Whatever Happened to Hoder?

While clearing out some spam comments on some older posts in this blog, I stumbled across this 2004 post in which I wrote about having dinner with some blogging luminaries including Rebecca MacKinnon, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan.

Reading that old post made me wonder: Whatever happened to Hoder?

Hoder made a name for himself in the early 2000s, earning his sobriquets, “The Iranian Blogger” and “The Blogfather” as the writer of the blog Editor: Myself and the guy who figured out how to use a little Unicode workaround that made it possible to write posts in Blogger with Persian characters. This made it possible for Iranians to make use of Blogger’s free publishing tools to share their stories with the world, giving rise to tens of thousands of Iranians and a sudden growth of internet use within the republic. “There were all these journalists who didn’t have a venue, and all these readers who missed the reformist papers,” said Hoder in an interview in the June 2005 edition of Wired.

Hoder was always an opportunist; his tendency to work systems and people to his advantage is how I came to cross paths with him. I was working at Tucows when he publicized a flaw in the Tucows-owned product Blogrolling.com. “Crackers and electronic maladroits of the world,” he wrote in a piece encouraging people to mess with the “Blogs for Bush” blogroll, “here’s a flaw in a piece of software used by thousands of bloggers, and here’s how you exploit it. Get to work.”

After getting the matter straightened out — which involved exchanging some stern words with both Hoder and journalist Dan Gillmor, who made matters worse by publicizing Hoder’s hints — I chatted with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss, explaining what happened and who Hoder was: popular blogger, Iranian reformist, .

The story of a popular Iranian-in-exile with a blog intrigued Elliot, and we agreed that rather than giving Hoder the cold shoulder for sharing a way to exploit our systems, we should be friendly with him.

“Help him,” Elliot said. “Blogrolling, Blogware, domain names…set him up with whatever he needs.”

I did just that, even showing him around Harvard and Harvard Square during the blogging conference where Global Voices Online was formed, hooking him up with Tucows goodies when he needed them, and generally hanging out with him and introducing him (not that he needed much introduction by the end) at any given “bloggers can make a difference” kind of gathering that was popular at the time.

It might have been around late 2005 or early 2006 that things turned. Hoder, possibly fueled by the fame and accolades, became Hoder the Freeloader, leaving his wife, taking advantage of people’s willingness to host him, overstaying his welcome and generally using his charm and notoriety to get his way, often at someone else’s expense. At one point, he even tried to live in New York City illegally; these plans were foiled by an eagle-eyed customs official who noticed that he had a magazine with a subscription label bearing his name and a Manhattan address. To many of us, it seemed that he was taking advantage of his friends and his newly-acquired Canadian citizenship, treating them as mere stepping stones to the good life.

The final alienating move was his apparent “switching of sides”. After his 2006 visit to Israel to foster some kind of dialogue between Israel and Iran, he became a strong supporter of the Iranian regime, a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fanboy (arguing that when Ahmadinejad said “Wipe Israel off the map”, he meant by a democratic process rather than nukes and that a guy who let Chris de Burgh perform in Iran can’t be all bad) and a critic of the US and Israel and organizations that he perceived as stooges of Western hegemony. At the time, I attributed it to the sort of homesickness exiles face. Since Hoder was the mercurial sort, I thought that it was just some kind of rebellious flirtation that would evaporate in a few months when he’d go back to being a reformist. By that point, he’d burned so many bridges that a good number of us just stopped listening to him.

His newfound allegiance didn’t matter to the Iranian government when they arrested him in November 2008. He was charged with spying for Israel, and there were whispers that he might even be charged with “insulting religion”, a dimly-looked-upon crime in Islamic theocracies. Over here, his situation raised some concern among people like Ethan Zuckerman, who tactfully described both the situation and Hoder as “complicated”, but there were many who saw it as just desserts. I remember making this ribald dismissal: “Oh, he’ll be fine; Hoder’s got his tongue so far up Mahmoud’s crack that he’ll get off with a slap on the wrist,” out of annoyance with the man whom I referred to as “Hoder the Goader”.

Evin Prison, Tehran, Hoder’s current home.

He’s been in Evin Prison in Tehran for nearly five years and fifteen yet to be served, with his family’s appeals falling on deaf ears and few of his former colleagues wondering about him. The last mention I can find of him in English-language media is from a piece last summer in Al-Jazeera: The Forgotten Bloggers, which looks at the fates of middle eastern dissidents with blogs. Today, with Turkey close to melting down and its Prime Minister describing Twitter as “the worst menace to society”, I think it’s only fitting that Hoder’s name be brought up again.

I won’t mince words. Hoder’s an asshole, and he has some asshole opinions. But he’s also a Canadian citizen, and a human being who’s being held prisoner by a terrible government on trumped-up charges.

I’m not suggesting that we take him into our homes, welcome him with open arms and say that all is forgiven. The guy needs a good kick in the ass, but he certainly doesn’t deserve the far harsher treatment that he’s likely getting in Evin prison. I’m going to hold my nose and join the (hopefully not too small) group that says “Free Hoder”.