There is something very disturbing about the number of people on social media, and Facebook in particular, who have chosen to display “I stand with Iran” overlays on their profile pictures. We’ve seen this sort of solidarity signalling before. Displaying the Ukrainian flag on your avatar, for instance, or the words, “I stand with Gaza.”
But what does “I stand with Iran” actually mean? That you are a big fan of regularly executing citizens in secret, and then – this bit is particularly clever! – refusing to hand over the bodies to the families of the dead? I mean, if you don’t want to get killed, you shouldn’t be an “enemy of God” in the first place. Which is an actual charge that carries the death penalty in Iran. Yes, I stand with Iran, because I think it’s kinda cool the way the state has killed thousands of protesters, and I’m definitely on the side of the country that uses torture and rape as weapons of state.
Clearly, this is not what those who claim to stand with Iran literally mean. Well, at least in the social media bubble I inhabit; I imagine there are supporters of the regime who make the claim without ambiguity.
Perhaps “I stand with Iran” is actually intended to convey the message, “I do not stand with the US and Israel, and their unprovoked, self-serving attack on Iran. I am against the deaths of thousands of Iranians who are collateral damage in a political power play.” But, then, why not just say this? Why elect to plunk down a calling card for a side that is evil, and which is happy to sacrifice innocent lives as part of its venal attempt to preserve an authoritarian regime?
If we were to look for the positive, it is that those displaying their earnest four-word messages of solidarity appear to trust that those reading them will understand that the support is not for the regime, but for its victims. That what they mean is, “I am sympathetic to the cause of the innocent Iranian people, or at least those that are pro-democracy and against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp and its supreme leader.” Too many words for a banner though, and this is the not-so-positive way to understand these badges.
Clickbait and binaries
Current ideological discourse, and its enabling handmaiden, social media, has forced many of us into precisely the sort of crude binary that strips away complexity, and that allows the bots, propagandists and demagogues to prevail. In the brave new world where we have all become crotchety old men shaking our fists at the Amazon cloud, there is very little room to have a reasoned approach to anything. The algorithms reward information based on how easily it can move around its environment, and punish ideas that demand that you slow down and think, rather than speed up and click.
If you look at how these solidarity overlays work, you’ll see that they’re precisely constructed to fit this information stream. There’s a short slogan with a visual marker such as a flag, and the message is designed to be instantly understandable, and to stand out in the firehose of nonsense and AI slop that is your social media feed. The ones that really work are emotionally charged, and easy to adopt with one click. And best of all, the message is ostensibly very simple. No need to actually think about it – just press play, and save the world.
I imagine that some readers, at this point, will be thinking: is it really worth getting annoyed by something as silly as this? And why has he written an entire column about it, when it could just have been an Instagram post? Good question!
Social media is designed to train our brains to pursue an endless cycle of desire and immediate reward. You’ll see an echo of this in the easy answers that political parties around the world provide for their polity – you’re poor because of immigration! – and the cycle has a negative impact on the ability of people to think critically.
There’s even a technical term for how this avaricious doomscrolling through bite-sized content trains us to favour immediate rewards over long-term advantages. “Temporal discounting” is apparently the psychological tendency to see rewards as less valuable when they are set in the future, rather than available right now.
Those platitude posts like “I stand with Iran” signal more than an oversimplification of a complex subject. They’re also a sign that we have been conditioned to be part of the dismaying destruction of critical discourse online, and are now just units of currency in the information profiteering economy. I stand with complexity.