Different Stans

But the Donkey Bloggers Were Released from Prison After an Internet Campaign: the Troubling Thesis of Kendzior and Pearce

Donkey parody video which led to sentencing of Azeri bloggers to jail.

The troubling article by Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce published in the Journal of Communication is now published here behind a paywall, where it will cost you $35 to access the article for 24 hours. Just like those old heady days of reading samizdat overnight -- except for that $35 part! Needless to say, I can't spend a day's grocery bill on these newly-baked "networked authoritarianism" gurus, so I will see if I can either get it in the NY public library or perhaps someone will have a copy in their office. Funny, both of them complain about paid academic content and boost open source stuff on Twitter, but their own article will cost you.

I wrote about my concerns related to their article here and here -- prompting both Kendzior and Pearce not only to react with thin-skinned fury but to start attacking me for "poor analytical skills" etc. myself. Academia is a terribly closed society and they are exemplary of some of the worst aspects of it -- stifling criticism, suppressing critics (Sarah assists Nathan Hamm in moderating at Registan, and is responsible for my banning from that site for criticizing the notorious Joshua Foust).

Like Evgeny Morozov, Kendzior and Pearce are anti-utopianist regarding the Internet and take almost glee in informing you just how bad authoritiaran states suppress it and how foolhardy dissenters are to resist this. And like Morozov, they discount anything but their own grim message and essentially counsel scholars -- and by implication policy-makers -- to accept this status-quo and not attempt to change it or look for alternative narratives. In reacting to hypotheses -- and documented evidence -- in the Middle East and Russia that purport to show that increased social network participation is leading to increased political activism (and that this starts with exposing the regimes' crimes),  Kendzior says:

The “failures” – the many countries where the circulation of evidence of state crimes through social media prompts no change in state practices, and in some cases, dissuades citizens from joining activist causes – tend to go unmentioned. They are, I suspect, more the norm than the exception, and they have proven the rule in former Soviet authoritarian states.

The ellusive and changing and contradictory creature known as "the Internet" may not lend itself to firm pronouncements taken only in time-slices (the paper deals with the period 2009-2011) and things may be getting better or old conceptions being unravelled, but that's not the affair of anthropologists -- they need things to stay put.

In many places in the world, including in this region of Central Asia, documenting abuses by the regime leads to change. It may not be massive as in Tahrir Square or even in Bolotnaya Square, but it is something. Not so for Central Asia and the Caucasus, as Kendzior writes:

"In the Journal of Communication article, we suggest the opposite: that greater documentation and publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest."

I reject this thesis myself, and it's fairly easy to do so as more and more episodes pile up. As I noted, when protesters uploaded a video of an abusive governor in a province in Azerbaijan he was ultimately fired; protestors who had been arrested were freed; and increased scrutiny was given to the problems of injustice.  Shh, don't tell Kendzior and Pearce! The story completely falls outside of their paradigm; indeed, it didn't fit in the framework of this EurasiaNet, author, either, but eventually the pressure of events caused him to revise his telling of the story.

It's not necessarily an indicator of anything big, given that Facebook is relatively new and there are other local social networking sites with more relevance, perhaps, but there are now 782,000 on Facebook in Azerbaijan, and their numbers have increased significantly as we can see from Socialbakers. By the way, Uzbekistan's numbers on Socialbakers, which Katy Pearce fiercely contested and demanded to know about the methodology -- as if this respected commercial agency cooperating with Facebook to report on its growth couldn't be trusted! -- are now rising substantially again -- to 128,680. That defies Kendzior's complaint that the growth rate was slowing so much last year that the numbers couldn't really be said to be evidence of a "surge". Look at the graph again. In all the countries of Eurasia except Turkmenistan they appear to be taking quite a jump. Sometimes the facts of real life get in the way of your academic thesis.

Regrettably, Luke Allnutt of RFE/RL  tends to chase every "progressive" social media fad story that comes along has now celebrated Kendzior and Pearce -- and in a manner that I have to say is frankly disgusting -- by essentially trashing the "constricted" Soviet-era dissidents and "fractious" opposition today and indicating there is some shinier new Internety bunch who are "beyond politics" and now have "social media" instead of parties. Ugh:

When I first heard about Azerbaijan's "donkey bloggers," I couldn't help think of an opposition politician I had met on a reporting trip in the town of Lankoran, close to the border with Iran. The head of the local Musavat Party, Yadigar Sadigov, a genial and intellectual man, seemed to be the personification of the marginalized opposition in the former Soviet Union. His office was small, dark, with a few academic tomes, and posters curling up on the wall. He seemed resigned to the fate of being in a state of perpetual and nominal opposition. You didn't get the impression that this was an organization that was going to take down the Aliyev regime.

The donkey bloggers, on the other hand, were young, web-savvy, and English-speaking. The poster boys of Internet activism, Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli were jailed for 2 1/2 years for making a video mocking the government, which involved a man dressed up as a donkey. They were representative of a new generation, unburdened by the fractious politics of the traditional opposition or of the constrictive paradigms of Soviet-era dissidents. What tied their generation together were not political parties or ideology but rather social networks and the Internet.

Sigh. I shouldn't have to spend too much time explaining why Soviet-era dissidents were in "constrictive paradigms" -- but it might have to do with facing 7 years of labor camp and 5 years of exile merely for writing critical samizdat. I suppose it's fashionable to think of anti-communist Soviet dissidents as hopelessly mired in Cold War categories, but Sakharov's "Thoughts on Progress" and Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to Leaders" still make very interesting and relevant reading -- and there's the added creepy part where Putin embraced some of "Leaders" and visited Solzhenitsyn.

The age-old debates about whether capitalism or communism is better, or whether they even work, didn't go away, as unfashionable as the progs find it in the US -- it's still the essential argument of the Internet, collectivism and "sharing" and copyleftism and memes, or the individual and freedom of expression and privacy.

So to suggest that the opposition figures in places like Azerbaijan are marginal, doomed, out of touch, fractious -- gosh, that wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that they are too often persecuted and sent to jail, would it!

Sarah Kendzior's Theory of Achieving "Activist Aims Without Activist Intents" Needlessly Denigrates Human Rights Defenders

Sarah Kendzior has another disturbing piece posted -- this time on Al Jazeera -- which reiterates and enlarges her past work that drives us to the conclusion that social media sites with light or non-political commentary are to be preferred and even privileged as a means of social change over sites with hard-core human rights and opposition reporting.

In the past, human rights groups served as the primary liaison between local activists and the international community. In the era of social media and Google Translate, this is no longer the case.

The socializers are especially preferable to "loud proud political refugees" as she dubs the exiles hated by the regime of dictator Islam Karimov -- so much that he is widely believed even to send his secret police to make assassination attempts on them.

As this will be a long polemic, I'll start with the conclusions in case that's all you have time for.

What is the cumulative and net affect of all of Kendzior's argumentation?

o the individual human rights activist doesn't matter anymore; he is replaced by amorphous anonymous masses online in mediating reality to fellow citizens and the world at large;

o real-life human rights groups don't matter and human rights methodology doesn't matter; they are replaced by scraps of comments and anecdotes that somebody -- anthropologists perhaps! -- have to put together to form a "broader picture";

o non-political sites that can sometimes get away with things under the radar are more important than political groups that directly challenge the regime as they may survive longer (except they don't);

o we should focus on trying to record, mirror and/or save such lighter social websites because as ephemera they may be lost (like some Egyptian sites)  (no matter that groups inside the country or outside the country are making painstaking human rights and social reports that they submit to international bodies);

o we should privilege a theory of connectivism/Internet collectivism for knowledge and social change that moves incrementally and rhizomatically rather than confrontationally and openly as it may be more successful

o ordinary people who express their opinion anonymously are ultimately more important than intellectuals who confront the regime

If you think this sounds extreme and is a tendentious reading of Kendzior, see her own conclusions:

What do you do about a site like Arbuz - a privately owned forum which was shut down not by the government, but by the owner, out of concern for the people who used it? When analysing the potential of the internet for political change, we should try to see the present from the perspective of the future.

Many Uzbek websites that contain content censored by the state remain - but others are gone due to censorship, fear, or neglect. With each erasure, the narrative becomes more selective - which is, of course, the way life worked until the internet.

Kendzior gives us the essence of her "little guy" theory of history that faintly echoes Eleanor Roosevelt's famous line about human rights taking place in "small places"

The closure of Arbuz shows how digital activism manifests itself not only through petitions and campaigns, but through the casual conversation of an apolitical crowd. Human rights activism often rewards unambiguous cases of suppressed dissent: the persecuted journalist; the censored site; the loud, proud lobby of the political refugee.

But that is not the only way dissent spreads online. It exists in the web's quiet corners, stoked by citizens who might never overtly align themselves with activist causes - and whose ambiguous plight offers little recourse.

That's completely false. Human rights activism in fact does NOTHING OF THE KIND. The patient, painstaking daily work of people like Elena Urlaeva is precisely made up not of the "loud, proud lobby" but of ordinary people -- cab drivers, people with gas bills, farmers, disabled and elderly. Story after story is about people you've never heard of, not doing anything especially brave to stick out, but doing something they may have thought was not going to get noticed, and then got them caught by the state wheel of repression, like these women. Masses of stories in the reports of local human rights groups and organizations like Human Rights Watch are about what happens to ordinary people affected by the absence of the rule of law.

As for this "loud proud lobby of the political refugee" (sigh) -- that's disgusting, frankly. For one, what's wrong with being a loud refugee abroad? My God, we're living in a time when an imam who actually lived fairly quietly in Sweden had an attempt made on his life because he had opposed Karimov for years. Why can't political refugees be loud and proud? They have an important job to do: oppose a bloody oppressive regime. For two, in fact, most of the ones I've encountered in my years of work on Uzbekistan are pretty modest and quiet and unsung.

And I'm not at all convinced the Arbuz.uz does the things she claims -- raises important social and political topics in non-confrontational under-the-radar ways packaged in among the math tricks and funny stories. I frankly would like to see some links to the material rather than take her impressionistic say-so about it.

I've challenged Kendzior's theses before in this regard here (on her answer to Ethan Zuckerman's "cute cats theory" of Internet protest growth), here (on her joint paper with Katy Pearce on what derails political protest on the Internet), here (on her response to Twitter's decision to censor by country), here (on Registan's coverage of the harassment of two Uzbek students) and on Twitter -- but she's not someone who can handle criticism or dissent.

Nevertheless, these highly disturbing theses that work overtime to undermine local and international human rights activism do need to be challenged head-on -- and I'm actually not the only one who thinks that, as I've discovered. Others have grown increasingly concerned about these strange efforts to undermine human rights activism not only from Kendzior but Registan's antagonist Joshua Foust and others at the Central Asian discussion site.

Andijan and Arbuz.uz

In the Al-Jazeera piece, Kenzior gives us a clue as to what has shaped her understanding of social media and values. In 2005 she "watched a massacre reveal itself online" -- through Arbuz.uz, "a multi-topic discussion forum founded in the late 1990s" (whose name means "watermelon" in Russian) where she found a window on to the society:

Uzbeks who once used Arbuz to swap recipes or gossip about pop stars now were using it to share news reports and first-hand accounts of the incident. As international organisations struggled to document the Uzbek state's crimes, a largely anonymous internet forum took on the burden of witness.

Then the same thing happened with the pogroms in Osh leaving at least 400 dead.

As in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyz officials attempted to control the flow of information - and once again, Uzbeks flocked to Arbuz to discuss what happened. Threads on the Osh violence received hundreds of responses. They also attracted the attention of state officials in Uzbekistan, who saw how the forum had become a repository for political content.

I checked the Wayback Machine for the (now-closed) arbuz.uz site, which isn't really a site where people trade recipes or talk about pop singers -- it's more like a nerdy page with optical illusions, math problems, jokes, curious stories, etc. -- sort of a Redditt but with the feel of Highlights magazine or Our Weekly Reader. It's in Russian, so I could read it easily -- but looking at the two dates for which there were snapshots in May 2005, I couldn't see anything at all about the massacre. That doesn't mean it's not there -- it just doesn't strike me as the most promising place to look. There was Radio Ozodlik and other emigre web sites, you know?

Even so, Kendzior mounts a theory based on her impressions at the time and since then, and then laments what happened to the source for her theory:

Uzbek activists now use the internet to promote their causes themselves - although it is a debatable improvement when apathy, not inaccessibility, is what deters the world from noting their plight.

In January 2011, Uzbek state security officials arrested several citizens who posted on Arbuz, accusing them of "extremism". The website was shut down, only to return a month later with political conversations removed.

For Kendzior, this benign, vegetarian site used to chat about cooking or music (well, really about computers and cars) seems *better than* international organizations because it was authentic, run by Uzbeks themselves and able to reach them -- when international organizations couldn't. It was also useful again during the Osh events -- but then it revealed its terrible vulnerability -- the authorities, who completely control the Internet, could shut it down.

The implication -- and Kendzior indeed makes that implication -- that such sites are "better" or "more authentic" even if vulnerable are themselves strange claims to make that both domestic and international human rights groups let alone multilateral agencies wouldn't make because chat on a social site, where names are not given, where facts may not be able to be checked, isn't the same thing as a methodical, fact-checked human rights report. It's valuable as a source, and as first-hand witness material, but it's hard to know in these settings who the regime tools are, who the hysterics are whipping up hatred, and who the conscientious citizen journalists are. A human rights group will have professional methodologies worked out over years of trying to cover such situations and will know what questions to ask.

Blogs Aren't Human Rights Reports--and It Doesn't End Well

Example: when two students used the informal blog of Registan to report that they'd been questioned by Uzbek intelligence and threatened with "17 years of prison" if they didn't agree to work for the SBU, they didn't supply the basics -- we never learn the name of the agents who interrogated them, or their ranks; we never learn what article of the criminal code had "17 years" as its punishment (treason with especially aggravating circumstances?); we never learn the names or agencies to which they reported their problems in the US. All of this information may be available, but it wasn't presented, and when some cranks in the comments began to second-guess the students, they didn't always answer every question.

How did the Arbuz story end?

Arbuz's moderator, an Uzbek living abroad, asked users to post only "for fun" and to avoid political discussion for their own good. In the end, the responsibility was too much for him to bear - in December 2011, he shut down Arbuz out of fear for users' safety. Now, the oldest and most popular Uzbek-language forum on the internet is no more.

Moral of the story? Maybe it's merely that people who want to just swap recipes and chat about pop stars (well, who really want to share tongue-twisters and fractals) should just keep to themselves, and human rights groups censored at home should go on relying on sites abroad that can more safely publish incendiary stories of human rights atrocities. No sense in getting tortured and dead prisoners in your carbonera while you're listening to Lady Gaga!

But that's not the moral Kendzior makes. Her moral basically boils down to this:  Don't ruin the slow-food movement evolutionary approach to reform by using it for the fast-food movement of revolution.

While she would likely deny that she is placing a value judgement on the preferable approach, indeed she is making a profound challenge to the "traditional" individual activist or freely-associated public human rights group with what she says next:

The loss of Arbuz raises the question of what constitutes activism in the digital age. In the past, human rights groups served as the primary liaison between local activists and the international community. In the era of social media and Google Translate, this is no longer the case.

And that's where I step in and ask very pointedly: why is Sarah Kendzior once again adopting a position that dovetails with the Uzbek regime's denigration and even oppression of human rights activists and groups?

And it's definitely fine to ask this question about academic theories that seem to correlate with the regime's agenda -- something that Registan never permits, preferring to shrilly denounce the questioner as an impermissible "McCarthyite" or "neocon" or "Soviet" -- merely for demanding basic accountability when views *do indeed dovetail with the official perspective*.

Goofy Internet Theories

Why on earth did Sarah Kendzior *ever* get the idea that individual human rights defenders and groups are no longer primary liaisons just because social media created the felt need of academics to devise goofy Internet collectivist theories?

First of all, despite her strenuous efforts to undermine them, these individuals go right on proving to be the main liaison with the international community in hundreds of ways -- and on social media -- duh. They are the ones to put out emails and bulletins to the web sites that cover the news, often at great personal risk and often facing jail time or harassment in various ways. There isn't a single social media site within Uzbekistan, or any external twittering bar-campers holding the "radical" human rights movement at a distance (as we've seen in Russia and Kazakhstan) that are replacing that role of the brave human rights activists.

It's ridiculous to oppose the two roles in any event, as I've shown with the events around Abadan (when Annasoltan tried to mount a similar modern theory of special Turkmen social media uniqueness) -- all kinds of people get the news out, from old-fashioned dissidents who have been at this work for 30 years, to newer citizen journalists, to exiles, to political parties inside or outside of the country, to Russian journalists, to Western broadcasting. Sure, bloggers and tweeters get the news out faster than groups working more methodically to check human rights facts -- but in fact a lot of the bloggers and tweets ARE the human rights activists, especially the younger ones.

Power Struggles

To posit a theory of the "obsolete" nature of traditional kinds of activists (themselves in fact dissidents to the classic actors of Sovietology or its newer iteration, International Relations, which are states or professionals) is to overlook that these people are all on social media, too!

What this is really about is a struggle for power -- for some reason, these old-line activists even in their newer format really irk Kendzior and the other Registanis because they are outside her control and post what they want -- and she seems to implicitly blame them for upsetting somebody's recipe website needlessly (ok, their website with limericks).

Indeed, there is a struggle for power between individuals and groups and the networked tribalized "thought leaders" of our age, and that's part of it.

 

Rare Adult Supervision at Registan

I love it when the adults show up and demand some accountability from the young punks at Registan. That doesn't happen very often -- almost never, as far as I can see from some of the archives -- but when it does, it sure is appreciated. Michael Hancock-Parmer's colleague (supervisor?) from the University of Indiana showed up to comment on his long post on Zhanaozen.

Before that, the conversation had deteriorated to some anonymous bird asking whether Joshua Foust or MHP worked for Chevron -- those sort of gotchas are never the point about these people. They need always and everywhere to be debated purely on the merits and not on the suspicions of what or whom is backing them. That is, it's good if people take a whack at those murky backgrounds sometimes, but it is generally a lose/lose. It's much better to call out the lapses in knowledge, the wrong claims of facts, the tendentious and specious argument-mongering, the protectivist tap-dancing around regimes and so on.

Prof. Anderson basically scores MHP for dragging their university into drama (that's what you get if you tangle not only with The Exiled but Registan); for writing a long and poorly constructed post; for being snarky to people in the comments; and for possibly having only the selfish and emotional motive of only helping his friend Foust -- oh, and not making clear what is real vested interest might be in Foust.

It's too bad she didn't get to the substance of the argument, but fortunately, another poster before her, "Minty," got right to the point, on something I hadn't really thought about -- and that's the put-down implied in lumping Elena Kostyuchenko together with the notion of "Odna Baba Skazala," implying she was just jotting down the rumour mill. To some extent I dealt with this in my long parsing of his awful post, but I'm glad she brought it up.

The fact is, the expression  -- which I've heard for 30 years or more -- isn't only in the form Одна Бабка Сказала. It can be Одна Баба Сказала as well -- both are present in the Russian lexicon. Just Google either and you'll easily prove this (as it is spoken in Russia; it is spoken in Russian in other post-Soviet republics, too but maybe takes different forms). This phrase is not a context that means "broad" ("whore" is going too far for "Baba" in any event); it's a context more leaning towards "granny" whether "Baba" or "Babka" is used. Don't forget that in provincial colloquial Russian, it's common to say "Baba Volya" for "Grandmother Volya," not necessarily "Babushka" and never "Babka".  So the commenters are right: this is not "some woman said" but a folkoric representation of the rumour mill.

Furthermore, OBS (it's sometimes jokingly referred to by just those initials as if it is a radio station, like VOA) does *not* mean newspapers, it's the grapevine. It's the babushki talking to each other in the courtyards, it's the rumour mill. For him to compare the work of an investigative journalist from an independent highly reputable newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, to Odna Baba Skazala is not only insulting, it's ignorant. Nobody uses it in that fashion.

Only somebody tendentiously and maliciously trying to take down a reporter in order to protect an official version of events would do that. Or, if we are to believe it, only someone emotionally going to any lengths merely to defend his friend, who in turn was protective of the Nazarbayev narrative, and was called out on it by Mark Ames. There's just no way you can characterize the news-gathering and rendering of Korkel's story by Elena as OBS. It's wrong. Not with the efforts she went to sort through different narratives, and not with the thorough level of detail she supplied.

On social media when these pretendious academics show up and question basic ordinary news-writing and news-gathering functions, they only make themselves look stupid. Their science here looks like faux science or sciencism -- they really lose sight of the forest of the trees. This may be anecdotal but I really see an increasing problem -- as we saw from Dr. Katy Pearson today on Twitter -- of sciencism from people like these annoying academics on Registan in rejecting ordinary levels of news and news meaning, and insisting on a deep "scientific" subtext to every communication or unit of knowledge -- utterly distorting basic sense in the process.

I'll reiterate here the crucial translation errors I found in MHP's piece -- it really does change the meaning if you describe Kokel as someone pushing through a crowd, and pushing against the falling wounded, and being such in the thick of things that a dead person toppled at her feet (the wrong translation) and as I corrected it, hanging back (she had a child with her, but they had uncertainly started in the direction of the child's mother; she was marching in some kind of line ahead of them with striking workers), and seeing how people dragged the wounded back to the rear of the event, and lay the dead bodies at her feet -- very different feel.

Blogging doesn't necessarily communicate a story or help improve writing. If anything, I know famous published writers who swear that their abstention from Facebook and Twitter is what makes them great writers.

I personally am not interested in being in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Somebody else can do that. I personally am much more interested in *thinking and discussing with others to come to some comprehension* and I think with the explosion of information and connections in our time, whataever academia offers, social media discussions are really the only way of comprehending the firehose of news.

I don't mind if MHP's writing is baggy and unfocused and raggedy. I do mind, however, if he deliberately hides the main point of the story: that an investigative journalist found a knowledgeable witness that she decided was credible. No, worse than hides it, impugns it merely out of spite and spleen, merely because that's the same point that frankly Mark Ames made, although he was a total ass in making it, and got it wrong as far as conflating Elena's source Kokel with Elena as a reporter.

 

 

What Derails Political Protest

This is not the NDN. It is not even a railroad in Central Asia. It's in Australia. Photo: Louise Docker.

I continue to be troubled by the theses represented in this paper:  "Networked Authoritarianiam and the Demonization of Social Media in the Republic of Azerbaijan."

As I said, the excerpt of the paper published appears to suggest that documenting abuses and protesting them is futile and may even harm protest movements or more incremental reform. It's an argument against the human rights documentalist approach and an argument for a pragmatic accommodation to the regimes to avoid further human suffering and perhaps preservation of a core of intellectuals for a better day.

I haven't misread this excerpt: the theses are there to be seen.  Curiously, Sarah Kendzior implies in the comments here that you cannot criticize a paper when only the excerpt is available; her co-author Katy Pearce even implies that expressing concern about the logic of certain theses is "an attack". Why the thin skin, ladies? If you don't want your paper read and critiqued by the general public before its time, don't publish excerpts, or even keep the entire paper hidden behind a paywall or academic log-on.

Worse, following the now-standard Registan smear method, Kendzior implies that my "poor analytical skills" (i.e. my normal and legitimate critique of this excerpt and its theses) means I shouldn't be employed in this field. My, that's rather severe punishment -- and truly an illegitimate means of debate -- for having a different opinion and expressing legitimate concern about the inexorable logic of the paper as it stands now: that the message activists should draw is to cease being active -- to "watch out," because their activism not only is futile against such authoritarian regimes, it may actually harm further progress that might be achieved other ways, or even the longer term prospect of the more thorough revolution. Say the authors:

Many assume that greater exposure to information technology leads to increased activism in authoritarian states.[i]  [...] In the Journal of Communication article, we suggest the opposite: that greater documentation and publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest.  We argue that this is particularly evident in the authoritarian countries of the former Soviet Union – the very countries, ironically, that fuel the misguided Cold War analogy.  Often neglected in analyses of the internet, these countries have a unique approach to internet regulation that represents a “middle path” between open access and censorship

Their approach, rooted in the particularities of post-Soviet political culture, exploits problems of trust, cynicism, and insecurity in the population.[ii]  Other scholars of the internet have defined these internet regulation practices  as “networked authoritarianism”.  Rebecca MacKinnon defines networked authoritarianism as when “an authoritarian regime embraces and adjusts to the inevitable changes brought by digital communication”. States that practice networked authoritarianism do not strictly censor online dissent: they compete with it, making an example out of online dissenters in order to affirm the futility of activism to a disillusioned public.  This is what we believe happened in Azerbaijan.  Our study found that the Azerbaijanis who were most active online during the donkey blogger affair were the ones whose attitude to protest was most negatively affected by the crackdowns on activism.

Obviously, I'm not the only one who will find problems with all these theses, even starting with the simple observation about the milk of human kindess that has been more on evidence than you might imagine even in those societies ridden with distrust and cynicism. I'm also not convinced that "networked authoritarianism" functions quite the way Rebecca MacKinnon indicates. This is Evgeny Morozov's thesis as well -- that these post-Soviet countries "don't have to" use prior or post censorship or even arrests for speech offenses much of the time because they can prevail with the cynical statist narrative and use every bad-faith Soviet-style propaganda and active-measure trick in the book to discredit dissenters online, often through sock-puppets in the comments sections of blogs or news sites.

While they're masters at this -- they have all the time in the world to wait out the distractable West -- they sometimes get overwhelmed, they sometimes pick their battles, they sometimes so overplay their hands that they get blowback. It's not a one-way street. (BTW, a bit of that "networked authoritarianism" laps at the shores of Registan.net itself, as they ban critics like me, delete statements by their defenders and keep nastily trying to control the narrative in any way possible.)

Then there's the problem that even those more "subtle" networked authoritarians like Russia and Kazakhstan on its better days in fact do in fact censor (they block journalists from entering a crisis area); they do deploy arrests strategically and pull Live Journal accounts and use other methods of pressure.  (I'll never forget the array of characters brought forth to persecute Samodurov).

No doubt Kendzior and Pearce have compelling field studies -- they know their business and their methodical interviews are going to tell what any of us have seen for ourselves, that people are intimidated if a fellow blogger or any Internet user is punished and an example was made of him. To be sure, a commenter named Ani on Registan.net (Ani Wandaryan @GoldenTent on Twitter) has elaborated that what was a critical factor in the "donkey bloggers" case is that these comics were not seen as "political," i.e. as part of the organized human rights groups or political parties, so it seemed doubly disconcerting that the regime picked on them.

And the analytical model is undoubtedly correct and helpful and not something I'm trained to comment on; I never chose to go into academia. (Years ago when I contemplated getting a higher degree in political science, a seasoned professor of Soviet studies laid out all the branches and theories and schools to me in several meetings, and I found all of them inadequate to explain the intuitions one gathers from living and studying these countries of the Soviet bloc first-hand, which I had done. The field was also filled with fellow-travellers who relied on good relations with the Soviet and other communist regimes for their very field of study and access -- the number of scholars of dissent could be counted on half a hand. While there have been improvements in the last 20 years, I don't find the field free of these problems to this day.)

Writes Kendzior and Pearce:

In Azerbaijan, there is a non-relationship between frequency of internet use and support for political protest.  Unlike in the Arab world, where citizens were mobilized by the documentation of state crimes on social media, the arrest of Azerbaijani bloggers only demoralized frequent internet users.  We argue that this is because of the Azerbaijani government’s embrace of “networked authoritarianism”: the use of the internet to compete with and engage with internet activists through propaganda campaigns in cyberspace and physical force on the ground.

In an indignant response, Kendzior says -- for my sake -- "One thing I’d like to make clear is that the situations in Azerbaijan, and in other places I wrote about, can change, and the grimness of the current situation does not therefore mean activists should cease their work."

But she didn't say that in her excerpt; it took some prodding. That's unfortunate. They did indeed  paint a grim picture: they said documenting human rights abuses only scares people away and that ultimately publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest -- those were their words. They didn't say, "But we don't mean to discourage activists" or "we understand people surprise us with their bravey and overcome intimidation anyway" or "it's a moving target and this is just our take now." They said their main thesis: publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest.

The point is, if someone -- already presupposed to feeling burned on colour revolutions -- wanted to find some theoretical underpinnings as to why they should stop giving grants in "non-permissive environments" -- this could be their thesis.

The facts that Kendzior and Pearce found -- and they aren't disputed, just insufficient -- they packaged, in this excerpt (which we have no reason to believe differs substantively from the still-to-come longer piece) do inexorably lead to a policy prescription: don't spend a lot of money on people who are going to go to jail and cause the regimes to backlash so hard that even milder forms of Internet activity could be harmed.

Nedouchki like myself, of course, can't be allowed to debate academic papers or scientific models. But when they move from the realm of theory to policy, then I as a tax-payer and blogger do get to comment. And so I do. The policy prescription indeed seems to be one of caution and incrementalism. It is a body of data and thinking meant as a bulwark against cyber-utopianism which at this point can get people killed in countries like Uzbekistan.

Remember how the story of the suicide girl got real legs? It wasn't from Urlaeva, writing in Russian on a limited mailing list, or fergananews.com that ran a short piece quickly buried by other news. It wasn't from me, who didn't write about it for some days out of distrust of the story because of its classic intelligence memes. It was from Sarah Kendzior, writing in English on the fairly widely read Registan.net, taking it very seriously, and even adding thoughtfully, "Facebook doesn’t kill people; the national security services of Uzbekistan do." Indeed, it was seeing her taking the story at face value, and other people expressing sympathy about the tragedy on Twitter that made me think that I would be churlish to express my doubts and not write, too. That's how it works.

 Socialbakers is showing quite an increase on Facebook use in Azerbaijan -- there's a big jump this last month -- over the New Year's holidays, maybe people had more time to go on line. "The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan is reaching 604040 and grew by more than 185200 in the last 6 months." So, donkey blogger backlash or no, people keep coming; we do understand that their cute-catting does not have a high dissident conversation rate, however, such as to justify the ROI of granting to Internet programs for velvet/coloured/spring revolutions. And we do get to ask a simple question vis-a-vis the thesis of Kendzior and Pearce: with growth like this, maybe the demonization of social media by the government just didn't work?

Again, the policy debate out of this is what matters -- academics likely argue even among themselves when they measure the fluid and elusive thing called "the Internet" (which is a new field of study in a context of a lot of pseudoscience from Silicon Valley motivational consultants like Jeff Jarvis and Seth Godin).

Even without any arguments about Central Asia and the Caucasus, the failures of the Arab Spring to deliver those velvety democracies some hoped for are their own brake on policy; if you listen to Ethan Zuckerman's cute-cat talk all the way through and don't just read Cory Doctorow's self-serving digest of it, Zuckerman does throw in some cautionary stories about killed people on the square in Egypt.

My guess -- although it's completely a hunch -- is that if Azerbaijan experiences a larger growth in Internet and people, especially those connected to the leadership, see it as a way to make money, the regime will find ways to create the managed class of technologists and technologically-savvy I spoke of and get them to do their own policing away of dissent without having to use jailings but it's all going to move forward. And the other narrative is about Islam, which I will return to later.

Everything depends on whether you adopt a strategy of accepting the regime's incrementalism as a pose that you constantly attempt to dodge or call its bluff, or accept incrementalism as having actual merit that ensures a sturdy and reliable conveyor belt between the regime and its coopted intellectuals and their professional positions and perks.

 

 

Say, Kids, What Month is It?

Mayor Phineas T. Bluster, character from Howdy Doody Show on TV in 1960

It's 21st Century Statecraft Month!

I wonder if people half my age don't feel a jar when they hear that Buck Rogers-sounding phrase "21st Century".

The new statecraft has stuff like this (which I learned about on my Facebook):

The Secretary of State’s Senior Advisor for Innovation Alec Ross will participate in a Live at State video web chat with journalists and bloggers from around the world to discuss 21^st Century Statecraft on Tuesday, January 10 at 09:45 a.m. EST. You can watch a live webcast of the discussion on video.state.gov.

You know who else is a senior official for innovation now? Surkov!

It looks like the month of statecraft activities will (mercifully) leave the Central Asian region untouched.

Although you could still work it in here, in the chat about International Organizations.

Let me just say that the US Department of State's Official Presence on Tumblr looks for all the world like a communique from Anonymous. Does the same artist do their design work?

I'm familiar with Tumblr and pretty savvy with social media, having been on Twitter since 2007, etc. And I have to say I didn't see any way to post comments either on the Tumblr blog or the State Department page, but maybe I'm missing something. Accordingly, I wrote the email address.

I wonder if anybody is analyzing whether all these massive numbers of State Department social media thingies are, well, making foreign policy better. At least they make us feel involved, no?

The other day I was reading the US Embassy in Tashkent's Facebook page. It asked readers what was the most important thing they wanted to achieve in 2012. Numerous young people wrote that their dream was to get a US visa and study at a US university. A few said things like "to get married".

A US Embassy manager of the Facebook page noted that Uzbek telecom companies had reduced the Internet costs by 60%; how were people finding this and how did it affect their use of the Internet?

The page has 8,000 "likers" (not quite the same thing as "friends" -- it's a page) -- and only a few answered that they now had cheaper and speedier web access but were still waiting for 4G to come to Uzbekistan -- they didn't say *what* they read on the Internet (and would be unlikely to on such a public page). It occurred to me that maybe through the vast net of such numerous little conversations the US hopes to get some open-source intelligence. Seems like an arduous way to go about it.

What is social media for, if not for the feedback? Well, it's a PR tool, a means of projecting the "smart power" of the US, that is now going to even have a smarter, smaller military footprint. I'm not sure the more interactive social media package that the same foreign policy positions are wrapped in now makes them more consumable for the world public.

 

Merry Christmas!

I'm glad Alena Popova checked into Sretensky Monastery on Russian Orthodox Christmas -- and that Sretensky Monastery was on FourSquare to be checked into!

BTW, Boris of Chuvashia has captured the Mayor position at Sretensky, probably because not enough of those i-phone toting Moscow hipsters stop in to pray at the Sretensky much! Boris likes to ride horses and has somehow captured the mall rat badge as well.

I don't know what the little fathers are thinking about these developments.

The million-strong Chuvashia autonomous republic has quite a story if you've never read it. Turkic people, but mainly Russian Orthodox. One of the things I remember from my days translating the Kremlin's TV was that they would show Chuvashia events as if to say, "See, these are  Orthodox, not Muslim" (as distinct from Bashkiria.) Depending on who tells the story, they "voluntarily" converted, or were forced to convert, with some converting back.