Paper short abstract

Facing local Internet infrastructure the state developed to disconnect from the global network, Iranians use sociomaterial practices to fix the disconnection and circumvent state regulation. I discuss the situated knowledge of users, the fragility of their fix and the care it needs to keep working.

Paper long abstract

During the 2026 protests, Iranian government shut down all means of communication for two weeks to silently unleash a bloody crackdown. This was possible due to state's project to build the "National Information Network" (NIN). In official language, NIN promises a local version of Internet that is faster and safer. But in reality it is set to regulate, and occasionally, cut access to the global network. In response, citizens resort to "Filtering Circumvention Tools" (FCTs), which bypass the censorship and mend the infrastructure to reinstate free navigation. I focus on the users' experiences of disconnection and practices of circumvention--drawing on digital ethnography of online discussions happening during recent shutdown, interviews with people whose job rely on Internet and participant observation with non-technical users trying to make their FCTs work. I aim to underscore how they thread together their devices, trusted communities that support them in times of crisis, and their situated knowledge about the infrastructure to create a fragile linkage against a broken infrastructure. Following infrastructural studies in STS and anthropology, I attend to the emergence of new temporalities, regimes of connection / disconnection, and divisions of local / global spaces that NIN causes and how these inform the practices of lay knowledge creation. By attending to the mundane and the fragile, this paper contributes to our understanding of what political defiance means in the digital age. I argue that lacking the political platform to influence the design of NIN, users have to find ways to negotiate with infrastructure directly.