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Paper short abstract

Facing an infrastructure of digital borders, Iranian users rely on fragile and unsafe techniques to bypass blockages and access the Internet and Web services. I offer examples from an ethnography of their challenges and solutions to discuss how and to whom technology turns hostile.

Paper long abstract

Iranian Internet users are between a rock and a hard place. The state project to build a "National Information Network" (NIN) is promoted as bringing a fast, safe and equitable Internet. In reality, it provides the infrastructure for censorship and occasional shutdowns to facilitate bloody crackdowns as happened in January 2026. Moreover because of international sanctions, users are losing access to a growing number of globally popular Web services. As a result, they are experiencing a tiered Internet which limits some users, while support others in their work. To navigate it, users resort to assemblages of devices, circumvention software, services and trusted communities to create linkages which bypass checkpoints and reinstate free navigation. Although fragile and in need of constant maintenance, almost every Iranian user relies on them for access. Drawing on a review of official documents regarding NIN, interviews with people whose job rely on Internet and participant observation with non-technical users, I characterize Internet in Iran as hostile. I demonstrate that digital borders installed by censorship and geoblocking technologies force users to choose between privacy and efficiency of their assemblages. Moreover, the case suggests hostility as a tiered condition caused by reconfigurations and co-option of networking devices and protocols, in ways not anticipated in their initial design. I argue that attention to mundane and fragile practices of users is crucial as it uniquely reveals the emergence of new temporalities, regimes of connection/disconnection, and divisions of local/global spaces that puts users in current tiered condition.