Iran 2.0: Thirty Years of Social Media Revoutionaries

Before the Social Media Revolution, before Twitter, before blogging, before even the internet itself there was the Iranian Revolution.

 In 1979  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini  was able to mobilize his supporters and fire the Islamic shot heard round the world with the subversive, emergent media of the day--- cassette tapes and the telephone. The Shah may have had complete control over mainstream media, but nobody was in charge of all the cassette machines that copied Khomeini's  message of Islamic fundamentalism  from France to Iran  and ultimately into mosques across the country. So there is some irony that the revolutionaries of that era who now run the place are cast as today's  reactionaries,  on the receiving end of uncontrollable social media which relentlessly and inevitably are spreading the word, despite the state's  desperate effort  write  history in its image and control the message. Honestly, Stalin would have been just as annoyed at Twitter and would have dispatched the KGB to shoot up the internet.

Back in the day the United States was on the wrong side of history as we watched the Shah's power crumble and then endured revolutionaries occupying our embassy and holding Americans  hostage. Today things are flipped as the Iranians are outraged at a regime backed by Fundamentalists Gone Wild.  Or to quote the 1968  Chicago Yippies who were the media influence for the 1979 Iranian radicals,  "the whole world is watching" as the credibility of the Iranian state and its elections  are challenged. Which raises a tempting question: are the forces that led to Islamic fundamentalism in the first place now about to self-organize once again and begin to lead to its undoing? After all, the first great manifestation of the Fundamentalist Islamic state was Iran 30 years ago. Al Queda and the Taliban simply open-sourced the Khomeini idea and extended it.   The greatest challenge to fundamentalist  Islam ever seen is being witnessed  right now, in Iran as its people question the legitimacy of their  ruling regime.

Well, almost. After 9/11 the USA mounted he greatest, most intense challenge to Islamic fundimentlaism ever. But that took untold billions of dollars, thousands of lives and ultimately ended up picking a fight with a non-fundamentalist regime that wasn't responsible  for 9/11 in the first place. Which  hurt us at home, hurt us in the eyes of many people of the Middle East, and will take us years to clean up. One could argue that what  has been accomplished in the name  of self determination , freedom and the power of democracy  in the last 100 hours by the thoroughly  pissed-off  and energized people of Iran is more leveraged, sustainable  and likely to spread virally that the efforts of the  USA over the past 100 months in its endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq by force. This is not to diminish the  valiant effort of our armed forces or our diplomatic successes.  But it does point out that the top down, were gonna impose it approach we took is incredibly  expensive  and has a lot of annoying side effects that you don't have to worry about in bottoms-up people led movement. Many a CEO might note that top down imposed change in a corporation is a lot tougher to make stick effectively  than engendering a bottoms-up movement among employees. This seems to be part of the fundamental grammar of the distribution media of our day.

President Ahmadinejad would like the world to believe that the forces opposing him are so much American  and western hooligan meddling (Has any state that blamed hooliganism for its woes ever been anything other than a bad joke?)  Its true that we Americans are  contributing  to the Iranian proto-revolution, but not in the state led manner that Ahmadinejad imagines.  His problems stem from the modern version of the cassette tape. A set of thoroughly western,  nee  American, nee practically Northern Californian innovations: Twitter, the blogosphere and the Internet. There is a certain symmetry that the very nation that ushered in the Islamic revolution a generation ago with bits of subversive  western technology  may be returning to their playbook to remake themselves today. So, viva la revolution! Viva open media! And viva the first mass self-determination movement made possible by APIs! ( Okay,  Obama used a lot of these techniques last year. But he had the advantage of operating on the home turf of a great  Democracy. So watching all this play out in Iran is particularly stunning. )

Comments

[Matthew Smith]

Great piece. We actually attended the first annual Open Video Conference at NYU while countless messages and videos were pouring out of Iran. If you're interested, here's the footage.

http://www.thoughtcast.org/thoughtcast-shorts/the-promise-of-open-media/

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I just cant stop reading this. Its so cool, so full of information that I just didnt know. Im glad to see that people are actually writing about this issue in such a smart way, showing us all different sides to it. Youre a great blogger. Please keep it up. I cant wait to read whats next.

[MALLERYVSNBCU]

This email is about two NYC artists that were put on trial in a NYC court without their knowledge by the tv network NBC and a NYC judge because former NBC CEO Jeff Zucker and Tim Kring of the American tv show " Heroes" were so desperate for ratings and hit tv shows, that NBC representatives are attending artists film screenings, art exhibits etc... to steal the artist copyrighted intellectual property to create content for NBC like the failed NBC TV Show "Heroes."
( Google ENJAI EELE or "MALLERY VS NBCU" to read more).
The lawsuit " Mallery vs NBCUl" which recently went before The Supreme Court is a great example of this fact.
Fraud? How about NBC employee Tim Kring doing an admission of guilt while the lawsuit "MALLERY VS NBCU" was before a NYC judge for copyright infringement.
Tim Kring did an admission of guilt in the media at:
http://blog.the-eg.com/2007/12/04/tim-kring
Where Tim Kring states: "In Hollywood they say if Hitler wrote a great screenplay they'd send a limo to the airport to pick him up... Great creativity comes from everywhere, I was flubbed (before) and I didn't just want a show on the air, I wanted something big, bold and wanted to prove them wrong. Only problem was I didn't have an idea, so I was just left angry and worried about it... I lied and cheated and schemed and manipulated all the way through the idiocy that is the notes process when you do this, was able to push the production through relatively unscathed and in the form that it would work in.
That's how Heroes got on the air. It's not the most original idea in the world, you build and borrow. Just put these pieces together in the right way, at the right time, and on the right network".

Tim Kring didn't stop there.....
at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/rebel-alliance.html written by David Kushner April 11, 2008 Tim Kring also stated to the media:" We are literally making up the parameters of the intellectual property that will take the networks into the next generation. We're the beta-testing ground. It's a wild west: There are no rules. Just take something and go try it".

Question: Why is Tim Kring " making up the parameter" of something that's already set?

The NYC artist that can paint the future on large canvas which was featured on "Heroes" is a original copyrighted character named "Idai Markus" based on a real life Luba divination artist named Enjai Eele.
Eele and his Twin Amnau Eele were first written about by arts editor Danny Simmons and writer Quashell Curtis in Russell Simmons "One World Magazine" July 2001 and The NY Daily News by Daily Beast and NY Magazine editor Lloyd Grove on August 5, 2004 article titled: "Future Tribeca Stars"?
The "One World" magazine and NY Daily News articles led to "The Twins" as we are known in the NYC art world to being invited to screen our 15 minute short film "The Letter" starring Robert Deniro , our Luba divination art on September 11,2001, our Luba divination art on the storms Katrina and Rita and our script/novel titled "The Twins: Journey Of The Soul " on the fictional character "Idai Markus the artist that can paint the future on large canvas before it happens" to the students in the art dept at Hunter College NYC April 2005 which was attended by NBC representatives like Bryan Fuller.
NBC claimed in court that they heard about our Hunter College show on the Associated Press and by September 2006 our Luba divination art, characters, concepts etc... were on the tv show " Heroes" as the number one show in America with a growing worldwide audience of over 45 million viewers.

Idai Markus the drug free NYC African-American artist that could paint the future on large canvas became Isaac Mendez the NYC Latino artist that could paint the future on large canvas , but only after he shot up drugs.
We filed a copyright infringement and defamation lawsuit against NBC in March 2007.
NBC then killed off the" artist that could paint the future with a dope problem" sending the fans into a rage,
Tim Kring became angry and called the show's few fans that were left "saps and Dip-shits for not watching and the rest of this tragic copyright crime is in the plaintiffs Supreme Court Cert in Washington, D.C.

NOTE: Why was the plaintiffs work so valuable to NBC?
Because the plaintiff, Luba Divination Artist Enjai Eele divined, painted and copyrighted before September 11, 2001 a "Luba Memory Board"(36x 48 inches, oil on canvas) titled: "The Atta Page" which depicted two planes crashing into the twin towers in NYC on 9-11 and the message that:
" A man named Atta will attack the twin towers on September 11 because there are 9 letters in the word Manhattan and 11 letters in the name Mohamed Atta and the name ATTA is in the word manh-ATTA-n and whenever the world look at the word manhATTAn, the world will always remember the name ATTA and what ATTA did to the twin towers and manh-ATTA-n on 9-11-01". copyright Eele 2001
Note: The Atta Page is the only painting of it's type worldwide.
The plaintiffs last art exhibition before the NBC lawsuit was at Danny Simmons "Rush Art Gallery" in NYC curated by Danny Simmons and hosted by Derrick Adams.
Note: Eele's painting ( A Luba Memory Board) of a terrorist blowing up a truck in Times Square NYC has been sitting in a NYC court since March 2007 in the lawsuit "MALLERY VS NBCU".
Eele's painting was right, because the terrorist tried to blow up a truck in Times Square NYC in 2010.
The terrorist is now on trial in a NYC court.

Jeff Zucker and Tim Kring took Eele's original copyrighted IP and made billions of dollars with it without Eele's permission.
NBC even used our great-great grandfather's symbol that was used by him to survive the trans-atlantic slave trade that landed him on a plantation in the deep south .
His symbol was used on the tv show "Heroes" and to show NBC executives where to park their cars in the L.A. California NBC parking lot.
Tim Kring had no problem accepting a Golden globe nomination and a NAACP image award for someone else's IP
Extortion, perjury, wire fraud,and many other crimes have been comitted in this lawsuit by NBC and Tim Kring.
We're not afraid of NBC and we are not going to stop until they pay for what they did un-lawfully with our copyrighted IP.
Our human and civil rights have been totally violated in this lawsuit and this lawsuit will prove that NBCU is nothing more than a greedy racist organized crime hate group that traffics in stolen copyrighted IP.

[ray ban]

I just cant stop reading this. Its so cool, so full of information that I just didnt know. Im glad to see that people are actually writing about this issue in such a smart way, showing us all different sides to it. Youre a great blogger. Please keep it up. I cant wait to read whats next.

[http://dx.zoapcon.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2299875&extra=]

Peter Hirshberg's weblog on disruptive culture and technology: Iran 2.0: Thirty Years of Social Media Revoutionaries
http://dx.zoapcon.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2299875&extra= http://dx.zoapcon.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2299875&extra=