Insecure adjunct professor threatens to call police over...my blog (!). For the record I've never, ever in any fashion, "threatened" this thin-skinned academic; meanwhile, she has written denunciations of me to my employers.
Sarah Kendzior, an anthropologist and loyal supporter of the controversial Registan.net, has done it again. Although she's threatened to actually call the police over my criticism of her ideas (!), I'm not going to be intimidated.
While everybody else everywhere is marveling at the fact that Uzbekistan is blocking Wikipedia, and implicitly condemning this Internet predation, Kendzior is claiming that in fact it's a work of "performance art" and spinning the incident.
At the end of her handling of the story, you are supposed to conclude that a) nothing really bad happened after all and b) the regime is actually sort of cuddly, because it does pathetically awkward and humorous things like this.
Isn't that what always happens at Registan where inevitably, the reader is always driven to leave the regimes alone and is distracted from the main point of their awfulness?
As for the "performance art" bit -- yeah, I get it's tongue-in-cheek, but it's actually a common trope of the liberal intelligentsia -- light ridicule of these regimes rather than a forthright acknowledgement of their sinister nature is often a way they cope with them and simultaneously minimize them (especially by contrast with the US, with they inevitably find more sinister).
Kendzior speculates -- and even by her own admission, without a shred of evidence -- that what was really bothering the Uzbek censors were some articles on sex -- those were apparently recent entries. To be sure, there have been a number of morality crackdowns lately -- the vetting of rap lyrics; the behaviour code for students; the shuttering of lingerie stores. So sure, maybe this, too, although the thought that people even on the Uzbek filtered Internet are getting their porn thrills by reading...Wikipedia seems like rather a tall story.
Kendzior is among the writers on Registan who remind us that Russian is dwindling, that it has lost its influence, that young people don't speak it anymore. That's why it's especially funny that this time, she wheels out the theory that people are going to read the Russian pages of Wikipedia from Uzbekistan, making the blocking of the Uzbek pages pointless -- and thereby minimizing the regime's actions.
I actually think Russian isn't dwindling in Uzbekistan or Central Asia (maybe because I see people speak and write it all the time especially in international or regional contexts?) and that they do read the Russian pages, but that's not the point.
Sarah is only thinking of what people passively may *read* on Wikipedia in Uzbek. I think the regime is likely much more worried that they will *write* in Uzbek on Wikipedia. It's a whole realm of do-it-yourselve editing that opens up a real challenge to a regime like Tashkent has, with special agencies filtering the press and social media and controlling every publication. (Of course, there is a cabal at the English language Wikipedia that controls everything, particularly ruling on controversial articles, and they are authoritarian and non-accountable much like a regime, but that's another story).
There's also the fact that the articles in Uzbek offensive to the regime aren't necessarily things like "Islam Karimov," about which there is almost nothing, or "Mohammad Salih" -- ditto -- but things outside of Uzbekistan, like "Arab Spring" or "Syria". I don't read Uzbek, but even I can tell that the "Arab Spring" article looks longer than anything in the Uzbek media -- which is zero.
An Uzbek on Twitter has also explained that the Uzbeks, even if they know English or Russian, are likely to search in Uzbek, and the regime doesn't want all the searches in Uzbek leading to Wikipedia (which is what happens with the Google algorithms -- they are fixed so as to reward Wikipedia because it remains at the top of the search returns due to...always being at the top of the search returns and linked the most.)
Once you decide that your job is not to explain away what the Uzbek regime is doing, and your job is not to minimize what they are doing or ridiculing it so as to make it seem harmless, your mind can be opened to seeing what may have driven them. I think that the writing of Wikipedia itself in unapproved ways, and possibly the Arab Spring type material may have been a factor. And I think the idea that the killing of search as a factor also makes sense.
Now, so I don't have to write a whole separate post on the topic of this curious academic, let me point out here that Sarah Kendzior has a history of not only writing pieces strangely...evasive about the regime's nature, she also has an utter inability to stand the slightest criticism about this (she is in a milieu in Registan where she doesn't get any, and most likely in her provincial college as well).
That may account for her incredibly wild and thin-skinned response to first my disagreement with her take on Ethan Zuckerman's "cute cat theory of the Internet", then my normal and legitimate criticism of her strange thesis, in tandem with Katy Pearce, another authoritarian, outlined in an article titled "This Can Happen to You," regarding the supposed properties of human rights reporting on the Internet as retardants on political protest and the increase in use of the Internet and even a factor in decreasing use and slowing incremental reform. I found that an unsupportable thesis in many ways.
Kendzior and Pearce attacked me on Twitter as suffering from "poor analysis" for this legitimate criticism; Pearce went on later to accuse me of "sloppy analytics" because I...reportedly accurately that there was a surge of membership on Facebook in Uzbekistan. There was. Kendzior fussed that there was a slow in growth rate, failing to concede the larger significance. Maybe because that didn't fit her thesis -- there is plenty of human rights reporting on Facebook about Uzbekistan in the Uzbek and Russian languages, and it hasn't retarded membership, which surged and slowed for other reasons -- one, the lowering of cost, and two, the natural progression of tech adaptation and the fact that cost is still 10 cents a day for Facebook (!).
Kendzior and Pearce then went further, the more I resisted their claims, and wrote to my editor to denounce me -- they did this both publicly, on Twitter, and privately. This is HUGELY CREEPY and everyone in this field should be conscious of this really outrageous act -- a curious collusion between Registan and EurasiaNet about which I will have more to say in the future.
The Registan's barrage of hate-tweets and police-state like denunciations like Komsomol informants led to a demand from EurasiaNet management that I cease tweeting or speaking on social media at all about the whole region of Central Asia (!) -- something that after following for a time, I rejected as unfair and unnecessary because a) the management has no policy, written or unwritten, about social media; b) freelancers cannot be expected to hew to some corporate policy about social media in any event c) nothing in my speech was offensive, i.e. it was not obscene or extreme.
I do fight back, especially when I'm repeatedly put in an unfair situation without recourse, and I do call names that summarize the situation -- in this case, I called Sarah Kendzior an "office wife" for Registan because of her protective stance toward Joshua Foust, who has made numerous outrageous attacks on all kinds of people and is notorious for this on Twitter and blogs. Far from finding it somehow a culpable action, I defended calling her an office wife and will go on doing so. And BTW I did this *after* Nathan Hamm of Registan deliberately sent a tweet to the front page of EurasiaNet on December 26 calling my normal and legitimate defense of Martha Brill Olcott and calling out of Foust's hypocrisy as a "black mark against EurasiaNet" (!).
That sort of mild put-down was nothing like the speech I was subjected to and the false claims made about me using obscenities -- in fact it was Nathan Hamm, the manager of Registan, using them.
But it can and does get worse.
The other day, a Twitfight broke out against with Nathan, who runs the @registan_net account on Twitter (the style is definitely his).
During this exchange, Kendzior wrote the most outlandish stuff. She claimed that I was "stalking" her -- merely because I have written several critical blogs about her ideas, which I find curiously enabling of the regimes of Central Asia in ways that just do not seem justified.
Example: her refusal to include in the hypotheses about the culprits for the suicide student's hoax the very likely possibility that the SBU planted the story itself to discredit emigres and human rights activists -- not, as she implies, one emigre discrediting another emigre in an atmosphere riddled with distrust. Example: her conversion of the very real problem of the real SBU's surveillance and persecution into a kind of virtuality that infects trust in communities -- among her pet theses -- and the promotion of a story involving the harassment of two students, but without any real checking of the story nor condemnation of the acts of the SBU (and a faux "even-handedness" to allow regime boosters to trample over these students in the comments).
Kendzior has -- outrageously -- even tweeted that her friends had urged her to go to the police over my criticism of her on my blog (!!!).
When people become this crazed, you can chalk it up to terrible provincial insularity and thin-skinned intolerance of criticism and also a tendency to dramatize and go into hysterics to gain sympathy rather than to speak to the issues. It's a common Internet technique and Sarah has learned it well -- she is a product of the Internet she purports to study.
That someone could actually write that they thought they should call the police because a blog criticized their ideas is just so far-fetched and so weird that you just don't know where to put it. And so I document it and publicize it because that's the only way you can address the effort to silence speech.
