The Lair

It seems like a made-for-a-VC-presentation fairytale – an oppressed people rise up, converge online and overthrow the comedic villain that everyone loves to hate. It could even be the next “You Got Mail” (You Can Haz Tweets?). On the face of it, I should be all over this – power to the people, information should be free, and hey, it’s Iran. My (completely irrelevant and probably unedified) view from several thousand miles away is that there could be worse things that a change of regime. And that this view is probably diametrically opposed to my country’s foreign policy causes me much amusement.

But somewhere, Iran’s Twitter Revolution went a little bit awry.

By no means the first, but (as usual) one of the most succinct descriptions came from the Economist.

Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do

A quick anecdote – count the number of Iranians on the #iranelection hashtag page. Come back when you reach 10. Take provisions, you may be gone a while.

But there was more to come. The next big thing was the Sea of Green where everyone was supposed to give their Twitter avatar a sickly (or hulk-like) cast of green. And here, Twitter to the rescue.

Slowly buy (sic) surely, green-shaded Twitter icons of bored American housewives will destroy the grand ayatollah’s will to go on

And there is even an unsurprising followup.

My little tweet about how sad it is that in 2009, activism = turning your Twitter icon green, got me in a little bit of hot water last night

Because I know exactly how many things have been solved by hand wringing, blog posts ad nauseum, tweets and even candlelight vigils and demonstrations at busy roundabouts. Answer: a bit less than the people doing them might think.

ETA: Saw this post a couple of days ago. I love the picture of the failwhale.
ETA-2: The latest thing appears to be changing the timezone/location of your Twitter profile to match Tehran. Because allegedly, security forces are using these pieces of information to crack down on Iranian sources. Clearly, this is far easier than Iranians (who may genuinely be at risk) changing their information to something like GMT/London in order to blend in. Anyway, I would be shocked if Twitter and Facebook were still accessible via normal means from within Iran.

For pretty much as far back as I can remember; whenever something wasn’t going too well with the country – someone would always pipe up and say “but look, there is a war on. We can’t be expected to fight an insurgency and do things that make economic sense at the same time”. And this was completely true. This type of war doesn’t make economic sense anyway (OTOH, if we invaded the Maldives and got into a war there, now that may have made some sort of economic sense).

But so it goes.

In the past 20 odd years (really, the mid/late 80s didn’t count too much – economic liberalization really started trickling down in the early 90s), we were the subject of many casual conversations and head scratching by economic types. Usually, you see, other countries with this sort of debilitating civil war tend to do a lot worse than we did. Oh, which isn’t to say that we had it all good – but the relative isolation of fighting to a section of the island (with only the occasional spillover) meant that economic activity could continue.

But there was always this shrug of the shoulders and “Yeah, we’re fighting a war” as an excuse to not even pretend at bridging the deficit, make populist subsidies and the like. How many times has the war been the single biggest electoral issue? I think the last time it wasn’t a serious issue was in 1990/1991.

Which brings me to my main point – there are no more excuses.

In the space of 12-14 months (yeah, I know the offensive started earlier – but May 2008 is as good a point as any), we have been transformed from a case of economic curiosity into yet another common or garden mismanaged third world economy. One with a massive budget deficit, a crushing amount of public debt and a horrifying trade imbalance. And we still have one of the largest cabinets in the world. I don’t mean the sort that you store ornamental porcelain in either.

And I guess everyone thought the hard part is over.

Blood is the price of victory