When United States President Trump threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Age”, it relied on familiar assumptions: that infrastructure marks the boundary between civilisation and barbarity, and that its destruction signals historical regression. Tehran’s response was immediate. A spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said that “the power of a ‘civilised nation’ lay not in ‘brute force’ but in ‘culture logic, and faith’”.However, something far more poignant unfolded alongside these exchanges – something less rhetorical and more lived. Across Iran, people began to gather around infrastructure. Much of what we came to know of these acts arrived not through official statements but short-form videos and circulating images. Social media made possible a form of witnessing in which distant viewers, like ourselves, participated in a unique form of protest. Except it didn’t feel like a protest.Why do people risk their lives not only for each other, but for bridges, power lines and infrastructure? When does infrastructure become an object of care, even devotion?Iranian musician Ali Ghamsari staged a sit-in outside the Damavand Power plant. The video footage of Ghamsari shows him first speaking to his viewers before beginning to play the tar. Behind Ghamsari stood the monumental outlines of industrial modernity – cooling towers and transmission lines. In the foreground: a single body, a wooden instrument and a set of vibrating strings. It was a poignant juxtaposition – a classical musical performance in defense of modern infrastructure. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Narges Mohammadi Foundation (@nargesfoundation)More images followed. Iranian composer and kamancheh player Hamidreza Afrideh was filmed performing atop rubble in Tehran, his instrument placed within the debris of the school he once taught at. In the video, he says, “I wanted the last sound that remains here to be music, not bombs and missiles.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hamidreza Afarideh (@hamidrezaafarideh)Civilians formed chains around bridges and power stations. These extended to fuel stations, municipal buildings and key transit routes. People stood shoulder to shoulder, some holding flags, others simply remaking the boundary – between military targets and life.Social media responses were not uniform. Some viewers suggested that such gatherings were coerced or orchestrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But even if these acts were shaped or amplified by state power, their form is revealing. These gatherings resembled less a politics of resistance than a custodial act: an investment in infrastructure as something like a shared inheritance.These gestures of attachment are not simply about national pride or patriotism. Here a useful counterpoint lies in India, where infrastructure often becomes the site of protest rather than protection. Movements such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan or popular protest against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant have shown how dams, reactors, and highways are experienced not as lifelines but as impositions – disruptive, unequal and extractive. In post-independence India, rural fiction and Adivasi poetry, has often depicted developmental infrastructure not as progress but as dispossession.In Iran, the image is inverted. Iranians are resisting the instrumentalisation of infrastructure much as their Indian counterparts have resisted infrastructure as extraction and dispossession. Protest and protection are forms of care under different conditions of threat.Infrastructure is loved not because it is a symbol of state power but because it is relational. What we are witnessing is a moment in which infrastructure ceases to be a distant state project and becomes a lived necessity. It is no longer something imposed by a totalitarian regime but something whose loss would make life unlivable. A bridge is not concrete; it is connection. Electricity is not simply a state project of universal electrification; it is time extended and the possibility of rest. Its absence is not just darkness but the contraction of humanity itself.Social media has made this care visible. Short format videos – Instagram reels, YouTube clips, Facebook posts – circulate these acts of protection far beyond their immediate sites. What might have remained local gestures became repeatable forms of collective witnessing. To film a power plant, to stand beside a bridge, to document their frailty – these are ways of showing that what is under threat is not just infrastructure, but the lives built around it.In these images, infrastructure is no longer an abstract measure of progress. It has become a fragile condition of collective life, defended not only by a defiant, belligerent state, but by the people who depend on it.Joya John teaches Literature at Krea University.