Narenji

» see narenji.ir as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Narenji means orange, the color. It started in 2007 in Kerman, which is nine hundred kilometers southeast of Tehran and not where anybody expects a national technology site to come from, and it was put together by a group of bloggers working out of one cramped office. What they published was the most ordinary thing on the internet: phone reviews, app roundups, notes on Iranian games, the specs of whatever had just been announced somewhere else in the world and would reach Iran late or never.

It worked. Narenji became the most-read gadget site in the country, and in 2010 it took the most informative website prize at the Online Festival of Iranian Websites, an award handed out in public, in Iran, to a site everybody could name. The founder was Aliasghar Honarmand, a journalist who had at one point trained on a BBC World Service Trust program for developing journalists.

That training is the detail the case was built on. The last stories went up on 2 December 2013.

~ the dossier ~

~ the third of december ~

On 3 December 2013 agents of the Revolutionary Guard's Sarollah Headquarters raided the office and detained Honarmand along with thirteen members of the team. Eleven were eventually charged. A week after the arrests they were shown on Iranian state television in handcuffs, before any trial, which is how these cases are normally introduced to the public there.

The accusation was that they had been working toward a soft overthrow of the government, with the BBC training offered as the evidence of foreign direction, and the charges came out as designing websites and creating content for media hostile to the regime, filed under propaganda against the regime. In June 2014 the sentences landed: eleven years for Honarmand, seven for Hossein Nozari, five for Ehsan Paknejad, two and a half for Abbas Vahedi. Eleven internet professionals in total, with terms running from one year to eleven. Honarmand appealed in 2015 and lost.

~ the frozen page ~

Nobody took narenji.ir down. For more than a year after the raid the server kept answering, and what it served was the front page exactly as the team had left it. You can still pull the 2 December 2014 capture out of the Internet Archive: it is 23,730 bytes, the same size it had been every month that year, and the article thumbnails in it carry filenames ending narenji-20131201 and narenji-20131202. The top story is a Morgan Freeman portrait painted on an iPad. Underneath it sit an Iranian game and a smartphone roundup. One day's worth of tech blogging, served to anyone who typed the address, for twelve months.

I read a site shaped exactly like this one every day in those years. In Turkey it was Donanım Haber, the same mix of hardware news and review threads and people arguing about graphics cards, run by people roughly my age who had turned an enthusiasm into a job. What separates Narenji from that is one thing only, and it is which side of a border the office happened to sit on. Sometime between December 2014 and March 2015 the host started returning 403s, and narenji.ir does not resolve at all today.

~ hello world ~

Aliasghar Honarmand served about eight years. When he came out he announced it on Twitter with two words, Hello World, which is the first line of the first program anyone writes and also, from someone who had been in prison since 2013, a plain statement of fact. The site never came back. Nothing replaced it under that name.

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