Igor Ashmanov on "information stuffing," i.e. mass propaganda on the Internet from poznavatelnoe.tv.
Here's a good piece on the Russian Internet (called Ru.net by some) on "Siamese Cat's" blog. It's long by itself, and my analysis makes it longer, but I think it's very important to study if you are involved in human rights, democracy promotion, Internet freedom, and all the rest around Russia and its allies.
Alyona Popova, a Russian politician and Internet personality promoting innovation in Russia brought my attention to it on Twitter; she links to the Siamese Cat's blog at suamskuykot.livejournal.com (so you can read comments there), but what Siamese is doing is re-posting an article by Igor Ashmanov -- which he says he is publishing with permission from his own editor at Rossiyskaya gazeta (rg.ru). So this article first appeared in Rossiyskaya gazeta, but with the plethora of Russian bloggers and social media pages reprinting this without a link to its original, I can't find the original to link to! That tells you a lot about Runet...
Ashmanov is one of the founders of the Russian IT industry, a prominent computer programmer who was crucial to the development of Microsoft Office for Russians; an expert on artificial intelligence and also intensively involved in various search services. Siamese Cat says Ashmanov and Partners, his firm, is the leading Internet analytics and site promotion company.
Instead of just translating this straight through, which someone else might eventually do, I'm going to weave in my commentary because I think a lot of people will read this article superficially (and ecstatically) when it gets linked around -- people don't always read articles, they merely react to "the idea of them" or their headlines. So I think analysis of the analysis is in order...
Says Ashmanov, in his piece analytizing trends in 2012 and predicting trends for 2013:
ALIEN FORCES HAVE OCCUPIED THE RUSSIAN INTERNET
In 2012, our government finally discovered that Runet is occupied by alien political and ideological forces...Understandably, no government can rule completely on occupied terrority; therefore the government is shaken. But these "aliens" have great experience, they've been working for a long time, and they've successfully adapted the technology of the information wars -- in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia -- and they have won everywhere. The Russian government faces a world-class player, a grand master. Moreoever, he has most of the Internet technology in his hands (browsers, search, social networks, operational systems).
While Ashmanov is speaking of the "Internet revolutionaries" in the third person, what he is really saying, in my view, that the code class of Russia -- the top Internet technologists and legions of programmers and script kiddies -- are in a position to withstand the analogue Kremlin now, and we really have to see who will defeat whom.
And this class of technologists -- really the people in whose hands are the browsers, the search, the social networks, the infrastructure -- isn't necessarily a class that favours human rights, democracy in some liberal sense, or anything but their own interests as I explain at copious length in my analysis of #rutechdel -- the trip by American technologists to see their "counterparts" in Russia.
Some of the opposition that makes use of these technologists tools and affordances might be roughly equivalent to what a Westerner might think of as a liberal; many others are illiberal and that includes the technologists themselves in some respects. And I think we'll see as we read Ashmanov, that while he and his people might constitute a class that Putin will find a force to conjure with, and won't be able to beat down lightly, they are not necessarily a friend to either liberal, much less extreme revolutionaries.
TECHNOLOGISTS ARE NOT LIKE LIBERAL SCIENTISTS
Russia had many decades when the scientists -- Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov, Anatoly Shcharansky, Pavel Litvinov -- were at the forefront of the human rights movement and literally sacrificed their freedom and spent many years in jail or exile for these principles. Those liberal scientists as a class have died out, however; there are almost no scientists left today of the stature of Sakharov who challenge Putin. I can't think of any except the biochemist Sergei Kovalev, in his 80s now, and some of his also elderly and a few younger colleagues at the Sakharov Center and Museum in Moscow; I can't think of any young physicist or mathematician who is fighting the good liberal fight or any fight at all. The new class of opposition leaders are from a different strand of society -- Navalny is a lawyer; there are others who are journalists or sociologists or business people. In America, technologists are famous for bringing Obama to power; in Russia, I think we'll see they become famous for keeping Putin in power.
There is a concerted effort by Silicon Valley to see the Russian programming class as somehow a counterpart in the "progressive" struggle for freedom. It's not. Start with Kaspersky, who is aligned with Putin and in my view increasingly suspect. When I read about Red October, just as when I read about Stuxnet, I ask: is he discovering viruses or helping to spread them? Or finding them selectively and opportunistically? Or? Kaspersky is probably the most powerful and internationally known technologist in Russia, and from all indications, he is in Putin's pocket, at least for now.
That lets me know that what Ashmanov is writing about is important and interesting, but not necessarily going to turn out to be true. When he says this "world-class player" has "most of the technology in his hands" (if I have read this correctly), he means ultimately that the Russian programming class has invented all these things for Russia, or bought them from the West (the way Live Journal, the most popular blogging platform, was bought from its American founders), or adapted them through their own relationships outside the Kremlin, like Russian Facebook. But, I would add, Putin still has SORM and all the other backdoors and programs and controls needed to shut these people down. We need more opinions on this.
To continue:
THE KREMLIN FIGHTS BACK WITH LAWS
Ashmanov notes that a sovereign state (the enemy of coders everywhere, and Russia is no different) has one tool in its hand to use against cyberspace: the law. And the Kremlin used that tool mightily in 2012: aside from the law on NGOs and law on "foreign agents," which are suppressing more liberal internationalists, there was a law on children's rights, which some believed went too far in chasing child pornography into the realm of free expression by creating a register of bad sites -- sites on pedophilia, suicide, pornography, narcotics all harmful to children and adults for that matter. (And here's your first sign that the technologist is not always a friend to human rights -- he is first ready to overthrow children's rights in the name of freedom of expression, particularly his own.) Other laws are being prepared.
But "In fact, it is not censorhip," Ashmanov says about the child protection leaw. "For now, it really is defense of children."
Even so, before this law, ROSKOMNADZOR (Russian Monitoring Committee), the spiritual heir of the Soviet GLAVLIT is formed and operational and will apply itself, without the law, as Ashmanov concedes.
However he fears -- and Rebecca McKinnon or Cory Doctorow would gallop to his side -- "in the course of implementation of the law on protection of children, a technological and organizational infrastructure is created to block undesirable political content". In Russia, this is, of course a distinct possibility, far more than in the US; we have seen how Russia uses the "law on extremism" in fact to punish those who monitor and criticize the government's own extremism in dealing with minorities.
LIVE JOURNAL HAS DIED; FACEBOOK HAS FAILED; LONG LIVE VKONTAKTE?
Although some analysts still cling to Live Journal because they hate admitting that something they see as indigenous and precious (although purchased from a US company!) is not as good as Facebook, Ashmanov says what everybody is saying:
At some point the former chief discussion platform for Runet, Live Journal, almost died, because of constant technical malfunctions and lack of development. The management of LJ blames this on DDoS attacks and unknown hackers (vaguely hinting that this is likely malicious hackers from the FSB who want to shut the mouths of the democratic public on LJ).
Ashmanov is being ironic here and adds this pointedly: "But the rest of the popular social and commercial services of Runet experience no less a squeeze from hackers, although they remain stable." So that's his way of saying that he doesn't believe the secret police are harassing LJ. Nonsense. Of course they go after LJ and there's plenty of evidence of that in removed accounts and "slow loading pages". It's so typical of the elites in Russia to blame the other part of the intelligentsia that isn't as craven as they are with the powers-that-be for their own problems as somehow being due to "incompetence".
He predicts that if the management, mission and owners remain as they did in 2012, "LJ will not survive 2013". I don't think so, because there are gadzillion people still using LJ -- Pussy Riot supporters were among them and hey, this very journal we're reading Ashmanov's article on. But it definitely is struggling, and even I don't use it because of the slow-loading problem.
For some reason -- competition? -- Ashmanov pronounces the "blitzkrieg" of Facebook on the Russian Internet to be "a failure" merely because growth stabilized at only a few million users. Ridiculous. Facebook in Russian now includes all the main thinkers and doers of Russia in the liberal and not-so-liberal vein -- all the main TV personalities, journalists, bloggers, opposition party leaders, etc. have very active FB pages. Follow me on Facebook if you want to find them, I have them among my friends or followers and sample them in my own feed.
And here's what is suspect in my view -- where typically, as a technologist, Ashmanov substitutes quantity for quality or significance -- he says Vkontakte is the wave of the future.
Nonsense. I will never forget how Vkontakte instantly, without appeal, shut down the account and group of Andrei Sannikov, leader of the largest independent web site in Belarus, charter97.org, and an independent presidential candidate, that had 8,000 members. Vkontakte was in Russia and didn't have to obey Lukashenka's orders in Belarus; but the minute Sannikov was arrested, that account was deleted and all the content taken. Shame on them. If you don't think that can happen to you o Vkontakte in Russia, don't be naive. Of course it can. And I've had experience of Pavel Durov, the head of Vkontakte myself, directly. I followed him for a time on Facebook, and read some political manifesto he issued, which was the typical mix of libertarian nationalism that you find in the opposition these days. I challenged him as to why he shut down Sannikov's account, and he had no answer. Then he was promoting "direct democracy" as a way to get around Putin, and talking about "direct election" of judges. I pointed out that this would lead to mob justice, especially in Russia, and that direct elections are always in the hands of coders and that's an interface between ourselves and the government that usurps democratic institutions. He promptly banned and blocked me. No one can criticize Pavel Durov. I do not trust these people as far as I can throw them, which apparently isn't very far, as they are thrown by the slightest normal intellectual critique of their ideas.
Ashmanov claims Russian youths find Vkontakte "more comfortable, more native, and besides, as students say literally: why Facebook, when in VK you can 'watch a video and listen to music covertly' (literally bespalevno, and you can argue what that means, but it means without surveillance). Perhaps they mean that they might face more market monitoring on FB than VK, although that's hard to believe; perhaps they believe that they can't share illegally as much, not sure what the point is. As for "more comfortable," it's certainly true that a Russian-language service is going to be more attuned to customers than an American one that is merely localizing part of its service in Russian. Ashmanov claims, "Moreoever, there is a fashionable trend even among the web intelligentsia to demonstratively transfer to Vkontakte, announcing this loudly". I haven't seen this anywhere, but someone can point it out if it exists. I don't buy it, because I see more and more web intelligentsia in fact pouring on to Facebook where they won't be banned (unless, of course, the FB community organizer bans them, like he blocked me from viewing him and asking hard questions, or unless Ushmanov, the Russian oligarch and his company that owns a big chunk of Facebook, throws their weight around --which remains to be scene).
And I would simply say this: if that web intelligentsia wants to be part of the rest of the world, even publishing in Russian, they have to be on a service where people who read Russian, but are native speakers of English or German or French or Norwegian, are already naturally located. That will NOT be Vkontakte, which is Russian only, but it will not be due to any language barriers, it will be due to the fact that people like me aren't going to bother to join a service and put up content when they might be summarily banned for political reasons, as Sannikov was, or blocked and muted for thin-skinned politically-motivated vain reasons, as I was by Durov on Facebook. No thanks. When you're ready to restore Sannikov's group and unblock me, then I'll believe VK is a free democratic platform. It's that simple.
Ashmanov claims Odnoklassniki has reanimated; that Yandex and mail.ru (which is widely used in Central Asia I could note) have strengthened their leadership. As for Twitter, he says this has "stabilized" at two million active users a month in Russia. Not too shabby.
Ashmanov is right about one Facebook failure (and Groupon's too): its IPO was a flop. Russians took note. The group buying phenomenon, which he says is "built on pure greed," is dying; the start-up hysteria of 2011 is dying, too, he says. (Don't tell that to the Russians who took part in TechCrunch Disrupt). He believes the "dubious romanticism of the frontier in Runet" seems to be over. Maybe, maybe not; maybe it's beginning for people far younger than he. But he's right that the era of "big business" in the Internet in Russia has definitely started -- and that's why I find it hard to believe that he and his colleagues are going to constitute a bastion against Putin's encroachment on Internet freedom -- I think it's far more likely they'll make a deal, as the oligarchs in the organic earth industries of oil and gas or potash have had to do with the Kremlin. We'll see.
It's true that a series of court cases in Russia have actually helped to entrench the idea that the Internet services do not have to bear responsibility for the media, and blogs, and most importantly, for comments that users make on Internet fora -- even in provincial court houses, this has been established when insulted dignitaries have tried to hall ISPs into court over hate speech or anti-government speech -- and haven't had much success jailing the commenters, either, because there are technically Constitutional norms for free speech
OH, THOSE IRRESPONSIBLE JOURNALISTS!
Ashmanov is angry about something else, however, what he calls the "otmyvka' or washing one's hands of news and removal of the media's responsibility as well by referring to sources "on Twitter". Or "as was reported on the Internet" the way Russians say "a grandmother told me" or "I heard it on Voice of America".
It's funny that Mr. Internet Freedom here -- that is, a technologist implying that he and his fellow engineers can create a bastion that can withstand the Kremlin -- is suddenly dumping on journalists and the media and telling us essentially that they are all "irresponsible".
And that lets me know just how the deal will be made with the Kremlin: these big Russian Internet businesses will be allowed to make their millions of rubles and dollars in services and advertising, but they will collaborate and collude with the FSB in policing and removing "irresponsible" media. That's the scenario I see shaping up when I see somebody like Ashmanov talking about "informatsionny vbros" with a curl of the lip (I see the term "vbros" which means literally "stuffing" and comes from the verb "to throw" used negatively a lot lately in commentary on the Internet -- I think it basically means a deluge of information to skew a story, "Google bombing" -- Ashmanov himself explains more in the video above -- perhaps some hipster can tell me a better term in English for this).
Ashmanov also notes the appearance of numerous text robots -- there are 4-5 million tweets a day in the Russian Twitter; of these, 2.5-3 million are spam generated by 50,000-100,000 accounts, he says, and I believe it, knowing of the Russian propensity for spam on e-mail and what I see on my own Twitter feed from Russian SEO gurus, etc. (but they haven't caught up with the spam capacity of their English-language equivalents in that regard).
There's a debate to be had about what is spam, and he admits that some of the linkage is in a grey area -- and I'm not sure I want to trust somebody who just said fussily that "journalists have finally removed responsibility from themselves for the information they report to the reader" in such a blanket -- and ultimately ominous way.
THE ATTACK OF THE POLITICAL BOTS
Ashmanov describes what appears to be an attack on the government's much-ballyhooed Olympics in Sochi, which some have called to boycott (and I endorse those calls, although I don't support the use of bots or DDoS to achieve these goals).
He says on October 26, within 3-4 hours, more than 250,000 tweets were issued with the tag #Олимпиадынебудет (Olympics won't happen) with automatically generated texts like "they've stolen everything" and "how embarassing in front of foreigners" -- that notion is still alive in Russia. Of course, the Olympics have been frought with corruption. Ashmanov says 20,000 accounts took part in this bombing and the bot wrangler, whoever it was, got themselves into the top trends on Twitter -- and then disappeared. "Why, it is not known, possibly they fulfilled their propaganda budget or perhaps at that time in Sochi some sort of important meeting was taking place." Does this let us know that Ashmanov might view any protest against Sochi as "paid for"?
THE CLIP MENTALITY
In 2012, Runet was flooded with a "clip mentality": the attention of users became fragmented, unstable, the average user could not keep a focus of attention, and could not comprehend long texts. No one looks at long videos; the content has to be finely granulated, easily consumed, read glancingly, and consist of habitual images, memes and archtypes.
Ashmanov laments what he sees as the "purely Russian" phenomenon of long discussions on LJ that have subsided and the move to Facebook a bad thing for those Tolstoy-length novels that Russians write on the Internet. I agree -- except the long texts do remain on "standalone" websites as Russians call them using angrusski, and they even remain on LJ, but because it's so slow-loading, you just don't bother going there.
Facebook not only does not encourage the writing of long texts and commentaries, and not only itself automatically decides for the users what they should read and what they shouldn't; it is practically without memory, all content there is quickly drowned, it goes beyond the edge of the screen and is not found with search.
Actually, Facebook's new social search will probably fix some of that, and some people can scroll down...but the conversation you had in a bar wasn't tape-recorded and archived from 1982, and yet, you lived, somehow.
But all this engenders a loss of memory in the reader mitigating against long-term comprehension, says Ashmanov; the public quickly forgets that "just as now they are looking for chemical weapons in Syria, so the public has already forgotten how they looked for nuclear weapons in Iraq." Hmm.
The clip perception [i.e. the consumption of only brief pieces of content] and the short memory of the public enables old propagandistic models to be repeated: if the method worked once, it will work again.
Yeah, like thinking there can't possibly be any chemical weapons in Syria?
THE EMPTINESS OF THE VAST INTERNET
Incredibly,
Ashmanov -- based on his spam monitoring -- concludes that only 1-2% of
the comments on Twitter "and often on Facebook" are substantive, i.e.
not spam. That's preposterous. "Even a re-post with commentary, that is
statements along the lines of "copied and commented" is a rarity. Almost
no one comments. The entire information space is filled with obtuse
re-posts, likes, and so on," he frets.
Ah, the haughtiness of the Russian intelligent.
The masses are "dense" and just re-blog and re-tweet and never think
for themselves. I tend to agree there's a lot of that on social
networks, but it does mean something to the person doing it, what they
select whom and what to re-tweet, and some people are just bookmarking,
and you cannot necessarily draw any huge meaning out of their re-tweet.
In any event, I simply don't buy that only one percent of Russian
Twitter accounts are substantive, when I follow hundreds of them and
would follow more if there weren't that stupid 2,000 ceiling on
following until you are followed more yourself. I hope someone
challenges this
I would call this epidemia not even the summary but the event of the year. When we, monitoring Runet, realized this -- it was a shock for us. There is practically no original content and real communication, what is happening is a trivial broadcasting.
Bingo. I tend to agree. I said this back in 2007 when I was among the early adapters of Twitter. When you followed a hashtag or one of the big accounts like Scoble, you would peer into the inanity and timidity and stupidity of the American tech set. Most people had nothing original to say. They blindly, obediently copied others. They themselves were pathetic SEO or web site consultants struggling in the pre-recession and recession to eke out a living after they lost their jobs in big companies. I used to say that I felt like I was staring down a silo of nothingness on the web when the big people on the top kept describing it as vibrant and burgeoning merely because they had a lot of followers and re-tweeters. But those people had little to say.
But so what? Ashmanov is over-reacting with judgement that I think doesn't come from a good place and can't lead to good consequences. Technology can dictate behaviour, you know? If there were more room in the Tweet box -- even 256 instead of 140 -- there might be more room to add an assessment of that re-tweet.
And it's common when one technology is replacing another that people keep using the new technology with the old habits. That's why the booming radio voice of Walter Cronkite was so popular on early TV in the 1950s; that's why Scoble a pod/casting and hence radio personality could be popular on Twitter and why the movie star Ashton Kucher is one of the most followedo n Twitter. People very showly change their habits. Their habits from TV are to watch and save on TIVO, so that's what they do on Twitter. Given the nasty culture of hatred and attacking and blocking and muting on these social networks, you can understand why people don't talk. They will when it becomes more free and more safe.
Ashmanov talks about this phenomenon of the re-tweet as "a magnifying lense, a means of amplifcation, even the smallest signal, given correctly, an be increased by many factors. And therefore with few means you can achieve a lot".
Yes. That's both a good and bad things -- in his video, Ashmanov talks about ferment on Twitter over some event, and the way a few manipulators come on and turn everybody in one direction or another, like schools of fish suddenly switching directions.
One of the things that the destructive anarchist cult Anonymous does, aside from getting many actual anonymous followers, is to endlessly create new Twitter accounts with various personas, usually designed specifically to amplify something like the response to the death of Swartz or the roll-out of Mega by Kim Dotcom, and then dash critics. Most of the criticism and hate speech I get on Twitter comes from day-old or month-old accounts with various personas, many of whom disappear by the following week as they get banned or simply deleted. They are like the carpetbaggers of the Internet.
"WITHOUT GOD, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE" (DOSTOEVSKY)
"A sad trend for the year: now anything goes in the Internet". Well,
sad, if you want to make a deal with Putin and control the media by
continuing to sell Internet services.
Ashmanov complains about
the hate, and the schisms -- Russians fear schisms -- and all the
swearing and insults. In other words, Russians behaved online like they
do in real life.
The Belarusian play Minsk 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker
has a great moment (I will write more) where a woman describes how you
can't look at people in public for long, that when she got into a line
and happened to glance at a young man, he barked "Khuy li smotrish"
or "what the fuck are you looking at" -- that level of nastiness in
public life is common. This was in Belarus, but it could have been in
Russia.
There's more that ensures you have to worry about how the Internet goes in RU -- even if this guy defends his turf:
There is an incitement of hate and a fall of moral barriers, and a removal of all masks. Business and information media which before at least maintained the semblance of objectivity have now ceased to be ashamend and have finally taken one political side (mainly the liberal, of course). Now the journalist, including the Internet-journalist is a fierce political warrier, and not at all a sober observer. And he is not ashamed at the loss of his professional innocence.
You see how different this class of people are from the technologists
in the United States? Can you imagine Sergy Brin or Biz Evans talking
like that?
Ashmanov complains about FB's secret algorithms
that pick out "the most interesting" supposedly in your feed to serve up
to you, but he believes it leads to more siloization. I tend to agree.
But in that, FB is serving their public. Most people want affirmation
and likes, not questioning and dislikes. That's why Twitter is better
than Facebook for arguments.
THE INTERNET FILTER
He complains of:
people shut in their narrow thematic niches, semantic little compartments, cells; essentially it will become easy not to see anything that you don't like or which seems uninteresting and that means the chances of learning something new and changing your perspective will be less. And that process is increasing , with a positive feedback, leading to the "encapsulzation" of consciousness.
Ashmanov may not realize this, but before him, Eli Pariser of move.on
wrote a book about the same topic: The Filter Bubble: What The Internet
Is Hiding From You -- but what really bothered Pariser, as a
"progressive" was that conservatives weren't being forced to consume
leftist propaganda so they could be "educated". He was never, ever bothered by the fact that Google turned
up Wikipedia as virtually the first result on most topics ensuring that tilt to the left that in fact he so yearned for -- Wikipedia
with its leftist skew and all its problems is notorious. What Pariser was worried about
was that if a lefty looked up "BP" he might get information about an oil
spill, but a conservative wouldn't find anything critical (not really a
proven thesis, but only anecdotal). He was worried about differing
views on climate change coming up and one might not be "correct". Evgeny
Morozov took this even further, urging that "somebody" should the high ranking of
sites on the pseudoscience of vaccination scares -- as if the public
shouldn't be free to make up their own minds.
Now, says Ashmanov, the
gosudarstvenniki -- the statists -- believe the government is losing the
information battle, and are forming "Internet militias" -- which he
believes to be true -- and we do see evidence of them everywhere
commenting -- but we've seen that for 15 years.
While Western
journalists have been entranced with the big marches in Russia -- engendered and
encouraged by social media, particularly LJ, FB and Twitter -- they
haven't been willing to concede the backlash as much -- not only are the
opposition leaders getting arrested, as Ashmanov points out (and I've
seen evidence of this) there is a "movement from below", and "without a
summons or help from the government" to fight liberals on the Internet. I
see this every time one of my blog posts is published on Inosmi.ru --
there is a deluge of hundreds of hate messages, many of them seemingly
authentic and not produced from bots.
Of course, I think this
movement "from below" *does* have a lot of help getting fanned and
started, and it only takes a few to feel like a million, when there are
bots and fake accounts, as we see with Anonymous, which I also believe
to be infilterated by the FSB handily.
But it would be naive
to think that all hate comments on liberal posts come from FSB
engineering -- they do come from the Russian public mind at large, which
is none to liberal. It was always clear to me even from the "informal"
period of the 1980s and the post-coup liberalization that the people in
the military-industrial complex -- and that's the milieu that the Internet technologists come from in Russia, not the humanities -- which makes up a lot of people, were
going to stick to an aggressive, nationalistic illiberal mindset. These
are people who have not read Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn and will never
read them.
THE ARMIES OF THE INTERNET
"I have observed them," writes Ashmanov. "They
have formed like drops, gradually joining into larger detachments." He
feels the liberals already had their own army by then, and only Surkov,
the Kremlin propagandist and grey cardinal, now in remission, would
fight them. He thinks the Nashisty, which were the Kremlin supported
"Nashi," or "Ours," supporting Putin's Party, "United Russia," wrangled
bots against liberals. But as he notes, it's actually hard for bots to
fight against live people and Ashmanov feels that Runet was occupied by
liberals (this disturbed pro-Putin Kevin Rothrock, at A Good Treaty as
well. He is probably the leading expert of Runet, but he hasn't written
about Ashmanov's article and likely won't -- or will approve of it
without criticism).
Ashmanov predicts the war will continue
for influence over the Russian Internet; there are draft laws on spam
and the Internet as a whole, and the whole filtration infrastructure is
going to get built out. "We will see the first show trials on blocking
sites, and also responsiblility for the 'Internet bazaar,'" he writes by
which he means the "anything goes" atmosphere, I guess.
And
here's where the gloomy Russian intelligent-tekhnolog kicks in: "We will
see the final erosion of the borders between text robots and
roboticized people." Oh, come now, people still argue on Facebook,
especially if Durov doesn't block them, and on the Internet, in fact people find out quickly that you are a dog.
He also predicts the
"merger of TV and the Internet". Given that TV is how Putin keeps the
masses "zombified" and there is much greater availability of TV than the
Internet, I find that hard to believe, or at least, if it happens, it
will happen on Putin's terms. I've seen other experts in Russia write
about the "second screen" phenomenon noted in the US, that people sit on
the couch with a remote control AND a phone or tablet or laptop and
chat with their friends about what they watch on TV.
More
than half of users in Russia will have mobile phones in 2013, says
Ashmanov, and many will skip the stage of having desk top computers
(which we see in many third-world countries, and Russia is in some
respects still a third-world country) "a tablet and a smart phone will
cover all their Internet needs" -- except he's forgetting that at work,
they will likely still sit in front of a desktop. But he says like
American technologists that there will be new services that jump the
Internet and go right to the smart phone.
So -- 5,000 words to tell you what you already knew: the Kremlin will try to take over the Internet from its technology class, which in part served the liberals, but the technologists will help them filter out and separate out those "irresponsible" journalists and opposition leaders who are "immoral" and in any event stuck in silos we should crowbar them out of...
Glad to see Alyona Popova's call for reactions to this piece got some good answers, but also you can see support of Ashmanov:
https://twitter.com/alyonapopova/status/293606716434681856
@dmitry_seryogin Re start-ups and politicization -- nonsense. Psychology of users has changed, but not toward videos, but it's more complicated
and the propagandistic ton of the article, it's not very pleasant to read
@misha_kvakin sharp Ashmanization of the brain
@SeoUmnik excellent post! Much truth
@s0ra111 article contracts my experience of reality in places (not only "web"). General impression -- propaganda of "patriotism"...
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | January 22, 2013 at 05:46 PM
Just one comment about Popova: a few years back she had photos of her and Anya Chapman all over her site, proudly posted. Those photos got deleted once she became a prominent figure in the Russian 'opposition' and claimed OMON broke her arm when probably some nationalist thug called her a b--- at a rally and she slugged him.
Regarding CatzFitz's 'tweeps' - @ReginaldQuill has confirmed in recent days he's all about attacking BigSis' enemies, including WND and Senator Rand Paul. He's a shameless hack for BigSis, whether paid or unpaid, and calls the CIA smuggling guns from Libya to Syria a 'conspiracy theory' when numerous ex-CIA and military insiders have said that's exactly what was happening at the 'consulate' (really CIA compound) in Benghazi.
And the notion that those putting forward this theory are 'blaming the victim' in Amb. Chris Stevens when Stevens himself may have had second thoughts about Fast and Furious po Arabski is pure sophistry. @ReginaldQuill is an authoritarian Military/BigSis complex worshipping thug, plain and simple, who agitates for war against his fellow Americans by calling them 'neo-Confederates'.
And Catherine Fitzpatrick's (and more importantly, Craig 'Streetwise Professor) Pirrong's tolerance of such libels of the Pauls simply because they don't like their foreign policy views is why I have so much contempt for Pirrong. Hey jackass Professor, those people @ReginaldQuill calls 'neo-Confederates' are your gun owning friends and neighbors!
Posted by: Mr. X | January 23, 2013 at 04:14 PM
I'm the one who reported on the connection between Popova and Chapman -- I think I broke that story actually:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/minding_russia/2010/06/spy-20.html
http://www.rferl.org/content/Russia_Mulls_Response_To_US_Spy_Arrests/2085798.html
http://www.rferl.org/content/Is_This_Espionage_20_Anna_Chapman_spy_Russia/2089061.html
As for the rest of all this ranting and raging about Craig Pirrong and Reginal Quill, I don't know these people. I don't agree often with what they say. I merely follow them on Twitter. They often post things that I *do* agree with about Russia.
I don't follow all the conspiracy theories about the Pauls, etc. etc. Perhaps they're true -- I just don't have time to investigate them. It's just not interesting to me. I don't like the Pauls, that video on China invading the US was stupid and tendentious. The person who raged at Reginal Quill today can hardly be considered a reliable source as he's an anonymous ranter himself, as they often are.
I don't follow Homeland Security and only today figured out who "BigSis" is. I lived most of my adult life without something called "Homeland Security" so I haven't really studied it except for a few efforts to try to get them to acknowledge that they shouldn't render people back to torture in authoritarian countries. I'm not an expert on Homeland Security. Right after 9/11, they had a "citizens' watch" that they asked everyone to sign up for. I volunteered to watch a block of riverfront. I never heard back from them. It's just as well, my eyesight is poor.
Posted by: Catherine A. Fitzpatrick | January 23, 2013 at 11:36 PM
While Ashmanov is speaking of the "Internet revolutionaries" in the third person, what he is really saying, in my view, that the code class of Russia -- the top Internet technologists and legions of programmers and script kiddies -- are in a position to withstand the analogue Kremlin now, and we really have to see who will defeat whom.
Posted by: Checkitgr Bookmarks | January 24, 2013 at 06:32 AM
Internet is the main part of human life. By using internet, people can search any information. That's why I liked going through your post.
Posted by: More Info | February 02, 2013 at 05:55 AM