The Web We Gave Away Without a Fight
Hossein Derakhshan opened his laptop in November 2014 and found an internet that had stopped being his. He’d been in Evin Prison in Tehran for six years—sentenced by the 15th Branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Court to nineteen and a half years and a thirty-thousand-euro fine for the crime of blogging too effectively against the Iranian government. He was pardoned by Ayatollah Khamenei. He was free. And what he found on his screen was something that should have felt like the future and felt, as he wrote, like television.
I keep coming back to that image. A man imprisoned because his words were dangerous enough to lock away. He gets out and finds the words aren’t dangerous anymore—not because the authorities relented, but because the architecture that made dissent possible had quietly collapsed while he was inside. The blog era was over. The stream had eaten it.
Blogs in 2008 were as close as the internet came to genuinely distributed speech. Blogs were cafés where people could meet,
Hossein wrote in The Web We Have to Save, where ideas were shared, where everyone interested in a topic could find each other.
Each blog had its own address, its own room, its own character. You navigated there on purpose. You followed links that someone had placed there as a gesture of trust between writer and reader—earned, not engineered by an algorithm you couldn’t inspect.
Now the feed has replaced all of that. You open the app and you scroll, and a proprietary system you cannot see or interrogate decides what enters your brain. You didn’t ask it to decide. You didn’t agree to the narrowing. It happened incrementally, and at some point it became what most people believe the internet fundamentally is.
Hossein identifies what’s been lost beyond just the diversity of voices: the authorship. On a blog you controlled the space—its appearance, its rhythm, what sat next to what. The post was yours in a way that a status update simply is not. I can’t personalize it, I can’t change its appearance,
he wrote of the social network’s container. The social network tells you how it has to look.
And how long the thought has to be. Character limits didn’t just truncate sentences—they trained a generation to think in truncated sentences. To optimize for the favorite and the retweet, to sand down anything rough or slow or genuinely complicated because rough and slow doesn’t circulate. You become your own censor, not in the political sense but in the worse one: you self-edit toward what gets reshared, and eventually there’s nothing left to edit because you stopped having the thought in the first place.
The cruelest detail: Iran eventually stopped blocking Instagram. In the blog era the government found Hossein dangerous enough to imprison. By 2015 they didn’t bother blocking filtered photos of people’s lunches. What can someone trained to perform their life in curated images actually say? Exactly. Nothing that matters.
When I log into Facebook, my personal television starts. I just begin scrolling: new profile pictures, short opinions on current events, links to articles with brief summaries, self-playing videos. Whatever I do, I stay inside Facebook. And it only shows me what I might like. That’s not the internet I went to prison for. That’s not the future of the internet. That future is television.
I started keeping this journal in a different internet—one where you bookmarked sites and returned to them, where a good post existed for years and people found it through links rather than through a ranking system nobody outside the company understood. That internet isn’t recoverable; the economic incentives all run the other direction now. But I understand exactly what Hossein means. And I think we mostly just watched it happen, scroll by scroll, without doing a thing about it.