BBC News reported this week that the Treasury Department has eased sanctions against Iran, Cuba, and Sudan with the hope of “[helping] further the use of web services and [supporting] opposition groups.” While I generally disagree with sanctions on principle, and so certainly welcome any removal of them by our gov’t, I can’t help but make a few quick points regarding the general narrative that this move fits into.

Throughout Iran’s post-election “crisis” of last June, our media constructed Twitter, Facebook, and other (Western-based) social networks as the key to the “Green Revolution.” The problem is that the Green Revolution never happened. A couple great posts — one by Josh Kucera and one by Kate Klonick — over at True/Slant hammered this point home at the time, urging a little perspective when the dominant point of view was “TWITTER IS LIBERATING IRAN YAYAYAYAYAY!!!!!” What Kucera noted is that we don’t even know whether the election was stolen, because reports are so conflicted and unverified, and communication technologies actually helped to spread more disinformation than information throughout the events. Most of this disinformation was based on Western wishful thinking and was memed and re-memed by Westerners. Klonick points out, quite astutely, that Mousavi over Ahmadinejad is pretty negligible social change in the first place, so maybe it was foolish to attach all our hopes and dreams to that “opposition.”

But why was the idea of new media ushering in a new age of freedom in Iran so persuasive in the first place? One reason is that it gels with the technological determinism of our dominant worldview. We tend to think that “technology” is “changing” things, though this is essentially a fantasy; reality is a whirlwind of conscious and unconscious action involving a variety of human and non-human agents, and certain agents (especially groups of agents, such as governments and corporations) have more power to act effectively than others. Technology, in and of itself, has no special power to change anything. The second reason is that we wear Orientalist goggles when we look at the Iranians. We tend to conceptualize Eastern people as alternatively either inert (which dovetails nicely with an animistic view of technology) or irrational — in any event, lacking intelligent agency. Thus we imagined these social networks as kind of infusing the Iranians with agency, which they subsequently used to oppose Mahmoud (in other words, to act rationally). It was never, in media discourse, considered a possibility that the Iranians might have consciously, intelligently chosen Ahmadinejad, or that they might be using technology to organize for him as well. (Regardless of whether vote fraud occurred — we must keep in mind that vote fraud doesn’t entail that the result would have been different.) Instead, all we heard about was the destabilizing [read: de-Ahmadinejad-izing] power of technology. What about the power of the highest leaders in the Islamic Republic to control technology for their own aims? What about the power of self-interested Western media and new media outlets, far removed physically and culturally from Iran, to construct the majority of the world’s knowledge of the events? What about the power of agents of foreign governments inside and outside of Iran to incite protests, offline and online, that clearly reflect their policy goals? It seems to me that the picture was (and is) very, very complicated, but that we tend to reduce it to a fantastical causal chain beginning with technology and ending in “positive” social changes. But a lot of people were using technology for a lot of different things, many of them negative.

In short, I applaud the removal of sanctions. I’m glad that more people around the world might now acquire Internet access. But it’s crucial to recognize that technology does not produce social change. It’s a tool, to be sure, but we often think of it as more than that. If we really want to help the little people of the world, we should start by thinking of them as agentive, and by taking account of what other agents and groups of agents are currently determining their socio-political situations for them. Most importantly, we should commit to handing over the tool without intervening in its use.

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