# Hossein Derakhshan Hossein Derakhshan (born 1975, Tehran) is an Iranian-Canadian blogger, journalist, and media theorist known as "the Blogfather" of [[Iran]]. In 2001 he published a simple guide in Farsi explaining how to start a blog — and in doing so helped launch the Iranian blogosphere, which became one of the largest and most vibrant in the world: a digital public sphere for political dissent, cultural expression, and circumvention of state media censorship in an authoritarian society. ## The Iranian blogosphere By the mid-2000s, Farsi was one of the top ten languages of the blogosphere. Iranian blogs became a critical infrastructure for voices that had no access to state-controlled broadcast media: reformists, feminists, students, artists, dissidents, the secular middle class. The blogosphere was decentralized, hyperlinked, and ungovernable in ways that prefigured — and then contrasted sharply with — the corporate social media platforms that would replace it. ## Imprisonment Derakhshan returned to Iran in 2008. He was arrested and sentenced to 19.5 years in prison on charges including "cooperating with hostile states," "propaganda against the system," and "insulting sanctities." He served six years before being released in November 2014. ## "The Web We Have to Save" In 2015, shortly after his release, Derakhshan published an essay that became one of the most widely-read pieces of internet criticism of the decade: "The Web We Have to Save." The essay described what he found when he emerged from prison: the open, hyperlinked web of blogs had been replaced by the algorithmic, stream-based feeds of [[Instagram]], Facebook, and Twitter. The internet he had helped build in Iran — decentralized, navigable, reader-directed — was gone. In its place was a system designed to keep users scrolling passively through algorithmically-curated content, never clicking outward, never following a link to somewhere the platform didn't control. His central framework: the **hyperlink** versus the **stream**. The hyperlink was the web's democratic technology — it let any page connect to any other page, creating a horizontal network of references and conversations. The stream (the Facebook News Feed, the Twitter timeline, the Instagram grid) replaced horizontal exploration with vertical passivity. Blogs empowered readers to navigate; feeds made them scroll. The web went from a library you walked through to a television that watched you. ## Significance for the RWKB Derakhshan's framework is essential context for understanding the [[Attention Economy]] and the platform dynamics documented across the RWKB. His "hyperlink vs. stream" analysis anticipated much of the subsequent critique of algorithmic curation, [[Engagement Farming]], and the [[Outrage Industry]] — the very mechanisms that platforms like [[X (Twitter)]] exploit for political amplification. The parable is this: Derakhshan helped create one of the most important digital public spheres in the world (the Iranian blogosphere). He was imprisoned for it. He emerged to find that the open web had been captured and enclosed by corporate platforms whose business model — [[Surveillance Capitalism]] — depended on destroying the hyperlink and replacing it with the feed. The public sphere he built was decentralized and ungovernable; the one that replaced it was centralized and perfectly governable — by whoever owned the platform. This connects directly to the RWKB's [[Tech Oligarchy]] thesis: when [[Elon Musk]] buys [[X (Twitter)]], he is buying not just a company but the infrastructure that replaced the open web. The enclosure happened first (blogs → feeds); the political capture happened second (Musk buying the feed). Derakhshan's story helps explain why the second step was even possible. ## Later career and controversy After his release, Derakhshan took positions that were more sympathetic to the Iranian government and critical of Western internet platforms, which alienated many of his former supporters in the Iranian diaspora. His intellectual trajectory — from dissident blogger to platform critic to something resembling accommodation with the state — remains contested and unresolved. ## See also [[Attention Economy]], [[Surveillance Capitalism]], [[Tech Oligarchy]], [[Engagement Farming]], [[Outrage Industry]], [[Free Speech]], [[Disinformation]], [[Iran]]