Iran internet ban: How your life can be dictated by where you are born

It has been six days since the internet shutdown and ban by the regime in Iran. I will post this whenever the connection becomes stable and available, if it ever does.This article is not a complaint about inconvenience. It is a record of what it feels like to live and work under a system that routinely and continiousely cuts you off from the world and then acts shocked and asks why you are falling behind.

In these times of oppression, I lose my hope for the future more than ever before. It’s not like this is my first rodeo. The regime bans the internet in Iran whenever they get the chance and the slightest reason to do so.

I chose a career that heavily relies on having access to global resources and networks. Back when I started studying computer engineering at my university, I was a naive young man with hopes of a great future ahead. I dreamed of a future where I work hard and get results based off my hard work.

Now years have passed, and I have held up my end of the bargain. I worked hard for the past years and tried to gather as much knowledge as I could, considering my limitations and life situations, of course. Yet the results have been diminishing constantly as time goes on. Our currency loses more of its value on a daily basis. We lose our basic human rights as time goes by, and people who fight for a better future are beaten, imprisoned, or killed in the streets.

Do you know how exhausting and tiring fighting against the geographic location you were born into is? To have to try the next VPN, hoping it will work, just to be able to connect to the globe? Watching the little hope you have for google.com tab to load successfully die? I hope not. Most days I feel hopeless. What can I do at this point? I want to motivate myself every day, yet I feel like a fool when I open a book during these hard times, where grocery prices have quadrupled and people are dying in the streets.

My Brave browser has an in app notification telling me that I am “offline”. No Brave! I am not offline. I am excluded. This “you are offline”, to me, is just another reminded that I am deprived of my basic rights.

Due to personal reasons, I chose to stay in this country when all my friends and colleagues decided to leave and migrate to a better one where they wouldn’t have to worry about their lives. Nowadays, those personal reasons are gone, and I want to try to get away from this place. However, due to the politics our masters have opted for, in most companies Iran’s name on your resume will get you rejected faster than having a criminal record. It is not always about skills. It can also be about percieved risk and fear of all the things that can go wrong when trying to hire an Iranian.

Sometimes I feel like being born here is like being born with a constant COVID, and everyone who is not born here will try to avoid you so they can avoid getting into trouble. Maybe being Iranian is contagious.

If I and most people I know had put all these efforts into most other places in the world, we would at least have a normal life. Having a normal life was what most of us wanted anyways and even if somehow, magically, everything starts getting better from today, I will not get my lost 30-ish years back. Acknowledging that is just realism. It is just plain saddening. I just needed to rant about it in a blog post and leave it for the world to see.

If anyone is reading this and you were born in a country where access, safety, and opportunity are taken for granted, cherish it. Talent is everywhere but opportunity is not.

Hope you are having a good day (or night, based on where you live and when you read this). Thanks for reading.