This is not the first time that fundamental citizenship rights, such as the right of access to the internet, have been transformed into rent and special privilege. This is a recurring pattern of social control in a society whose people have for years been forced to struggle for even the simplest of their citizenship rights.

Anyone who imagines that “rent” is merely a form of economic corruption does not understand the depth of its function in authoritarian systems. In such systems, rent is an instrument for organizing social life.
As a “method of social organization,” rent always operates according to the same logic and through the same sequence. First, a “public right” is restricted. Then an exceptional and privileged version of that same right is created for groups closer to power. Finally, that privilege becomes an instrument of loyalty, wealth and political control.

From education and study to employment and the media, and from business licences and bank loans to cultural permissions for books and films, these are all citizenship rights that have been transformed into special privileges for controlling society. Sometimes they are granted as rewards, and sometimes they are gifts intended to manufacture loyalty.

It is therefore power that determines who may learn, who may speak, who may work, who may be seen, who may remain connected to the world, and who must live in silence, under repression and in imposed darkness.

Perhaps the bitterest part of this diabolical mockery of humanity is that people who have been deprived of their rights for years are now compelled to stand in line for each fragment of those same rights as a privilege, each in some way exchanging conscience and human dignity for that privilege—and then feeling fortunate because they have “won” in the transaction and obtained a special advantage. It is the feeling that there exists a degree of misery from which they have been permitted to remain exempt.

When the story of the so-called “white SIM cards” became public, it emerged that thousands of people had silently benefited from this privilege without any of them even telling close friends that such an advantage existed. The same pattern has operated for decades in education, cultural licensing, bank loans and the right to study.

And this is exactly the point at which every citizen must begin resistance. The greatest danger of rent is not that it produces illegitimate wealth and social position. Its greatest danger is that it produces a controlled conscience: a conscience that becomes permanently lost between truth and falsehood; a conscience that forever mistakes freedom for a golden key to a larger cage and may even become grateful to the jailer for making the cage larger.

Aydin Areta