The Iranian Revolution (and Others That Needed no Internet)

In recent weeks, concern about the internet’s threat to regime security, posed by unruly citizens, has grown intense enough that switching off the main router has begun to resemble a public-safety measure on par with firing live ammunition into a crowd.

One is tempted to ask whether His Eminence, Imam Hazim al-Raad Khamenei, has reflected on a simple historical inconvenience: revolutions which not require social media, trending hashtags, or explanatory threads clarifying to citizens why they were angry.

The Iranian Revolution

Long before broadband and platforms, Iranians spent nearly fifteen years listening to smuggled cassette tapes, copied and recopied until the plastic warped and the sound dissolved into static. The Shah eventually fell anyway. No one complained about audio quality, and no one paid to skip advertisements.

History’s got a habit of repeating itself and has recycled many of the same ingredients: corruption, repression, a squeezed middle class, students. There are women out there smoking. They are still present, and they remain capable of toppling a turbaned Pahlavi.

The French Revolution

The French Revolution presents an even less technologically demanding case study. It succeeded without electricity, relying instead on a suffocating economic crisis, an inflexible authoritarian system, and a widely shared sense that conditions could not possibly deteriorate further, a sentiment that history has repeatedly shown as reliably wrong.

Louis XVI lost his head. This is not meant as a threat; escape remains an option. But it is worth recalling that the revolutionaries had no social networks at their disposal. What they did have was a religiously sanctioned class system that had long since severed communication with the public, not unlike how the public severed Louis XVI’s head from his neck after re-establishing contact in the Bastille.

The Industrial Revolution

Even the Industrial Revolution, which altered the trajectory of human history, somehow managed without the internet. Had the immense resources of the state—and its connectivity—been invested in genuine industrial and economic development rather than the maintenance of the Revolutionary Guard and perpetual regional meddling, the streets might well be quieter. Besides: such meddling has yet to yield anything more impressive than Bashar al-Assad.