir/
[7] - https://www.rayafiber.com/en/home
[8] - https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1011657
[9] - https://www.kharon.com/brief/iran-sanctions-maximum-pressure...
As for China, they would be more wealthy without the meddling of their government. There's no reason they couldn't be like Taiwan, but bigger. The Chinese people got to where they are in spite of their anchor.
Huge GDP/capita in certain places is because of outsized industries that don't really translate to the average person. Ireland is another example where it's nearly twice as 'rich' as the US by that same metric, but it's just a nuance of it being an international hub for tax avoidance, not because the Irish are doing especially well.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/1jmhhk1/realistic_s...
They kept predicting collapse, too.
Nobody talks much about the ricardian theory of static comparative advantage today. China's rise kind of invalidated it.
America was taken by surprise by its rise because of this. The cordial relations and trade flipped almost overnight to hostility once it was realized that China's economic power now rivaled that of that of the US and was poised to grow even more.
https://incyber.org/en/article/iran-between-isolation-and-te...
>The Iranian Information Technology Organization (ITOI) even set precise rules to evaluate candidates based on three different standards: ISO 27017 (cloud security controls), ISO 27018 (protection of personally identifiable information), and NIST SP 900-145, which concerns the American definition of cloud computing. “They want a comprehensive offer with its three components— IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS https://incyber.org/en/article/iran-between-isolation-and-te...
China could have been like Japan per capita. Protectionism puts a big cap on economic growth potential.
"current dollar valuations are more appropriate. Nominal GDP measured in these units are plotted in Figure 2." https://econbrowser.com/archives/2009/06/how_important_i_2#:...
(What do those bumps correspond to?)
What’s the excuse for not having the same GDP per capita 80 years later?
The curve became exponential way too late. And only after they (partially) opened up.
Assuming Iran didn't follow the path that it did, Iran would have also ended up becoming a tech hub like Israel became today.
But this recognition should not be used to glaze a regime that has officially admitted to killing at least 5,000 protestors [0] in just 2 weeks and in reality killed significantly more people than that.
Being adept at understanding the applications of technology doesn't make one a humanist.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/iranian-offic...
That expertise wasn’t just gonna disappear in a couple of decades.
And yes, the Iranian regime is brutal and terrible. This was one time the opposition was strong enough that they may have had a chance and yet our fellow in chief decided to launch incendiary words, which only allowed the regime to paint the opposition as western funded, while not providing any actual support (there’s a reason Israel, which is at least led by competent leadership, kept quiet about the protests in Iran because they understand how their words of support would undermine them).
Iran is not Syria, there's a lot of wily people in the leadership and they won't be rolled over so easily
So actually.. getting the nukes was the right play for them because eventually they would get sold out by China or Russia. Having nukes gets you to shake hands and send love letters to Trump. Frankly Trump sees Europeans as total cucks and has more respect for Kim Jong-un
If Iran actually had nukes, the Israeli lead bullying would immediately halt.
I should probably put an outside bet on the next country to get the Bomb being Poland, maybe by 2050. They've only just started building a civilian reactor, but weapons would make strategic sense for them.
Not sure if Trump understands that he is playing quite a dangerous game in terms of nuclear proliferation because if the US deterrent goes away, the small countries will start thinking about it.
https://citizenlab.ca/research/2025-10-ai-enabled-io-aimed-a...
This is already repeated by the Google Search AI summary, which is unfortunate since your reference (from 2012) doesn't seem to back it up.
And even when the blackout was not present, my friend had to used some complex V2Ray server (in Iran) to another server (in Germany) to connect and it was shared by other people, so if he cannot connect probably 99% of other people in his area cannot also connect outside.
Right. Because MI-6, Mossad, and the CIA isn't worth mentioning here. whistles kicks some pebbles on the ground furtively looks around
The west complains about lgbtx[..] executions but did not care a bit about the million dead, or how many there were, in the Iran-Iraq war fomented by the west, neither they care about what the majority of pepple of Iran wants (I very much doubt they want the return of Pehlewi family).
The west has more and more blood on its hands. Ukraine war (would never happen if the west would not use their nationalists for the west's aggression against the Russian people), Iran, and so many others.
Do you understand how much you are hated everywhere?
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/19/in-iran-the-us-...
It is irrelevant with regards to conversations about the Iranian NIN and is essentially a form of whataboutism.