The Brutal Reality Of The World’s Longest Internet Blackout

Someone living in Iran right now, what can they not do?

What can they not access that we take for granted here?

Look, in normal times

they can access almost everything, right?

Through VPNs, Instagram, for example,

has been mostly open since 2012, right?

And it's something that a lot of Iranian businesses rely on

as a means to advertise.

Right now with this internet blackout,

almost all of that is shut off.

It's also a country that that relies

and has for at least a decade on Telegram

that's been taken away from them.

You do have a handful of people

who have what they call white sim cards, right?

People who do have access, right?

So anybody that you see posting from Iran right now,

you should be very skeptical about what they're saying

because they are doing it with the approval

or acceptance of the state.

And I can tell you in a year and a half

that I was in prison, I didn't have access to the internet,

and it's incredibly disorienting.

Sort of like isolating, like really isolating.

It's so isolating and it's also,

you don't realize until you don't have it,

how often you rely on it to answer a question in a day.

Yeah.

From things that you need to know

to more mundane pieces of information.

You know, what was the name of the actor in that movie that,

you know who won the World Series in 1987?

Those sorts of things that, you know,

our sort of standard parts of your life,

you're starved of all of that, right?

And imagine that on a mass scale,

I've seen a couple of really good essays

where former political prisoners have written about

the feeling of imprisonment that not having access

to the internet sort of replicates for them.

Yeah. I talk about this

over and over and over again,

hoping that someone in a position of power

in the United States is listening and thinks to themselves,

well maybe there is something that we can do.