It’s an irony of protest movements in Iran’s modern history that technology is both a medium for protesters to communicate and coordinate their resistance and a mainstay of dictators’ technocratic counter-response. Even before the advent of the Islamic Republic, it was through cassette tapes that future Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, while he was in exile in Iraq and France, sowed the seeds of the revolution that brought him to power in 1979. Thirty years later, the Islamic regime found themselves on the receiving end of a technology-driven movement, faced with what became known as the world’s fi rst ‘Twitter revolution’ in the wake of the disputed election that delivered religious hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term as president, and culminated in the protests that became known as the Green movement.
But in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, whose one-year anniversary is in September, technology has played a much more instrumental role by rendering a figurehead redundant. While the Green movement gathered around reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi – whom protesters argued had been robbed of the presidency – Woman, Life, Freedom had no organised leadership, meaning that, or callouts, from Twitter, Instagram and Telegram users, making it harder for security forces to fi nd the bulk of protesters, or to work out how to divide forces between numerous protests happening concurrently.
