It all started at 10:40 p.m. on an otherwise quiet Sunday night. After talking about the Iranian election on and off for several hours (if not days, if not weeks), I saw a tweet that, with a depth of irony that is hard to fully grasp, pointed out the ridiculousness of CNN. As an obviously rigged election in one of the world’s most important countries was being perpetrated, America’s oldest 24-hour news network was reporting primarily about how confusing the new fangled digital TVs were.

“Dear CNN: please report about Iran, not Twitter. #cnnfail #iranelection,” nympholepsy wrote. The dual hashtags (the pound symbol before a topic) opened the door for me, a 25-year old who had never even traveled to the Middle East, to become an activist in Iran.

It was probably #cnnfail that appealed to me at first. I had seen in 2000, the first presidential election for which I was truly cognizant, how legitimate claims of voter suppression were ignored by the mainstream media as conspiracy theory. As a native of Ohio, I saw similar legitimate claims from my home state brushed under the rug.

If the media failed, the populace was complicit. There were no protests that rocked the stability of our government. No mass movements against the subversion of our democracy.

#iranelection did not have the luxury of our delusion. In advance of the ridiculously lopsided results, opposition headquarters were sacked, dissidents arrested. The Khamenei-Ahmadinejad government wanted to minimize any leaders who could lead a revolution against it. Unfortunately for them, this revolution did not need figure heads to lead them. The Ayatollah had not read the lessons of Moldova.

Through the power of social networking, individual Iranians were able to mobilize each other. Twitter hashtags created an instantaneous collectivity that could never be created by any mainstream media. When the government realized what was happening, they tried to shut it down. Members of the tech community across the globe did what they could to support it. We started posting functioning relays through which Iranians could subvert government firewalls. The spontaneity of the tech movement was also one of its weaknesses.

With so many updates at #iranelection, what relays (or proxies) were working and what were not became almost indiscernible. I started monitoring all the proxies and created a webpage that warehoused which were functioning and which were not. I asked people I had never met and never spoken to before to post @ me on Twitter any they knew of. And they did.

But that information was public. Anyone on Twitter could find it. Anyone could access the page I created. When the Guardian Council began monitoring tweets, other members of the community reported it and reported it to me. We had to adapt instantly to maintain the ability of the Iranian opposition to mobilize. Quickly, I set up a secure page. Instead of sending relays @ me publicly, I now asked for them to be sent via Direct Message (DM) or e-mail. They came in a flood.

My website has been attacked by Iran. My servers are melting. But individuals in the opposition are still able to use technology to mobilize each other. And the tech community around the world is still able to support them.

Now less than twenty-four hours later I am receiving over 2,000 simultaneous connections per second from Iran. When I wake up, I will have received over 300 e-mails from volunteers trying to contribute and lighting the path forward for a movement — both new and old.

Americans ignored the subversion of their democracy. When a people, better than us, stand up to secure theirs, I could not, I would not, let them down. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be tweeted.