Understanding the underlying mechanisms of the November 1998 riots in Iran has been the aim of this study, which has been conducted in the form of a qualitative research in the tradition of cultural studies. What we achieved was that poverty, inequality marginalization, job-instability, could not explain these events alone. Finally, by critically applying the conceptual tool of "pericaria" - and with the arguments in the text - we came to the conclusion that the occurrence of these unrests is traceable in the form of machine reactions through the formation and activation of a sense of "fear of poverty" among destabilizers of the active population.Understanding the underlying mechanisms of the November 1998 riots in Iran has been the aim of this study, which has been conducted in the form of a qualitative research in the tradition of cultural studies. What we achieved was that poverty, inequality marginalization, job-instability, could not explain these events alone. Finally, by critically applying the conceptual tool of "pericaria" - and with the arguments in the text - we came to the conclusion that the occurrence of these unrests is traceable in the form of machine reactions through the formation and activation of a sense of "fear of poverty" among destabilizers of the active population.