THE WAR WITH POKÉMON
In July 2016, on Ilyinka Square in Moscow, by the Kitai-Gorod metro station and just a stone’s throw from the holiest of holies of Russian power – the complex of buildings that make up the Presidential Administration on Staraya Square – a spontaneous, unsanctioned rally occurred. Every day, especially as dusk fell, hundreds of people began to gather in the square. Sitting on the benches and on the grass, they became engrossed in their smartphones. They introduced themselves to each other, quietly chatted, and went off for a drink and a bite to eat, before once again taking up their positions. In the darkness among the trees and bushes, hundreds of screens glowed.
No, this was not an opposition rally called ‘Occupy Kitai-Gorod’; it was the hunt for Pokémon. On Ilyinka Square there were four PokeStops[33] with constantly activated ‘lures’ (bait to catch Pokémon). The creatures were appearing roughly every couple of minutes, including rare examples, such as Vaporeon, who caused a well-publicized crush in New York’s Central Park. He was chased by dozens of people, all trying to catch him on their smartphones. All night in the square a life understood only by the initiated went on; a few vehicles rushed past on Ilyinka Lane; while in the windows of the buildings of the Presidential Administration lights burned behind the white blinds, which, it seems, had remained there from the time when the buildings housed the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Divided by a fence under the watchful eye of the Federal Protection Service, two civilizations met, two concepts of space: the world of the state and the world of Pokémon. And the question arose as to whether these two worlds could live peacefully side by side in the consciousness of the citizens and on the streets of the city. The second Pokémon invasion of Russia began in the summer of 2016 when the new Pokémon Go game, with its added realistic features, was released. (The first invasion was way back in 1996, when Pokémon for Game Boy, the first version, appeared on the scene. It was accompanied by a franchise with cards and souvenirs, and mainly captured fans of computer games and the younger members of the population.) In the new version, characters are linked to Google Maps and actual places on the planet, and players move out of the virtual space into real places: on the streets of cities, in woods and parks.
This time, as opposed to the politically innocuous year of 1996, when the very idea of bringing in legal restraints on a computer game would have seemed funny, the Russian authorities saw in Pokémon a threat to national security. Denis Voronenkov, a Duma deputy from the Communist Party,[34] asked the FSB and the Communications Ministry to ban the game in Russia; he believed that it had been developed by the US special services in order to carry out reconnaissance and gain access to places otherwise difficult to reach. The deputy was convinced that ‘the USA is trying through this video game to formulate the image of the next war, which will exactly suit the aims and the interests of Washington’. Senator Franz Klintsevich agreed with the Communist deputy, suggesting that playing the game should be banned in churches, prisons, hospitals and in cemeteries and at memorials. Predictably, the Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky, waded in, declaring that ‘culture and Pokémon have nothing in common’. He compared the game with the Langoliers – creatures from the novels of Stephen King, which destroy reality. ‘There was a time when I played. I played at the start of the 1990s when “Tetris” appeared, and I immediately understood that this is evil. These are creatures that devour everything, like in Stephen King’s books; they devour space and time’, said Medinsky.[35]
Here, one could simply once again laugh at these Russian obscurantists, who throttle everything that is alive and progressive; or talk about this particular period of heightened paranoia in the history of Russia, when the siloviki have seized power and see conspiracies and threats everywhere. This would certainly be partially true; but the real piquancy of this situation is that deep down they really do feel a threat to their very existence: these amusing cartoon Pokémon characters announce the arrival of a new reality, one in which today’s Russian authorities – or, indeed, any others – simply have no place.
What we are talking about here is a new cartography, which is writing new laws of sovereignty and citizenship. Historically, the modern state was defined by geographical maps. This was how it happened: it was not the state that drew the maps, but the modern epoch, with its geographical, geometrical and cartographic imagination, which gave birth to the state. The state is a geometrical entity; it arises out of Cartesian rationalism, Hobbesian empiricism and the lineal geometry of Euclid and Newton. In his fundamental book The Power of Maps from 1992, the American culturologist and geographer, Dennis Wood, demonstrated how, at the start of the modern age, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, people began, with the help of maps, to imagine and then construct the wider world and political order. The cartographical images of the world led to the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries; and following on from that, colonialism and the ideas of state sovereignty and the nation-state. Lineal cartography gives us borders, regularity, planned and organized life, a controlled population living within the boundaries of defined territories: all the elements that make up the modern state. In fact, it is from maps that the idea arises of sovereignty as a territorial dimension of power, and the idea of citizenship as belonging to a particular territory.
At the end of the twentieth century, with the appearance of computer networks, the idea of territorial sovereignty received its first serious blow: networks became widely pervasive and transborder; a transaction could take place remotely from the server; space lost its connection with a particular place; the so-called ‘space of flows’ appeared (such as the Internet, the global financial market and satellite television). But the desktop computer was still joined to a cable, a provider and an IP address, which meant it could still be controlled and registered. With the appearance of the mobile Internet, all these restrictions were removed. The individual is set free from cables, providers, coverage areas and national operators: with his smartphone and tablet, he is instantly connected to millions of other users within a global information sphere. A new cartography is born before our very eyes, one without borders, states and the usual institutions: this is Google Maps, working in real time, in which a person with his gadget (and soon this will be one and the same thing as we turn into one biotechnical item – an android), linked to an anonymous GPS satellite, becomes an anonymous point of coordinates on the global map.
And suddenly Pokémon appears like agents of this new space, and with them a new cartography of reality, which is not even tied to street names. In the Pokémon Go interface there are no street names, only nameless areas and crossroads with special places marked out by the programme. It reminds one of navigating by orientation points, as was done before maps existed: ‘Go as far as the big rock; turn left and keep going until sunset.’ The game does away with the rules of linear cartography of the age of reason, with its hierarchies, borders, institutions of power, territorial rules and administrative regimes. Millions of people wander around the streets as if these streets don’t exist; they are moving according to an alternative map, paying no attention to cars, trees, fences or law-enforcement officers. And herein lies the actual threat to the authorities. Pokémon Go is a global ‘occupy’ movement, a rethinking of the principles of urbanization, borders and the boundaries of the city; a radical rewriting of the social space; a desacralization of the concept of ‘space’(the Holocaust Museum in Washington has forbidden the capture of Pokémon on its territory). It is a round-the-clock flash mob with no clear political goals.
33
Places in Pokémon Go that allow players to collect items such as eggs and more Poke Balls to capture more Pokémon.
34
The State Duma is the lower house of the Russian Parliament. The upper house is the Federation Council, members of which are referred to as ‘senators’. The two houses together are called the Federal Assembly.
35
https://www.interfax.ru/russia/519453. ‘Medinsky says computer games are evil’ (in Russian), 19 July 2016.