The current round of protests in Iran now seem to have gone far beyond anyone's original intent, and the demands of the leaders emerging from the movement are inflated compared to the more modest demands that were being put forward in the final days of the old year. I believe this is typical of the dynamics of a revolution. Let's look back on those days for a moment. The sequence of events I have in mind began on December 28 among people angry that factory workers were owed a lot of back pay, and that prices of important commodities were heading up. Within just a day or so, videos available on social media showed protesters chanting "Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran." That may sound more like a chant in Farsi than it does in English. It was symptomatic of the way an agenda increases. The focus was still on jobs and prices, BUT the idea was that the country's leaders weren't focusing on jobs or prices because they were focusing instead...
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A Facebook friend recently shared this with me. I hadn't encountered it before, and think it stunningly insightful. "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. ” Sourced to Brian Eno (1995).