Accounting for the discrepancy between the state’s vision of an “Islamic culture” and today’s actually existing popular culture in Iran has led to a proliferation of writings on Iranian media and popular culture in which the latter is bifurcated into two categories of “official culture” and “unofficial culture.” In such writings, the privileging of “cyberspace”/online content or the “underground” culture, and other elite cultural forms that tend to travel easily outside Iran, facilitates the bifurcation of culture rather neatly. Arguing against such views, this paper posits that state’s cultural, media and social policies have created a context in which popular culture, performed in everyday practices, engages and challenges politics on the very terms set by the state. With a sharper focus on the politics of culture, the paper argues that the performance of citizenship is facilitated by the affordances of the technologies of citizenship, a “citizenship” that is constrained, accommodated, subversive, and at times joyful. The performance of citizenship, in the form of self-expression as politics, media activism, subversive “textual” entry points to politics, culture jamming, and semiotic vandalism are all facilitated by the technological affordances of new media and legacy media embedded in the same social space.