SPLINTERNET 2: "To be a journalist in Russia is suicide."

Ephemera

Splinternet is an irregular report from Ephemera. Once upon a time, we thought of the Internet as like the Wild West; anarchic and mostly empty. The dream of the World Wide Web was ‘all of the world’s knowledge, at all the world’s fingertips’. But this dream has failed to materialize. As Scott Malcomson says in his book ‘Splinternet’, from which I’ve taken the title of this series: “the Internet is cracking apart into discrete groups no longer willing, or able, to connect.”

The Internet’s “destructive creativity”, born from Silicon Valley libertarianism, must be tamed. China’s solution has been to retreat from the World Wide Web and create a parallel Chinese Internet, which will soon dwarf the English one. In Russia, the mafia state pairs the Chinese panopticon with extralegal violence against the media.

Want a better handle on the idea of the “splinternet”? Here’s a quick and good tv interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZJSRR66teM

Here’s a cool 1-hr tv doc on Russia’s “Creepy, Innovative Internet” from Bloomberg TV. It’s great, especially the segment that starts at 28:50, which is about a facial recognition app that’s been downloaded over a million times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICL-lwI7KM

The op-ed Anna Politkovskaya wrote for the Guardian about being poisoned: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/09/russia.media

Yulia James and Sophia Jones for Wired: https://www.wired.com/2017/10/russian-trolls-attack/

I couldn’t have done this episode without the Freedom House reports on internet freedom. If you really want to drill down into the nitty-gritty, that’s where I’d start. Here’s their scores for Russia, year-by-year (100 is Least Free, 0 is Most Free): 2009: 49 2010: n/a (no report) 2011: 52 2012: 52 2013: 54 2014: 60 2015: 62 2016: 65 2017: 66 2018: 67 https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2018/russia

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This month's Patreon exclusive - a tour of Wikipedia's odder internal policies.

Music used:

Olafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm - Four Pussy Riot - Police State Alberto Iglesias - Los Vestidos Desgarrados Max Richter - infra 3 Frank Ocean - Voodoo