Digital Blackout: Behind the Curtains
Context note:
Iran has been experiencing a nationwide internet blackout. This post was written when international internet access was completely shut off.
This feels unreal. It has almost been a week since everything went offline, and I still find myself opening my browser three or four times a day, typing something—only to remember that there is no Google.
This is the extent of our misery:
- No international internet
- No Google services
- A lot of my files are trapped in Google Drive
- No email — so I can’t continue my internship applications or remote projects
- No Google Maps, no Colab, no Kaggle
- No location services
- Even internal social media platforms are shut down
- No text messages, and on some parts of the day, no phone calls
- No news channels or news sites
- No YouTube
- No Instagram
- No papers
- No books
- No ChatGPT
The list goes on and on.
Dear reader, this is sad.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This is horrifying.
As a college student, my life was built on papers, courses, YouTube, and constant searching. I was planning to apply for a master’s program overseas. Now everything feels like it’s falling apart. The building blocks of my future are slipping out of my hands, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
The thought that this situation might last for a long time terrifies me. The longer this disconnection continues, the harder it is to believe that things will go back to normal. I feel sad, frightened, angry, shocked—and mostly, I feel disbelief. I never imagined this could happen.
Even writing about it makes me more upset.
The Darkness
There’s this darkness, I would try to explain it, but I don’t think there are words for it. There’s a point—somewhere after hate and violence—where everything stops making sense. Moral values lose their meaning. Lives become numbers.
Past that point, nothing gets inside you anymore. And for good reason. No one can fully understand this level of violence and hate. You would go mad if you tried.
The Great Crime: Hope
Maybe the greatest crime, in times like these, is hope. When a tragedy at this scale happens, being OK becomes sinful. It takes a lot to get up and keep going when your whole world is down.
It’s a daring and strange thing, hope. And yet, you can only see the world’s wide horizons with eyes that still have it.
I hope for freedom, safety, and dignity for all people.