Few observers of the war on Iran have been as incisive as Narges Bajoghli, an anthropologist whose work on the politics of the media has enlarged our understanding of the Islamic Republic. We spoke to her about her recent reporting on the youthful, knowing animated videos churned out by affiliates of the Iranian regime, which function both as surreal propaganda and parody.

Equator: Tell us about these videos. Why are they so interesting?

Above all, they work. They meet people where they already are. Take the missile video. It’s under a minute long. It moves through a sequence of figures – a Native American man, a Vietnamese villager, a child from Palestine, someone from Hiroshima, an Iranian schoolgirl killed in a strike on her school; each one is chosen with surgical precision to land for a specific community. The Epstein imagery is the key that unlocks a door that was already open. It doesn’t feel like you’re watching Iranian state media. You’re watching something that feels like it was made for you, by someone who understands exactly what you were already feeling. That’s new.

You’ve been studying IRGC media for almost two decades. How was the old media different?

The old IRGC media was heavy, elegiac – martyrdom in slow motion, set to music that trafficked in the symbolic vocabulary of Shia Islam. These videos are in English. They use AI animation, trap beats, LEGO aesthetics. They enter conversations that are already happening – about Gaza, Epstein, American hypocrisy – rather than starting new ones. Because of that, they travel in ways that no amount of institutional pushing could achieve.

How is the younger generation making these videos different, and how did they come to be on the “front lines”?

The older generation – men like the filmmaker I call Reza, who fought as teenagers in the Iran-Iraq War – built Iran’s media apparatus out of genuine conviction and genuine trauma. They had seen what American military power could do up close. Their defiance was always shadowed by an awareness of what confrontation could cost. They made media that expressed resistance, but it was a resistance tempered by caution.

The younger generation grew up with an entirely different relationship to American power. They came of age watching Iranian-backed forces outlast and outmanoeuvre the US across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. They didn’t carry their fathers’ inferiority complex. They were less interested in Iran-as-martyr than Iran-as-victor. And crucially, they grew up online – running social-media campaigns for businesses in their off hours, watching what went viral on platforms the state officially condemned, learning in their bones how attention moves.

What accelerated their ascent was the assassinations and targeted killings of the past 18 months, which removed institutional gatekeepers – the fathers who had always told the younger filmmakers their work wasn’t “serious enough.” Hierarchies that move slowly suddenly had to move fast. A new generation was emergent, and they had grown up online

And they’re fluent in western idioms …

Totally. A few years ago, IRGC-adjacent media that tried to use western idioms often did so with a visible seam – you could feel the effort. What’s different now is that these filmmakers aren’t imitating western visual culture. They’re native to it. They grew up on the same internet, the same films, the same meme formats. The LEGO Movie’s plot – a resistance movement against a tyrant – was there, already available, already beloved by the audience they were trying to reach. You don’t appropriate a language you grew up speaking. That seamlessness is new.

How would you describe this new “digital public” – and to what extent was it brought into being by Gaza?

This is the question I find myself returning to every morning when I open my research accounts. What I’m watching is not a single public but a convergence – people who don’t think of themselves as politically aligned, sharing the same content without knowing it. Someone in Ohio who’s been following the Epstein files. Someone in Amman who has watched Gaza for two years and run out of patience for western lectures about proportionality. They’re receiving the same videos, and the videos were designed to fit into each of their existing conversations.

Is this new? The infrastructure isn’t – Telegram ecosystems, algorithmic amplification, the basic mechanics of virality. But the scale and the collapse of previously separate political communities into shared information flows: that does feel qualitatively different, and Gaza is the reason. The mainstream western media coverage of Gaza – the language of “both sides,” the institutional deference to Israeli government framing – was watched in real time by a generation that also had access to footage from Gaza itself. That experience didn’t just radicalise some people. It delegitimised the institutions those people had been told to trust. When AFP, the BBC, the New York Times are perceived as having failed – and that perception is widespread and not entirely wrong – western media loses the ambient credibility it usually coasts on. The IRGC’s media arm did not create that opening. Gaza did. They walked into a house that was already furnished.

What is the new language? Has anticolonialism become common sense again?

The Iranian Revolution in 1979 arrived at the end of a century shaped by anti-colonial struggle – it carried the energy of Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, Mozambique. Then it got trapped. The overriding message became one of religious martyrdom, Shia theological frameworks, the language of the umma – legible only to those already inside the tent.

What I’m watching now is a deliberate jailbreak from that vocabulary. Gone are the invocations of Karbala for western audiences. In their place: settler colonialism, occupation, genocide, anti-imperialism. The language of international human rights law and postcolonial theory – a vocabulary that anyone who paid attention in the past twenty years, anywhere in the world, already knows. You don’t need to know anything about Shia Islam to receive it. You need to have watched what happened in Gaza.

I think what’s happened is that the postcolonial intellectual tradition – which spent decades as the property of academic journals and activist margins – has become, through social media and through the lived experience of watching atrocities in real time, genuinely popular common sense for a generation of young people globally. The Iranian media operation didn’t invent that shift. They recognised it and are now fluent in it. The old anticolonialism isn’t new again exactly – it’s been downloaded and updated for a world where images travel instantly and the institutional gatekeepers of moral authority have lost their credibility.

I keep thinking of Hamid Dabashi and Peter Chelkowski’s Staging a Revolution, their account of visual culture in and around the 1979 revolution.

Dabashi and Chelkowski were documenting something that the Islamic Republic understood from its earliest days: that visual culture is not supplementary to political power but constitutive of it. The murals, the revolutionary posters, the aestheticization of martyrdom — these weren’t decoration. They were the architecture of a particular kind of political imagination.

What I’m tracking now is a continuation of that project by people who were raised inside it and have also been raised inside something else entirely: the global visual culture of the internet. The LEGO animations, the AI-generated movie trailers, the trap beats – these are not a departure from the tradition Dabashi and Chelkowski documented. They are its latest iteration, executed by people who understand that the battlefield has shifted to attention itself.