Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host Mike
Rugnetta and we have a dedicated show for you this week.
Contributing producer and freelance journalist based in
Kabul, Ali Latifi tells the story of a roughly forty eight
hour period at the 2025 when the Taliban turned off the entirety
of the Internet in Afghanistan. His friends and neighbors
reflect on the surprising and not so surprising impacts of
being completely offline. And Ali reflects on how being so
completely disconnected shifted his perspective of being online.
First, we're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the
member feed and then Ali Latifi on the time the Internet got
turned off in Afghanistan. At the time of writing, Iran's
internet has been off for about two hundred and seventy five
hours, almost twelve days according to internet access
watchdog group, NetBlocks, and coinciding with The United
States and Israel's start of their coordinated bombing of the
country. This comes not long after an extended outage in Iran
which ended, albeit slowly and incompletely, in January. From
the eighth to the twenty eighth, officials restricted access to
the larger global network in response to demonstrations
during which their revolutionary guard killed thousands and
potentially over 30,000 protesters who took to the
streets because of inflation, soaring food prices, and anti
government sentiment. It was the largest demonstration in the
country in nearly fifty years and it spread to multiple
cities.
You maybe didn't hear much about it. An internet shutdown is one
major reason why and the reason governments do it. This is an
increasingly popular tactic amongst authoritarian
governments and even some democratic ones. Digital rights
group Access Now who tracks amongst other things internet
shutdowns by government, estimates there were 78 internet
shutdowns in 2017 and two hundred and 96 in 2024. They put
India at the top of the list with 649 shutdowns over an eight
year period, followed by Myanmar, Iran, Pakistan,
Ukraine, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and so on and so on down
the authoritarian roster.
You may wonder hearing that list, why aren't China or Russia
near the top? Well, Internet shutdowns are a brute force
approach. When a country hasn't consolidated and nationalized
its communications infrastructure and they wanna
keep information from getting in or out, they don't have many
options. China and Russia have more control over their
networks. They can more easily stop certain data streams from
entering and in many scenarios leaving.
Though of course information as Stuart Brand proclaimed wants to
be free and it often ends up being a national infrastructural
game of cat and mouse. In 2025 for instance, Russia engaged in
broad scale shutdowns and restrictions especially for
mobile devices to thwart, they said, Ukrainian drone attacks.
But the blocks were widely circumvented with VPN use. It's
probably also worth pointing out here that China and Russia and
Israel and Sudan and a few others may not turn the Internet
off within their own borders, but often enact shutdowns on
their neighbors, Myanmar, Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Laos,
Bahrain, and so on. All this to say, China and Russia don't need
to shut off the Internet.
They have their own. This is the direction Iran is headed as
well. They've consolidated control of their communications
infrastructure and they're able to keep citizens on their
national intranet while blocking access to the global internet.
This means national services like banks, government websites,
and national media channels useful for disseminating
propaganda remain operational. Access to global social media to
report on what's happening is blocked unless of course you're
a high up government official.
And of course with a single national Internet, everyone is
just that much easier to surveil. Last fall, the Taliban,
the ruling government in Afghanistan, blocked the
Internet nationwide for about forty eight hours. They said
this was to prevent immoral activity, a measure taken to
prevent vice, one official said. Though there was speculation the
reasoning was much broader and like the blocks in Iran were
meant to keep citizens from communicating with the outside
world, especially following a massive earthquake in the East.
The Taliban has not consolidated control of their communications
infrastructure.
They have no half measures to employ, no filtering to use.
They literally just cut the cables and with very little
warning. What happened next is a revealing portrait of the ways
the Internet, the global Internet dominates everyday life
even in places we may think of as remote. We discuss on this
show the travails of social media, the immorality of tech
barons, but it is in stories like this that we see how the
Internet is a much larger thing, a literal lifeline to many while
also being still an extractive entity, a machine of
exploitation, a distraction from other parts of our lives. After
we take a short break, contributing producer Ali Latifi
was there in Afghanistan when the internet was shut off.
He asked his neighbors, friends, and acquaintances what that two
days was like.
Speaker 2: Not confirmed, but just received this. In
accordance with the decree of the supreme leader, Internet
services will be discontinued starting from 5PM today in
Kabul.
Ali Latifi: It's around 02:30PM on 09/29/2025 when I receive
this message on WhatsApp.
Speaker 2: The network will be permanently disconnected until
further notice, resulting in a twenty four hour outage each
day. Additionally, certain other networks will experience daily
Internet suspensions from 5PM to 8AM.
Ali Latifi: I immediately forward it to a friend who was
close with the government asking, true? His response is
simple. Yes. In case he's right, I send it to a human rights
researcher in Europe. Because the message mentioned the mobile
network I've had since 2011, I immediately rush to the office
of another carrier near my home and sign up for a new eSIM.
An hour later, I'm back home with nothing to do but wait and
see. A few years ago, I would have panicked. But by 2025, I'm
accustomed to uncertain political and security claims in
Afghanistan. There's no option in these situations but to sit
and wait and see. 05:00, it's happening.
Suha: Damn. Disconnected.
Ali Latifi: In ten minutes, all my devices disconnect. It's all
down. No signal on either SIM, no WiFi, no calls, and no texts.
Texts. Tens of millions of Avrons are suddenly and swiftly
cut off from each other and the outside world.
Hoping the text is true and the Internet will be back by the
morning, I decide to just wait it out and watch or rewatch what
movies were downloaded to my computer. But first, a drink of
water. I bent to grab a bottle and hit my head against the
metal hook. I never noticed it protruding out of the
refrigerator. There's blood in my hair.
It reminds me of the time I was hit by a motorcycle in Istanbul.
I panic and rush downstairs to the pharmacy down the street.
Did you get in a fight? Asked the pharmacist. I avoid the
question.
It seems better than admitting my refrigerator attacked me. He
gives me iodine, some cotton swabs, and pills. I head home.
Movie time. Movies I can't even log on letterboxed.
What I end up watching over the next forty eight hours is highly
ironic.
Ramin: All I have are negative thoughts.
Ali Latifi: Joker. No wizard that there is or was. Wicked.
You can act
Samir: like a man.
Ali Latifi: The Godfather
Samir: You can stop my war.
Ali Latifi: The Hunchback of Notre Dame I will decide. And
doubt What's important. The next forty eight hours are a blur of
confusion and anticipation. Everyone is constantly checking
to see if the Internet and phone services are back. Suha, a 20
year old online entrepreneur in Kabul, is in disbelief at the
sudden cuts.
She can't fathom that the Islamic Emirate could be so
audacious.
Suha: Because we all know that every system of a country is
reliant on Internet and technology in general.
Ali Latifi: Turns out she was wrong.
Suha: Unfortunately, in our society that turned out to be
possible.
Ali Latifi: Once people move beyond the shock, it's two days
full of speculation and rumors. Did Donald Trump really live up
to his threats? And is he actually at the Bagram Air Base
right now? Is the Islamic Emirates secretive supreme
leader, Habatullah Khunzada, in Kabul, and we just don't know
it? Or is all of this the setup for a coup d'etat that we don't
even know is underway?
Something that my parents' generation are very used to by
now. Farah works for an Internet provider and teaches online, and
she describes the uncertainty that pervades over Kabul. She
says being so cut off from the city, country, and the entire
world left her feeling like a child. Greatest fear is that
this marked the beginning of the end. The moment we had all been
dreading since 08/15/2021 when the former president ran away
and the Taliban returned to Kabul.
Are we officially going back to the strict rule of the nineteen
nineties Islamic Emirate? Really though, these forty eight hours
are a reminder of just how much of our lives in the twenty first
century depend on the Internet. Al Saeed, a resident of the
northern city of Mazar Sharif, puts it
Saeed: Basically, all life, social life, everything, it all
came to standstill.
Ali Latifi: I'm a journalist, and I have to wonder what the
world is saying. Obviously, there's no way to check, but I
still have to ask, has it made the news? Are people talking
about it? Am I being bombarded with media requests I can't
possibly respond to? Do they know I can't respond?
As the hours pass, all any of us can do is constantly check our
phones as we slowly realize how many simple things we can no
longer do. In Mazar Sharif, Afghanistan's main city in the
North, Syed notices just how much financial transactions are
affected.
Saeed: The money exchanges were shut, financial services overall
were halted, banks were closed, there was no real access to
money.
Ali Latifi: Samir from the western city of Herod, one of
Afghanistan's business and touristic hubs, notices that the
17 kilometer road leading to the airport is strangely quiet.
Samir: Flights were all canceled. No flights in or out
of Iraq.
Ali Latifi: Though I myself live only a few minutes from Kabul
International, airplanes didn't even cross my mind. At least not
until I unexpectedly run into a friend I hadn't seen in what
seemed like years after getting takeaway from a Yemeni
restaurant. If you can't have the Internet, you can at least
have chicken kabzah. Masood and I are sitting in the tables
outside the ice cream shop. We're talking about our primary
concern, the fact that the ATMs are all off and neither of us
ever bothered to open a bank account in Afghanistan.
This means I have to come back every few hours and check if the
machines are working again. At least I'm getting my steps in.
Over pistachio and vanilla ice cream at the mall, I tell Masud
that if the ATMs don't reopen, I'll have to ask a rich doctor
relative for a cash loan to tide me over. It all brings me back
to August 2021 when the Taliban had just returned to power and
the entire financial system was in disarray.
Speaker 8: People's access to banks and to cash remains a real
problem. The banks have largely remained closed. When they are
open, there are strict limits on how much you can withdraw.
Ali Latifi: At the time, I had to beg my employer to send me US
dollars because I was down to the equivalent of $11 in
Afghanis. The effects of this Internet shutdown are much
worse, though.
Suha: Business online. There is Instagram. I ran an online
clothing business via Instagram, and I had clients who had orders
that needed to be delivered for their events on those days.
Ali Latifi: Suha, the online entrepreneur, says it costs her
hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars in business.
Suha: But I couldn't get their orders to them because I
couldn't even get in contact with the delivery companies who
would deliver their orders. By the time the Internet was
restored, most of them had canceled their orders because
they needed them on those specific dates for their events.
And since I couldn't deliver their orders on time, they just
canceled them entirely. For
Ali Latifi: a small business in Kabul, even that much can have a
devastating effect. I've gone to Ramin, a tailor, to sew
everything from avani clothes to sheets for years and he reminds
me how small businesses are so interlinked. When I enter the
store he's talking to another colleague while staring intently
at a sheet of measurements. A client had an event to go to
that night, and they were trying to remember how he wanted his
clothes cut. Only there was no way to reach him.
Ramin: He invited 700 people to this wedding. Only 200 show up.
500 people didn't come the wedding. We had a bunch of
customers, who had events on that time and just had to cancel
them.
Ali Latifi: It's not just small businesses, though. Mohammad, an
NGO worker, said the macroeconomic effects were
sprawling.
Mohammad: For instance, businesses that had goods coming
from outside, their products were stacked at customs because
imports and exports were stopped.
Ali Latifi: Samir lives in Herat, a province that lies
directly along the 921 kilometer border with Iran. He saw just
how much cross border trade, whether that be goods or
currency exchanges, were affected.
Samir: The money exchange were left with nothing to do to find
out the exchange rates. The exchange will have to go all the
way to Islamabad border until the Internet actually was
restored. Every day at 8AM, something like a thousand cars
would go to border and stay until two 02:30 in the
afternoon.
Ali Latifi: Faid from Mazor E Sharif, considered one of
Afghanistan's main connection points to Central Asia, said
being cut off from regional trade also affected domestic
markets.
Ramin: People
Saeed: had no idea how to price things, what to sell something
for, whether it was the commodities or money markets. It
was all shut. No one knew how to price things.
Samir: But
Ali Latifi: you didn't have to travel far to see the impacts.
Even the most basic aspects of daily social life are impacted.
Saeed: You know how we are. If someone goes out and they are
even a little late, we are quick to call them and see where they
are. But, obviously, no one could get any information. We
had to do, like, back in the day and send someone out to the
street to find out where that person was.
Ali Latifi: What Saiz is describing is something that
annoys all Afghans, the fact that your parents are constantly
calling. Some people, though, had actual reasons to be
concerned with the fact that you couldn't even make a phone call
to check on a relative or a friend. Hamed, an NGO worker in
Kabul, says a colleague of his lived through what we were all
so afraid of, not being able to get in contact during an actual
emergency situation.
Hamed: One of my colleagues in the office lives in Kabul, but
he is from Khazni province. And that very morning, his mother
had died. Since phones were not working either, his brother had
to come to Kabul. When he got to the house, his family informed
him that his brother was in the office. So he went to the
office, but even there, since he couldn't call his brother to
come out, he was denied entry to the office.
He had to create quite a scene and finally, when the security
came out to talk to him directly, explain the situation.
It took until noon to sort out, and then they headed to Khazni.
By the time they reached Khazni, the funeral of their late mother
had almost taken place. So these were the issues, and all had
such challenges.
Ali Latifi: Farah, who works for an Internet provider, says being
cut off came at an especially trying time for her. She had
just lost her father a few days prior. With no Internet or
mobile phone access, she felt utterly alone at one of the most
difficult times of her life. Given the uncertainty and
confusion that had gripped the city, Farah said she couldn't
even will herself to go out and try to find her friends herself.
But some people seem to find the strangest silver linings.
Jabbar, a 22 year old student in Kabul, says when people aren't
scrolling through their phones, they can actually look at one
another, even talk to each other.
Jabar: What else is there to do?
Ali Latifi: Well, whatever happened to that game we used to
play before television was invented? It was called
conversation. In the twenty first century, mobile phones
have clearly replaced television, especially in the
Islamic Emirate where so much of what can be broadcast is so
tightly regulated.
Jabar: The shutdown of the Internet did have some benefits.
Though, because people's addiction to the Internet was
very real, people weren't speaking to one another or
hanging out with each other in person. This did create the
opportunity for people to actually have to sit down and
talk with one another directly for a few days instead of being
glued to the Internet to find time for their families.
Ali Latifi: Turns out, other people were thinking pretty much
the same thing Because within hours of the Internet being
restored on the afternoon of October 1, there was a video on
TikTok that said pretty much the same thing.
Speaker 13: Baba Sameer. Baba Sameer. The Internet is fixed.
The Internet is fixed? Really?
Yes. Forget it. What do you need with the Internet? For the two
nights that there was no Internet, I sat with my family.
They're such good people.
My little nephew has gotten so big. I swear to God, now I know
I have a family.
Ali Latifi: October 1 also happens to be Jabbar's birthday.
I'm on my way there for dinner when I stop outside a samosa
shop to buy some for the gathering. From the corner of my
eye, I see something I haven't seen in forty eight hours. A man
is speaking Pashto into his phone. Clocking that I'm
incredulous, the Samosa seller says in Pashto, yeah, it just
came back.
I immediately check my phone. There are bars. I start to get
alerts from WhatsApp, Instagram, Outlook. Before the food comes
up, I'm on my phone. The first thing I do is call my mother in
California.
After she scolds me for a few seconds, she asks me for the
details of what it's like. She's surprisingly speaking of it like
some kind of neighborhood gossip rather than a test of a nation's
endurance in the twenty first century. Walking to the birthday
party, I see everyone joyfully looking at their phones, calling
and happily posing for their first post in two days. When I
get to the party, it's all documented on Facebook,
WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat. I'm taken by how
quickly everything returns to normal.
Almost as if the last forty eight hours were all just
Speaker 13: Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
Ali Latifi: Less than thirty minutes after everything turns
back on, everyone is back on their phones. It's a cacophony
of TikTok videos and Instagram reels that fill the room. The
fervor, confusion, and worry are all gone. Everyone is sated once
again. I was sitting there watching men and women, young
and old, boomers to Gen X to millennials to Gen Z, all
returning to normal.
I'm struck by how quickly and easily everyone falls back into
their old habits. Maybe I'm naive, but I had just spent the
last few weeks helping with the coverage of Gen z protests that
led to the downfall of the government in Nepal, something
that was kick started by a proposed social media ban. A
year prior, I had helped cover the downfall of Bangladesh's
autocratic leader, Sheikh Hasina, which came after weeks
of youth led protests. Similar Gen Z protests had taken place
across Indonesia and The Philippines. I had hoped that in
Afghanistan, after forty eight hours of being cut off from each
other and the whole world, there would be at least something
more.
If not anger and people taking to the streets, then at least
people discussing what had happened, thinking about it, any
reaction. It didn't have to be anger, but just something to
show that a major unprecedented world event had just taken place
for all of us. But it turns out in Afghanistan, we were all just
happy to be back online. I think back to the song. By the next
morning, October 2, I'm at a cafe, MacBook and iPhone in
hand.
There is some lingering talk, mostly, wasn't that weird? And
I'm glad it's back, but that's really the most of it. I'm left
to wonder, is this the end result of our social media
obsessed society? Have we really become the humans in Wall E,
gluttonous and obsessed with what's in front of our faces?
Have we as a global society become like the resident of
Aldous Huxley's London, hooked to Soma?
In this case, content on Instagram, on TikTok, and
YouTube. Or in a country that in my parents' lifetime saw an
absolute monarchy turn to a constitutional one, to pseudo
democracy, to Soviet occupied communism, to a majority led
government, to the first Taliban Islamic Emirate, to an
approximation of Western democracy under US occupation,
to a second Taliban run Islamic Emirate, have people just
started to feel helpless and hopeless. The truth is I can't
say I blame them. If the last few months have taught us
anything, it's that this didn't end with the Islamic Emirate.
Only a couple of weeks prior to Afghanistan's Internet blackout,
pundits and politicians in The US were seriously questioning
whether the Internet was to blame for the public killing of
conservative firebrand, Charlie Kirk.
In 1999, video games and rock stars and to a lesser extent of
still fledgling Internet were cast with the blame for
Columbine. In 2025, the Internet and social media became the
alleged accelerant of what was being billed as an inevitable
spate of political killings.
Speaker 13: When you consider that young men are often
carrying out these kinds of acts of violence after becoming
radicalized online.
Speaker 14: I believe that social media has played a direct
role in every single assassination and assassination
attempt that we have seen over the last five, six years.
Ali Latifi: Australia banned social media for anyone 16. They
say they'll help any other country implement such policies.
India imposed a three hour deadline for platforms to delete
anything the Modi government, which has long been accused of
disenfranchising and abusing religious minorities, finds to
be false or misleading. Joseph Gordon Levitt, the star of one
of my favorite romantic comedies, The Five Hundred Days
of Summer, called for section two thirty to be repealed. It
protects companies from facing lawsuits over content users post
on their platforms.
Larry Ellison, the noted Zionist and a close associate of
Benjamin Netanyahu purchased TikTok in The US, a move that is
lauded by everyone from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. It
also resulted in allegations of censorship of pro Palestine
voices on TikTok. The Islamic Emirate may have been the most
stringent and the most sudden with their actions, but they're
far from the only government in the world trying to control
people's access to online content. In the end, we're still
not certain what happened in Afghanistan. The Islamic Emirate
acknowledged that communication was cut off for forty eight
hours.
But as usual, they stopped short of any real explanation of why
or how it happened. But maybe that's just it. As much as
governments are working to restrict and regulate Internet
access, the truth is it's become a part of our lives. When I sit
and watch my family and friends in Afghanistan and The US
scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, I realize
that it's come to mean so much to so many. To my family in The
US, it's their way of keeping track of daily life in
Afghanistan.
They watch YouTubers and influencers travel the country.
And then they ask me if I've been to the new million dollar
restaurant or if I went to the same earthquake stricken
villages of Herat and Pattikar they saw online. I'm old enough
to remember waking up in the middle of the night as my
parents screamed into the phone to check on relatives in
Peshawar or trying to make their way out of Toshkant on what
would be their long journey to the Bay Area suburbs I grew up
in. To my family, friends, and neighbors in Afghanistan, the
Internet is a window to the outside world, a world that
looks strange and confounding at times. How could Kendall and
Kylie let their father become a woman?
Why is the president of The United States blathering
incoherently at a debate? And most importantly, have I finally
managed to watch all of Naruto? Spoiler no. The Islamic Emirate
is certainly portrayed as the most nefarious to do it, but it
seems as if the lesson that the world learned from our forty
eight hours is kind of basic. Yeah.
The Taliban are bad, but we're not them. A Taliban led
government may get all the blame, but it seems like so many
others are moving far too quickly to strip their citizens
of rights to free speech and the Internet.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday,
March 19. Thank you so much to contributing producer Ali Latifi
for this story. Thanks also to our pseudonymous Afghans for
sharing their experiences. They were Suha, Farah, Saeed, Samir,
Ramin, Mohammed, Hamid, and Jabbar.
Thanks also to the folks who revoiced their tape in English.
Thank you to Sana Muradi, Fatima Hosseini, Haroun Rahimi, Nasir,
Ahmad Azizi, and Said. Did you know you can become a member of
Never Post for the low low low low low cost of $4 a month? It's
true. Head on over to neverpo.st and become a member today to
help us continue to make episodes like this one, which
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The more support we have, the more adventurous and the more
impactful stories we can produce. Neverpo.st, a measly $4
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Our senior producer is Hans Vutto. Our executive producer is
Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike
Krugnetta.
One, these are the vague demands you make on me. Two, that I
assemble. Two, recollect. Two, decode. Associate.
Three, that I admit fraught with difficulty. Reintegration is no
day at the beach in eggshell tints. The inmates start to get
brave and a little crazy when they hear that friendly voice,
the matron. Four, but that's also my mind lost. Her epic poem
on the constraints society places on the five,
misunderstood.
Excerpt of Sybil by Rebecca Wolf. Never Post is a production
of Charts and Leisure, and it's distributed by Radiotopia.