Late in 2014, I was abruptly pardoned and freed from Evin prison in northern Tehran. In November 2008, I had been sentenced to nearly 20 years in jail, mostly over my web activities, and thought I would end up spending most of my life in those cells. So the moment, when it came, was unexpected. I was sharing a cup of tea when the voice of the floor announcer – another prisoner – filled all the rooms and corridors: “Dear fellow inmates, the bird of luck has once again sat on one fellow inmate’s shoulders. Mr Hossein Derakhshan, as of this moment, you are free.”
Outside, everything felt new: the chill autumn breeze, the traffic noise from a nearby bridge, the smell, the colours of the city I had lived in most of my life. Around me, I noticed a very different Tehran from the one I had been used to. An influx of new, shamelessly luxurious condos had replaced the charming little houses I was familiar with. New roads, new highways, hordes of invasive SUVs. Large billboards with advertisements for Swiss-made watches and Korean TVs. Women in colourful scarves and manteaus, men with dyed hair and beards, and hundreds of charming cafes with hip western music and female staff. They were the kind of changes that creep up on people; the kind you only really notice once normal life gets taken away from you.
Two weeks later, I began writing again. Some friends agreed to let me start a blog as part of their arts magazine. I called it Ketabkhan – it means book-reader in Persian.
Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it is an entire era online. Writing on the internet had not changed, but reading – or, at least, getting things read – had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential social networks had become, so I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. It turned out Facebookdidn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.
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