The Virtual Shepherd

I was quite successfully doing this because I realized that there was ample availability of drugs, and that people had treatment centers and so-called addiction treatment camps even in remote areas, when I met the brother of a person who had a drug problem; and this brother happened to be the virtual shepherd later. Everyone in the valley referred to him as a shepherd hooked on his smartphone. They called him the virtual shepherd, chopan mojazi in Persian, because what he did most of the time was being on his Telegram channel, dealing with various chat groups and conversations, and talking about "the virtual" — this was the term he used all the time to anybody and everyone.

I was introduced to him and I started hanging out with him in a proper ethnographic fashion for months on end. Every year I would go to the valley for about a month or two and spend time with him and film. And after the first year, I started filming and using the camera in the fieldwork.

Everything was really interesting, and in a way, my drug addiction work started to intersect with screen addiction, which at the time was a very rare category used to refer to people. But I was quite convinced from early days that screen addiction would be the next big issue that we would have to deal with. He is in a valley very remote in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is disconnected for the most part from global capitalist regulations and products. And nonetheless, in his solitude, in his absence of human interactions on a regular basis, the phone becomes a projection of his desires, of the things that he wants to achieve.

In part, he consumes this information that comes to him through the phone, in a way giving him the possibility of tasting, of experiencing things that otherwise would have been impossible for him. There is a sort of ambiguous phenomenon, but ultimately quite disconnecting at the same time, quite isolating in the long term. In fact, in the case of the virtual shepherd, ultimately, he was quite alienated from the rest of the community, where he was perceived as someone who couldn't keep up a job like shepherding. And he eventually, as I described in the final scene of the film, had a mental breakdown and ended up using crystal meth and ending up in a treatment camp. Once he got out of that treatment camp, he gave up his smartphone, and he no longer has a smartphone today. Quite a strange story in the end.

When it comes to drugs, of course, it's the play between the hormonal and chemical dependency that the body and the mind experience that often is described as bringing people back to use. In my view, it's all of these and more. Part of it is we come to define addiction as the things — or at least we used to — we used to call addiction the things we didn't like. For instance, people who used alcohol or people who used drugs that were illegal were "addicted" if they used them, whereas the things that were acceptable — coffee, tea, or habits that were seen as non-problematic — were not seen as addiction.

Nowadays, screens pose a challenge to this framework because screens are everywhere. All of us, in one way or the other, are addicts in practice. How many times do we check our phones? How many times do we go online? How many times do we think of looking at the phone? Well, most of humanity would qualify in one way or the other as an addict. In a way, it doesn't make any sense anymore probably to refer to this.

But perhaps addiction, exactly because of this, is a fundamental category to understand the present, the forms of life that have emerged under our globalized system. And that's why I refer to this as being deeply connected to the world of capitalism, in which recurrent habits generate profit. And in a way, we are being tested by them. We often end up, like the shepherd, going back to the phone.

His economic possibilities were extremely limited. He couldn't get married because he didn't have the money. He could go to a nearby town once a month, maybe to have a haircut or to visit a game center, these kinds of things. The phone was not only negative; it was actually something that made that life sustainable, you know, like worth living. At least, that's how I felt he perceived it.

The fact is that it's also a very powerful, powerful device. Smartphones and the internet in general are something that we have never had to deal with before — the amount of information, the rapidity of it, the speed, the fact that through the phone and the internet, you are everywhere at any time and you can be with anybody constantly. Your desires are never materialized, but always everywhere, and it's very difficult to manage such a powerful device.

I think that's why at this very moment in time, we have come to realize that this needs to be somehow contained. At least because if we understand the logic of capitalism as fundamentally driven by increasing profits, this powerful tool cannot be driven only by that, not for everyone, at any time, everywhere at least.

This is, in part, what also the author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, has been campaigning for as of recently. And it's becoming a widespread acknowledgment that in the past 20 years, we've been quite clueless about what to do with smartphones, and only now we are realizing that perhaps these powerful devices need to be somehow regulated, controlled, or to make sure that they are not simply and exclusively driven by profit and shareholders' desires.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2026