Yet it is just a single step away from politics. The whole concept of the city and the city state – the cradle of politics and the object of the social contract, and the reformatting of the new cartography – is an act of politicization. Pokémon Go is a challenge to territorial splits and divisions; on the West Bank of the River Jordan, Palestinians put Pokémon on the other side of the border wall or in Israeli settlements and, in attempting to catch them, a warning appears: ‘the mistake of apartheid’. I won’t be at all surprised if rare Pokémon turn up in Kim Jong-un’s secret bunker or in Islamic State camps. This organization may be officially banned in Russia, but not on Google Maps.
Yes, Pokémon may be just a game, a mere fad of the summer of 2016, which quietly died away with the coming of the severe winter in the Northern hemisphere. But they are, nevertheless, emissaries from the future, forerunners of an augmented reality, which, with each passing day, will take a stronger grip on our imagination, our communications, our cities and our streets in a way that has proved impossible for, say, NATO or Islamic State. What’s more, no state can possibly build any barriers to defend itself against this reality. An ever-increasing number of users will make their way onto this map, outside the control of the laws of sovereignty or citizenship, and they will spend ever-increasing amounts of time in this fluid and flexible space, earning and spending money, falling in and out of love and living by their own rules. Enhanced reality will take the place ever more strongly of what is ‘real’ (but is it actually ‘real’?). Just look already at how fans of Game of Thrones, disappointed by both candidates in the 2016 US presidential election, created their own political party. Soon the state itself will have to go into its own augmented reality, creating there its own virtual objects.
As a result of this, the Moscow city government is planning on creating a Russian answer to Pokémon, an app for iPhone and Android called ‘Know your Moscow’, where instead of cartoon characters you will be able to catch the doubles of the poet Alexander Pushkin, the first cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, or the rock star Viktor Tsoi, and take a selfie with them. And International Memorial, the historical-educational and human rights organization, has since 2013 supported a site called ‘The Topography of Terror’ (the idea and the name have been borrowed from the museum of the same name in Berlin). On an interactive map of Moscow, sites are superimposed where the Soviet Terror was carried out: apartments of those who were repressed, prisons, torture chambers, sites of execution and burial. It is possible that this project could be expanded into enhanced reality in such a way that, as you walk the streets of the city, everyone would be able to see the hidden archaeology of repression, meet the ghosts and hear the voices of the victims of the Terror… A variety of frequently contradictory realities will cross over each other in the city, users of the app will be able to migrate between them or live in a number of them all at once; and with time the state will become simply one layer of this hybrid world – what’s more, far from the most interesting one.
KREMLIN FIREWALL
News from the world of Russian hi-tech sounds ever more like information reports from a battlefield. Natalya Kaspersky, the President of the InfoWatch group of companies and a co-founder of ‘Kaspersky Lab’, has introduced a system to record telephone conversations in the office. The police are going to use the GLONASS satellite tracking system (the Russian equivalent of GPS) to remotely turn off the engines of offenders’ cars: since 2017 all cars produced on the territory of the Customs Union of Post-Soviet Countries[36] have been fitted with special modules that allow them to be tracked and controlled with the help of GLONASS. Furthermore, Russian commercial centres have welcomed the new Russian Federation law on protecting personal data, which means that they have to keep the personal information of Russians living in the country: many Western firms were forced to install special equipment in Russia in advance. Russian hi-tech is preparing for the construction of the century: the creation of a digital iron curtain, an analogue of the ‘great Chinese firewall’.
Back in the far-off days of 1990s techno-optimism, we believed that the computer (in partnership with the video recorder) would bring us freedom. Russians, being masters of the grey import, flooded the country with IBM computers with AT and XT processors. The first programs were written by long-haired guys with holes in their sweaters, physics students from Phystech, the elite technical college, who had just opened their first cooperative businesses. They were the heralds of the open information society, the pioneers of the digital frontier. We greeted the successes of our native IT entrepreneurs – Ilya Segalovich, Arkady Volozh, Anatoly Karachinsky and Eugene Kaspersky – as a counterweight to raw state capitalism. The Yandex and ABBYY brands seemed to be the Russian bridges into the world of globalization; and the Facebook symbol invariably appeared on the banners of the demonstrators at the protests on Bolotnaya Square in the winter of 2011–12.[37]
Now everything has changed. The lesson has been well learned by the domestic IT industry of Pavel Durov, the creator of the social network vKontakte (‘In Touch’, considered the ‘Russian Facebook’). This libertarian clashed with the FSB, had his business taken from him and ended up being chased out of the country as a digital dissident. Now those programmers – still wearing the same sweaters with holes in them – write the code for ‘SORM’: Operational Search Systems, a complex of measures giving the special services control over telephones, mobile and wireless networks; and they are building the new Russian panopticon, a digital prison with a system for total monitoring of the population.
The optimism of the 1990s about the liberating actions of the Internet rested on the illusions that the new technologies, which are at one and the same time personalized yet provide a network, would produce a new type of social relationship: non-hierarchical, egalitarian, participatory; and that they would create a new type of politics, which would shake up the old hierarchy of parties, elites and states, which the industrial age left us as its legacy. And indeed, in the past twenty years completely different forms of politics have appeared, based on the new technologies, from the networked campaigning of Barack Obama in 2008 and the success of the Pirate Party in Iceland, to the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ in the Arab world. But Obama left office, Facebook helped bring to power the populist and chauvinist Donald Trump, and Twitter in the Arab states was taken over by the Islamists. At the same time, authoritarian regimes learnt how to live with the net; not just live with it, but use it to their own advantage: personalization and customization can be turned into personal control over citizens by means of their gadgets and their social network accounts. And social media activity, it turns out, can easily be transformed into noise on the net, when different forms of civil activity on the Internet can become lightning rods, a valve for letting off steam – a substitute for political protest. And at the same time, hi-tech companies can be changed from being agents for change into agents of the state, as happened, for example, with Kaspersky Lab in Russia.
36
The Customs Union gives customs-free travel for citizens of the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
37
Following allegations of rigged elections for the State Duma in December 2011, there were mass demonstrations in Moscow, the like of which had not been seen since the last days of the Soviet Union. These demonstrations seemed to convince President Putin that he needed to have a stronger grip on society.