When I first launched Digital Iran in 2019, my goal was to document and analyze how Iranian gaming communities navigate digital controls. What began as a focused project has since grown into a multi-phase, multi-method research program that examines the infrastructures of censorship, surveillance, and resilience in Iran and its diaspora.
Over the past several years, I have developed Digital Iran through multiple phases:
–Digital Iran 1.0 (2019–2020): Mapped online communities and cultural production through Iranian video games, creating a publicly accessible archive (iranianvideogames.com & digitaliranproject.com). In summer 2020, this led to public scholarship through Twitch live streaming. More about this stage is available at my academia.edu page.
–Digital Iran 2.0 (2023): Expanded into pedagogy and public scholarship through podcasting, workshops, and the Digital Iran site (digitaliranproject.com), which hosts resources and cultural commentary.
–Digital Iran Reloaded (2024–2025): Conducted mixed-methods research with 22 interviews, 660 survey responses, and RIPE Atlas network measurement to study how Iranian gamers mitigate information controls such as throttling, shutdowns, and VPN blocking. Findings show that while gamers often describe their practice as “apolitical,” censorship politicizes leisure and produces new forms of socio-technical resilience. A preprint version of this is available at Zenodo.
Looking forward, I am expanding Digital Iran into new directions:
–AI and Governance: Investigating how algorithmic systems and AI tools interact with authoritarian controls, shaping access, trust, and cultural production.
–Libraries and Cybersecurity: Designing frameworks for how public institutions, especially libraries, can support communities facing disinformation, surveillance, and digital risk.
–Global Comparisons: Situating Iranian case studies within broader internet governance debates, linking authoritarian edge cases to emerging concerns about digital rights worldwide.
Ultimately, Digital Iran is more than a single research project—it is a long-term, evolving platform that bridges ethnography, quantitative methods, and public scholarship to document resilience under constraint. As the information landscape continues to shift, this work remains committed to understanding how everyday users adapt, resist, and reimagine digital futures.
More at: digitaliranproject.com
