Watch what the pictures actually show, because the captions have stopped doing it for them. Since pumps began running dry last week, the dominant visual from Tehran is not a barricade. It is a line: small sedans nosing toward shuttered canopies at dusk, drivers leaning on open doors, an hour gone and a tank half-filled — the grammar of endurance, filmed vertically and posted with uprising hashtags attached. [1] Saturday's file documented those queues alongside Pahlavi's verdict that the hike is betrayal; the imagery since has deepened the patience, not broken it.

That gap between caption and content is where the reader gets mispriced. An uprising has a recognizable film language — squares, chants, confrontation, bodies against shields. None of it appears in the current feed. What appears is rationing by queue, patchy rather than total, some stations pumping while others sit dark, which is the signature of allocation strain, not revolt. [1] Even the government's signal — a price-hike warning steered onto sanctions eve — reads as a state managing expectations, not fleeing them. [2]

The regime answers in kind, with threat aesthetics instead of documentary: an outlet affiliated with the Supreme Leader's office published staged imagery of metal cages lowered over Emirati fuel tanks, which this paper filed Sunday, while commanders announced a 313,000-person internal security drill. [3] Two visual regimes now compete over the same streets.

The honest read sits between feeds. X needs 2019 to repeat itself. The footage keeps showing waiting rooms instead.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles