The Hard Thing About The Hardest Things

As a Middle Eastern entrepreneur, I believe it’s an uphill battle taking the plunge and starting one’s own business anywhere around the world, let alone in Iran. “When you’re running a business you’re being knocked from every side”. (source) I took the leap of faith in 2015 and resigned from Upstream Systems — leading mobile monetization company in high growth markets- to build my very own dream from the ground up. It has been tiresome and indeed frustrating at times. Despite the bureaucratic ineptness, unstable market, gender gap, lack of infrastructure, being locked out of global financial system, being totally cut off from the Apple Store and Slack, limited capital investment, macroeconomic instability, gradual increase in migration volume of software engineers and developers, media monopoly, internet censorship and blocked social media and messaging apps i.e. Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, Twitter, Medium, Reddit, no access to News agency websites like BBC and CNN (not to mention digital music services like Spotify) from within the borders - If it has been a while since your eyes have dramatically popped out of your skull, you can check the full list, here — with a lot of blood, sweat and tears, we finally managed to build a talented team and hence created the largest women-only community to start from.

Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash

My story

Flashback: In 2012 I had a speech at Oxford University about “Good and Evil in Ancient Persian Festivals: an Analytical Psychology Approach” which was later published under the title of “The Real and the Reflected: heroes and villains in existent and imagined worlds” by Inter-Disciplinary Press. I discussed how in empirical psychology, the concept good and evil is only of recent concern. However, this phenomenon exists and has always existed in the human world. Wherever good is felt, evil is also present. ‘The world exists only because opposing forces are held in equilibrium.’ Self-development of the individual, therefore, also includes evil. Evil can have great implication in the process of individuation, since it is indeed a part of the creative primal cause. To endeavor to demolish devil for noetic reasons would be to demolish the very gem of life. On the other hand, devoting free rein to evil would lead to the same upshot.

Afterwards I was welcome to the third annual Marginalized Mainstream 2014 conference at Senate House, University of London to talk about Author as “The Other” in Disguise: Reading Foucauldian Identity. Resurfacing throughout Persian literature, I explained how each culture and each era creates its own masks that encompass and express the agitations, anxieties and freedom specific to the environment of that particular generation. “The fright is with us, as God is with us”. My paper aimed to cast light on the unheard voices. It began by looking at the features of Iranian culture, continued with an examination of what theorists like Michel Foucault have to say in general about marginalized voices within the text and brings to the fore certain points about the discussion of authorship/ownership and how they could contribute to and fit within society’s distribution of roles and power.

I could never imagine -not even in my wildest dreams- that one day in my late 20’s, I’d be sitting helplessly in my own office — and a shattered world- with a marginalized voice in an alleged “evil” country writing about how Github has removed all Iranian accounts/repositories without a prior notice, as a requirement to comply with the laws of US state. Or in exact wording: “Due to US trade controls law restrictions, your GitHub account has been restricted. For individual accounts, you may have limited access to free GitHub public repository services for personal communications only.” Nationalist pride matter? A challenge that one cannot maneuver over with new skill acquisition or improvements in innovation capacity, not even Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page or any other successful entrepreneur we look up to and read books about could ever solve such a drastic problem!

Dining with scholars from around the world

O!ban Source

Contribution to the free software world should transcend where someone is from whether it be Iran or whatever HOT “enemy” some leaders decide. Let’s start with open source (special thanks to Wikipedia):

The open-source-software movement is a movement that supports the use of open-source licenses for some or all software, a part of the broader notion of open collaboration. The open-source movement was started to spread the concept/idea of open-source software. Programmers who support the open-source-movement philosophy contribute to the open-source community by voluntarily writing and exchanging programming code for software development. The term “open source” requires that no one can discriminate against a group in not sharing the edited code or hinder others from editing their already-edited work. Richard Stallman has called open source “a non-movement”, because it “does not campaign for anything. Open source addresses software being open as a practical question as opposed to an ethical dilemma. In other words, it focuses more on the development.

“GitHub has to be both independent and neutral,” CEO Nat Friedman said at the company’s Satellite event in Berlin — despite its acquisition by Microsoft in October 2018. (source) Double standards? Now let’s take a look at Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct which outlines expectations for participation in Microsoft-managed open source communities:

Be welcoming: Our communities welcome and support people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to members of any race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, color, immigration status, social and economic class, educational level, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, size, family status, political belief, religion, and mental and physical ability.

Photo by Mitch Lensink on Unsplash

Human Right or Wrong?

Ironic? I rather skip the whole GDPR topic and talk about our current status: Iranian Github pages are now censored and we are currently unable to participate in the maintenance of an open source repository. Don’t non-US human beings in other regions qualify for this basic human right, which happens to be codified in (including the UDHR) the 1st amendment to the US Constitution? Sanctions are meant to flex power for the enemy government and other countries. Does anybody care about people, developers, artists, innovators, inventors, re-inventors of structures, environmental activist, dreamers, and rebels? We’re not only concerned about Github! We must be keen-eyed against whatever stands in the way of our freedom whether in building a community or being simply informed, whether the US, Microsoft, Google or merely popular opinion.

Community is one of the most important aspects of open source. Github is essentially a public library for computer code. In this case we cannot fathom how Github has decided to remove accounts based on the nationality and not just blocking Iranian IPs? (Voila! We just solved the problem-to-be!) Isn’t this a clear implementation of authoritarian of governments instead? Strong policies that might not really be all that smart and welcoming. Are we prone to build our own instances individually without discoverability? Then what is the value proposition of tech companies like Github?

This restriction and all the similar prohibitions are imposed upon us from the U.S. Government, not a corporation. That can at best and on the long run only give boost to anti-Americanism. What we’re seeing is the inevitable result of the internet and tech companies becoming the most vital aspect of modern civilization. However no one really cares about the impact of such decisions on people with no hostile intent — I mean us Iranians. We have seemingly accepted and do understand that as long as Trump reigns it’s going to be America first, but can we just say: Iran the last? Or please let it be on the countries list?