In his seminal work Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard famously argued that we live in a world where the map has preceded the territory. Today, in January 2026, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) is not merely reporting on a conflict; it has constructed a hyperreality—a war that exists only in the flicker of the screen while the real streets are plunged into digital darkness.
1. The Simulacrum of the Global South
While the 17-day blackout silences the literal screams of protesters in Tehran and Isfahan, the regime’s digital assets are busy building a simulacrum of a “Global North vs. Global South” struggle.
* The Fabrication: State media portrays Iran as the heroic vanguard of the “Global South,” fighting against the “corrupted Western capitalism” of the North.
* The Baudrillardian Twist: This isn’t just a diversion; it’s a simulation of resistance. By using the language of anti-imperialism, they create a “copy” of a liberation movement to mask the “original” reality: a state violently suppressing its own working class and veterans.
2. The Death of the Real in the Blackout
Baudrillard spoke of the “death of the real,” where the image becomes more significant than the thing it represents.
* The Minneapolis Mirror: When Marandi tweets about “The Holocaust in Minneapolis,” he is not referring to a real event; he is creating a pure simulacrum. He uses the sign of trauma to replace the territory of the Iranian crisis.
* The Result: For the international observer scrolling through Twitter, the “Minneapolis Holocaust” becomes as “real” as the Tehran protests. In hyperreality, the two are equivalent, and thus, the urgency of the actual violence in Iran is neutralized by the simulation of violence elsewhere.
3. Foucault’s Truth Regime meets Baudrillard’s Hyperreality
This is where Foucault’s “Regime of Truth” takes its most modern form.

The state doesn’t just want you to believe a lie;

it wants you to inhabit a hyperreality where the criteria for truth are dictated by the state’s monopoly on signs.
By cutting the internet, the regime ensures there is no “ground truth” to challenge the simulation.

If the internet is the “territory,” then the blackout is the destruction of the territory, leaving only the state-mandated “map” (the simulacrum) behind.

Title: The Hyperreal War: Baudrillard and the 17-Day Iranian Simulacrum
By Elifelet Sara Lavie
Jean Baudrillard once observed that “the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
As we enter the third week of the January 2026 digital blackout in Iran, we are witnessing the birth of a Hyperreal War. Pro-regime accounts and state media have constructed a narrative of a global struggle: the “Virtuous Global South” vs. the “Corrupted Western Capitalist North.”
This war only exists in hyperreality.
While the people are physically silenced by a total communications shutdown, the IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) has built a simulation of stability and ideological purity. They aren’t just lying about the protests; they are replacing the reality of the protests with a “copy without an original.”
When Seyed Mohammad Marandi tweets about a “Holocaust in Minneapolis,” he is engaging in the ultimate Baudrillardian act: using a sign of Western failure to mask the disappearance of the Iranian territory. In this “Regime of Truth,” the image of a shoe bin in Minnesota is more “real” to the state than the death of a veteran like Mohammad Khan-Mohammadi.
We are not just fighting a blackout. We are fighting a simulacrum. To resist is to refuse to live in their hyperreality and to insist on the messy, violent, and undeniable Real that they are trying so hard to simulate away.
Would you like me to help you create a Farsi version of this “Hyperreality” section to add to your bilingual thread?
Baudrillard’s Hyperreality & The Simulacrum Explained
This video provides a deep dive into Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra and hyperreality, which directly parallels your analysis of how the Iranian regime constructs a “parallel reality” to replace actual events during the blackout.

Foucault’s Truth Regime meets Baudrillard’s Hyperreality (Continued)

This is where Foucault’s “Regime of Truth” takes its most modern form. For Foucault, “truth” isn’t an absolute; it is produced by power systems (institutions, scientific discourse, media) that decide what counts as true.

In the Iranian context, the regime traditionally enforced its Regime of Truth through the Panopticon—surveillance, prisons, and the physical policing of bodies. But under the blackout, the mechanism shifts:

• From Discipline to Simulation: The regime no longer needs to prove that its narrative is factually correct (a modernist constraint). In the age of Hyperreality, the Regime of Truth operates by saturation, not verification. If the “Minneapolis Holocaust” trends, it becomes true within the discourse, regardless of physical reality.
• The Weaponization of “Woke” Discourse:
• This is the ultimate cynical maneuver. The regime appropriates the very language of Western academia—terms like “human rights,” “anti-colonialism,” and “police brutality”—and turns them into empty signs. They use these signs to construct a shield around their own brutality.
• Epistemic Terrorism: This brings us back to my concept of Semantic Terrorism. When the regime’s spokesperson uses the language of the oppressed to defend the oppressor, they aren’t just lying; they are dismantling the meaning of the words themselves. They create a “fog of war” where the international left becomes paralyzed, unable to distinguish between the Simulacrum of anti-imperialist struggle and the Real struggle of Iranian women and workers.

The Conclusion?

We are not just fighting a political battle on the streets of Tehran; we are fighting an ontological war for the right to define reality. When the internet goes dark, the only “truth” that survives is the one the regime uploads. Our task is to pierce the simulacrum and drag the world’s attention back to the blood and bone of the Real.