Humanity trumps politics: we must stop the escalation
My parents fled Iran after the 1979 revolution and settled in Pittsburgh, PA, where I was born and raised. My uncle spent nearly a decade in solitary confinement in Iran for his poetry. He fled to Europe. My grandfather drafted reports and accounting for the Shah by hand; people said he had the most beautiful handwriting they’d ever seen. This fact may be apocryphal but I never met him so it’s what I have to remember him.
In January 2002, President Bush called Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” on national television. After that speech, kids at school started calling me a terrorist. That label followed me for years. With a grin people would normalize it.
In the San Francisco tech industry, I expected it to be different. But the “brand” followed. After I shared publicly that killing children is unconscionable, a colleague threatened to have me blacklisted. Others quietly disconnected, blocked across networks.
I have skin in this. I’m not objective about people, especially children, being setup to fail.
Four days ago, the US started bombing my parents’ homeland and a culture that pervades my existence in way’s I can’t unravel.
The tech community is too quiet. The Iranian people are not our enemy.
If you build products, you may see the world as a series of systems. Inputs, outputs, feedback loops, failure modes. It’s hard to turn that off when the system is foreign policy and the failure mode kills people.
The US and Israel have been bombing Iran since February 28. Iran’s internet has been down for four days. Eighty million people cut off. Six American service members are dead. The Strait of Hormuz is closed.
Before the bombs, we were already blocking Iranian developers from our tools. Now it’s worse. Platforms are making it harder to speak up. Content moderation flags “pro-Iran” as “pro-Terror.” Political speech filters bury the conversation.
Our tools are weaponized against our colleagues
In 2019, GitHub blocked developers in Iran, Syria, and Crimea from accessing private repositories. Accounts were restricted overnight, with no warning and no appeal process. One Iranian developer wrote: “GitHub blocked my account and they think I’m developing nuclear weapons.”
That wasn’t an isolated case. Here’s what US sanctions look like from inside the tech stack:
- GitHub: blocked Iranian developers from private repos and GitHub Pages for two years until Microsoft fought for an OFAC license in 2021
- Slack: suspended accounts of people who had merely visited Iran, including US citizens and residents
- AWS, Google Cloud, Azure: entirely blocked for Iranian users
- App Store and Google Play: Iranian-developed apps removed
- Docker Hub: blocked, cutting developers off from the container ecosystem
- Stripe, PayPal: Iranians can’t receive payment for their work, even freelancing for US companies
You can’t participate in the modern economy without these tools. You can’t get paid, deploy code, or reach customers. Destroying an economy through platform sanctions does the same thing as destroying homes and starving people. We’ve just normalized it.
Iran loses an estimated $50 billion per year in brain drain. In Quera’s survey of 5,000 Iranian programmers, only one in five had no plans to emigrate. The talent is there. Iran ranks 5th in the world in STEM graduates, 60% of its university students are women, and Iranian developers are tied for 3rd all-time in International Olympiad in Informatics medals, behind only China and the US. They leave because sanctions have made it nearly impossible to build anything inside the country.
Pierre Omidyar founded eBay. Dara Khosrowshahi runs Uber. Arash Ferdowsi co-founded Dropbox. Sean Rad founded Tinder. That talent came from Iranian families. But those founders got here decades ago. Today, Iranian visa approval rates are among the lowest in the world, and with current travel restrictions, the pipeline is effectively closed.
Here’s what makes this absurd: they don’t even need to come here. We have remote work. An Iranian developer could ship production code to a US company from Tehran without ever applying for a visa. But sanctions make it illegal to hire them, pay them, or give them tool access.
We’ve made it a crime to collaborate with 80 million internet-connected people in a country that produces more STEM graduates than most of Europe. It’s a self-inflicted talent embargo.
If you actually want systemic change in Iran, think about what it takes. Every country that has reformed did so because a middle class grew strong enough to demand it. In South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile, economic participation came first. Political reform followed. That requires people building businesses, earning money, gaining independence from the state. Sanctions do the opposite. They hollow out the middle class and push the most capable people to leave. The brain drain doesn’t just cost us talent. It evacuates the country of exactly the people who could change it from within.
The regime doesn’t use Docker Hub. The twenty-year-old trying to launch a startup does. Block her tools, and she’ll leave. The regime won’t mind.
Sanctions are the Versailles playbook
After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles imposed $33 billion in reparations on Germany, stripped 13% of its territory, and forced it to accept sole blame for the war. John Maynard Keynes resigned from the British delegation in protest:
The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable.
He predicted it would destabilize all of Europe.
Fourteen years later, Hitler was Chancellor. Twenty years later, the world was at war again. Marshal Foch, upon signing the treaty, called it: “not peace, but an armistice for twenty years.” He was off by 65 days.
After World War II, the US chose the opposite approach. The Marshall Plan invested $13.3 billion rebuilding Europe, including Germany. Japan received $2.2 billion in reconstruction aid. Within a decade, West Germany was the third-largest economy in the world. Japan became the second. Both became stable democracies and close allies. Neither reverted to authoritarianism.
The answer to tyranny isn’t bombs. It’s inclusion. No population in history has ever behaved better after being beaten and isolated. They may comply, but compliance isn’t sustainable without continued abuse.
People didn’t choose this
Seventy percent of Iranians alive today were born after the 1979 revolution. They didn’t choose the theocracy or the sanctions.
In 2022, when Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police, Iranians took to the streets under the banner “Woman, Life, Freedom.” The government killed over 500 protesters and arrested 20,000 more. When GAMAAN surveyed 200,000 Iranians, 81% inside the country said “No” to the Islamic Republic. The people are not the regime.
Collective punishment assumes citizens control their government. No country on earth meets that standard.
Zero political agency
UN: "no other population is under such restrictions." Sanctions delayed aid to 200,000 malnourished children.
The Fourth Geneva Convention banned collective punishment in 1949 for exactly this reason: you cannot punish a person for an offense they did not personally commit.
Denis Halliday ran the UN’s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. He resigned after a year and called the sanctions genocide:
We kill people with sanctions. Sanctions are not a substitute for war — they are a form of warfare.
We’ve been quiet before
The tech community has a pattern of staying quiet when the drumbeat starts.
The stated justification for Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, was false. No WMDs were ever found. Across Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates over $8 trillion spent and 4.5 million dead. Afghanistan alone cost over $2 trillion across twenty years. The Taliban captured nearly all provincial capitals in nine days and entered Kabul two weeks before the last American troops left. The tech industry stayed quiet during the buildup. Some companies took surveillance contracts.
In Gaza, the ICJ ruled it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide and ordered provisional measures. The UN Special Rapporteur titled her report “Gaza Genocide.” OHCHR raised concerns of ethnic cleansing. Over 68,800 verified dead, 70% women and children. In Sudan, an estimated 400,000 dead and 12 million displaced with what the UN calls “hallmarks of genocide.” In the Congo, 7 million displaced and documented crimes against humanity. The tech community is quiet about those too.
The dissenting voices were right every time. By the time consensus caught up, it was too late.
What we can actually do
Stop the war
This community has done this before. When 50,000 websites went dark over SOPA in 2012, nobody called it politics. Wikipedia, Reddit, and Mozilla blacked out because the question was structural: does the internet remain open, or does it become a tool of control? When Sergey Brin showed up at SFO during the Muslim ban and said “I’m here because I’m a refugee,” that was a technologist recognizing that immigration policy is tech infrastructure policy. Half of Silicon Valley’s founders came from somewhere else.
This is the same question.
This war won’t make you safer, lower your gas prices, or fix anything at home. Day one cost $779 million, more than Iraq at its peak. Projections run $65 billion to $210 billion, and that assumes it stays short. The post-9/11 wars were supposed to be short too. They cost $5.8 trillion. Gas is heading toward $3.50 a gallon. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, choking off 20% of the world’s oil supply. There is no exit strategy and no definition of success.
If you do nothing else, say that out loud to the people around you.
- Talk about it. The biggest thing the tech community does wrong on these issues is stay quiet. Break the silence.
Then push for partnership
Once we stop bombing, we should be building bridges. Everything in this article argues that inclusion works and punishment doesn’t. Here’s where the tech community can lead:
- If you work at a platform company: push for OFAC license applications like GitHub did. It took them two years, but they got Iranian developers back on the platform.
- If you maintain open source: make sure your project doesn’t block by IP or country. The code is already public.
- If you’re a founder or hiring manager: hire from the Iranian diaspora. The talent is extraordinary and the community needs advocates inside companies.
- If you need sanctions counsel: Ferrari & Associates is one of the first firms built around sanctions and export control law, now 17 years in practice. Full disclosure: the founder started the firm on my couch when I was in my early 20s. I’m biased, but I’ve watched them do this work since day one.