Every political order has its artifact, the object through which a human body becomes a legible subject. In the ancient city, it was the wall: to be inside was to be a citizen; to be outside was to be a stranger. In the modern state, it is the document: the birth certificate, the identity card, the passport, which inscribes the individual into the bureaucratic apparatus. In Iran today, it is neither. This past summer, when I returned to the country after years of living abroad and attempted to open a bank account, I was told I would first need a national identity card. When I went to obtain one, I learned that the prerequisite was a registered SIM card. Foreign SIM cards are blocked; without an Iranian one, a phone is inert, and its carrier functionally invisible. Without a SIM, I could not receive an ID; without the ID, I could not open a bank account. The wall, the document, the chip: each marks a shift not only in the technology of identification, but also in the relationship between the individual and the political order that claims authority over her. To become a citizen in Iran is to first become legible to a surveillance infrastructure. The threshold of civic existence is no longer architectural or even bureaucratic. It is electromagnetic.
Before the political revolutions of the eighteenth century, power was sovereign—it emanated from the body of the ruler and expressed itself through spectacle. Public executions, corporal punishment, the visible marking of the condemned: power was exercised on the body, in full view, as a demonstration of the sovereign’s right to take life. The scaffold was its architecture. What replaced the scaffold was the institution. The hospital, the school, the prison, the factory—each emerged not merely to confine or punish but to produce. Disciplinary power was not simply repressive but constitutive. The prison confined, but it also promised rehabilitation; the hospital administered pain, but it also healed; the school disciplined, but it also cultivated knowledge; the factory extracted labor, but it also produced the modern worker. Each institution operated through a double logic—coercion and care, subjugation and subject-formation—and it was precisely this duality that gave it legitimacy. Michel Foucault called the process assujettissement: subjection as both the imposition of external control and the production of subjectivity itself.1 Power no longer marked the body; it shaped it.
The architectural figure for this new order was Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a circular prison which Bentham believed was applicable to any institution: the factory, the school, the hospital. It was designed so that every inmate was visible from a central watchtower, yet could never confirm whether anyone was actually watching. The design’s genius was not in enforcing surveillance but in making enforcement unnecessary. The mere possibility of being observed was sufficient: inmates were to regulate their own behavior, to internalize the discipline that had previously required force. Visibility itself became the mechanism of control. Foucault saw in this figure the principle of discipline—power operating on individual bodies through spatial arrangement and internalized observation. But he saw, too, in the broader network of modern institutions, the emergence of what he called biopower: power that no longer threatens death but “takes life under its care,” operating on the individual body through discipline and on the population through regulation.2
Iran today presents the appearance of such a modern state. It has hospitals, schools, universities, a national telecommunications infrastructure, a centralized digital identity system, and a vast network of surveillance cameras and biometric databases. The institutional architecture of a disciplinary society is in place. But the logic that animates these institutions is not disciplinary. The cameras that line the streets of Tehran do not produce self-governing citizens; they enable targeted punishment. The databases do not serve the optimization of public health or education; they identify dissenters. The SIM card that constitutes the threshold of civic identity does not integrate the individual into a system of mutual obligation; it renders her permanently visible to a sovereign authority. The Islamic Republic has constructed the form of disciplinary modernity without its premise: the infrastructure of surveillance and institutional management, severed from the Enlightenment contract that once justified it—the promise that power, in taking life under its care, would produce autonomous subjects rather than obedient ones. What remains is the apparatus without its raison d'être. Surveillance without subjectification. The machinery of discipline in the service of the sovereign.
This logic is embodied in the fabric of the city. Following the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022, police in Isfahan—a city whose bridges, mosques, and public squares have for centuries gathered and sustained collective life—deployed portable IMSI catchers and contactless card readers at intersections that silently harvested identifying data from the phones and national ID cards of passersby.3 Women across the country have received threatening text messages from the state for having been identified by surveillance cameras as appearing in public without the hijab. Security cameras mounted on buildings share live feeds with government authorities; cell towers triangulate the movements of every registered device. These are not metaphors for control. They are technical artifacts, installed in urban space as deliberately as a streetlight or a traffic signal, yet operating beneath the threshold of visibility. A checkpoint announces itself; a cell tower does not. A wall declares its boundary; a data-harvesting device captures without disclosure. The city appears open while functioning as an enclosure.
What has emerged is a second city, coextensive with the physical one but organized by an entirely different logic. In this urban order, a resident’s location is not determined by the street she walks on but by the signal her phone transmits. Her path is not recorded in the wear of pavement but in a sequence of data points relayed to a centralized network. The public square—for centuries the site of civic gathering, political expression, and collective life—is no longer defined by its spatial boundaries but by the density of signals that pass through it. When protesters gathered across Iran late last December, the state did not need to see them from a watchtower or even a CCTV camera. It read their locations from their phones. Days later, many received text messages informing them that their presence at “illegal gatherings” had been noted and that they were under “intelligence monitoring.”4 The message was explicit: you were seen, not by eyes, but by infrastructure.
In Bentham’s panopticon, architecture and power occupied the same body; to be inside the building was to be inside the apparatus. In Iran today, the political apparatus has detached from the architectural enclosure. It no longer requires walls, towers, or even lines of sight. It operates through signals, frequencies, data—an invisible architecture superimposed on the visible one, indifferent to the form of streets or the shape of structures. The physical city persists—its boulevards, its squares, its buildings—but it is no longer the primary medium through which power apprehends urban space. The city has been doubled: the city of concrete and the city of signals; the city you walk through and the city that walks through you.
Nowhere is this inversion more legible than in the hospital. The modern hospital, as Foucault described in The Birth of the Clinic, was not merely a place of healing but an epistemological project—the institution through which the body became an object of systematic knowledge.5 The clinical gaze, the physical examination, the case file, the X-ray: each was a technology for rendering the interior of the body visible and legible to institutional authority. The hospital was where biopower operated most explicitly in its dual capacity—it confined the patient, but it also cared for her; it subjected the body to examination, but it also produced the knowledge that would heal it. To enter a hospital was to submit to a regime of visibility, but that visibility was directed, at least in principle, toward the preservation of life. The hospital was the architecture of biopower’s promise: that surveillance serves care, that knowledge serves health, that the institution that sees into you does so in order to save you.
In Iran, that promise has been systematically dismantled. In January, government-run hospitals across the country became extensions of the security apparatus. Agents followed the wounded into emergency wards and detained them in hospital beds. Officers entered operating rooms. Doctors who offered to treat the injured were arrested.6 To be wounded was to be marked; to seek healing was to be found. The institution designed to take life under its care had become the site where life was most efficiently captured. Yet the response by those who still practiced care was architectural in the most elemental sense. When it could no longer be trusted to heal, medicine evacuated the hospital. Networks of doctors and volunteers began treating the wounded in living rooms, kitchens, restaurants—spaces never designed for surgery, conscripted into service because the medical institution had become lethal. Convoys transported the injured hundreds of miles to safe operating rooms, moving through the night along back roads, navigating a geography defined not by distance but by the location of checkpoints. The hospital had not disappeared. It still stood, still functioned, still received patients. But its institutional logic had been so thoroughly commandeered by sovereign power that the practice of care was forced into fugitive architectures—improvised, mobile, illegible to the state.
And yet visibility cuts both ways. In hospitals across the country, medical records have been tampered with or destroyed by security forces; hospital systems have been purged of entries; the streets, as one witness described, have been washed of blood.7 But the images persist. Medical workers began quietly assembling their own records—photographing CT scans, X-rays, and surgical evidence on their personal devices, preserving what the regime sought to erase. An X-ray showing a bullet lodged in a shattered femur. A brain scan revealing a metal pellet that blinded a nurse as she exited a hospital. These imaging technologies were built to diagnose—to render visible the pathology hidden within the body so that it might be treated. They still diagnose, but the disorder they now reveal is not biological; it is political. The bullet lodged in a femur, the metal pellet embedded behind an eye—these are symptoms of a pathology that originates not in the body but in the body politic, its violence deposited in the tissue of its citizens. The technology that was meant to make the body transparent to care has become the medium through which the body bears witness against the state. The regime that constructed an invisible infrastructure to see through the city finds its own violence made visible by the architecture of the institution it betrayed.
The SIM card is the smallest unit of this architecture—at once an instrument of communication and mechanism of capture; the threshold of citizenship and technology of control. It registers its holder on a network in which connection and surveillance are indistinguishable, and in this it mirrors the contemporary condition of the Iranian city itself: infrastructure that appears to serve its inhabitants while rendering them permanently legible to a power that has no interest in their formation, only in their location. Here, the infrastructure of modernity is deployed according to the logic of sovereignty. Modern tools, pre-modern aims. The hospital that captures rather than heals, the public square that surveils rather than gathers, the SIM card that registers rather than connects—each is an instrument of modern governance wielded by a power that has renounced the promise that once justified it. This is a SIM city.
The apparatus in this system, to borrow from Giorgio Agamben, has migrated from the institution to the mundane device, the size of a fingernail, that captures and orients behavior.8 What subject does the SIM city produce? Not a disciplined citizen but a paranoid one; a subject defined not by what she can do in public but by what she must subtract from it, whose formation consists in learning to absent herself. This is not a disciplinary society but an anti-disciplinary one. The architecture of modern institutions, emptied of their constitutive function, persists as infrastructure through which sovereign power reaches not for the formation of subjects, but for their location, identification, and capture. The subject it produces is not formed but de-formed—stripped of public presence, constituted by the trace she cannot erase. It is the evacuation not only of the public square, the hospital ward, and the city street, but of the public itself.
When I left Iran last summer at the start of the Twelve-Day War, with flights grounded, I drove fourteen hours through the night from Tehran toward the Turkish border, across a darkening landscape that offered no indication of where one sovereignty ended and another began. Somewhere in the northwest hills, before any gate or checkpoint or stamped document came into view, my phone stirred—a foreign SIM, dormant for weeks inside Iran, invisible to the network but never beyond it. A flood of signals from across the border had found the device before the device had crossed it. My body was still in Iranian territory, but my phone had already departed. The electromagnetic frontier preceded the physical one, and in that disjunction—between the body that had not yet arrived and the signal that already had—the entire logic of the contemporary border disclosed itself. The border I crossed that night was neither stone nor paper: it was a frequency—not the edge of a network but the seam between two. The city of signals has no walls. But it has no outside either.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 170–194.
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 253.
Adam Satariano et al., “Iran Turns to Digital Surveillance Tools to Track Down Protesters,” The New York Times, February 13, 2026.
Satariano et al., “Iran Turns to Digital Surveillance Tools.”
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).
Cora Engelbrecht, “Even the Hospitals Aren’t Safe in Iran,” The New Yorker, February 11, 2026. See also Cora Engelbrecht, “Hundreds of Protesters in Iran Blinded by Metal Pellets and Rubber Bullets,” The New York Times, November 19, 2022.
Ibid.
Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford University Press, 2009).
