Here we see a fundamental rule of ‘network neutrality’: technology is neutral, not only in relation to its content and application formats, as the very term implies, but in relation to political regimes, too. The network can be used both to liberate people and also to spy on them; both to consolidate a protest and to disperse it. Technology itself is neither good nor bad, in the same way that an axe is neither good nor bad: it is simply an instrument in a person’s hands. The same axe can be used to chop the wood to make a cottage or to kill someone. The network does not exist separately from society, the elite, or the state. It transmits the vast majority of social relationships, but it does not define them. For example, the Islamic State has shown itself to be very advanced technologically, combining the social and religious practices of the Middle Ages with skilled management of the media and social networks.
In Russia the interrelationship of technology and the governing regime has its own peculiarities. First, it is a question of resources. In terms of the distribution model of the economy and the skilfully manipulated paranoia about ‘national information security’, the IT sector becomes a vital feeder of the budget alongside other strategic sectors: atomic energy, the air and space sector and the military-industrial complex. The IT sector gives rise to a large number of go-betweens who peddle ‘threats’ (people such as Duma deputy Irina Yarovaya; the creator of the League for a Safe Internet, Konstantin Malofeev; or the Communications Minister, Nikolai Nikiforov, who suggested that .doc files and the Times New Roman font could undermine the Russian Federation’s information sovereignty). These people dream up threats to information security to obtain resources from the budget. Storing Russians’ personal data; archiving for three years the contents of telephone and Internet communications (‘the Yarovaya Law’); relocating credit card transaction transfers to Russian servers; the creation of a national search engine and operation system; the transfer of state structures onto a national software system; and the possibility of creating the infrastructure for a sovereign Internet along the Chinese modeclass="underline" all of this gobbles up a huge slice of the budget pie, which no hi-tech company would turn away from.
Second, this is a question of the innovation culture. An engineer in Russia is a state worker. In Russian history, technology and modernization (particularly in the military-industrial context) were always first and foremost strategic priorities for the state, and only in a distant second place matters for private capital. For centuries, it was with this in mind that the state trained its engineers. As the Russian investigative journalist, Andrei Soldatov, has said:
Russian and Soviet engineers were never taught ethics and were never given normal philosophy courses. All that a Russian engineer knows is that, ‘there are these chattering artists, while we ensure order’. And, of course, the idea of ‘order’ chimes perfectly with the state’s way of thinking, because it is a hierarchy with a clearly defined structure. Many engineers have told me that if you ask an engineer with no training in the humanities to build you a defence system, he’ll produce a prison, because nothing is better protected: there’s one way in, one way out, and everything is controlled.[38]
Soldatov makes the comparison with Napoleon, who closed down the schools of philosophy and opened engineering schools, because he didn’t need revolutionaries; and with Stalin, who created a huge number of polytechnical colleges in order to teach people technical skills but without a university education. So the problem is far from being a specifically Russian one; but it was particularly in the USSR, where technical modernization became a question of national security, that the state almost completely took responsibility for the engineering culture. This went from Stalin’s sharashki (special camps for scientists who were carrying out strategic research), to Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s scientific-research institutes, to the ‘closed towns’ under the control of the military-industrial complex,[39] to the ‘post boxes’ – secret institutes and factories that were known only by their postcode.
From the end of the 1980s a new culture of innovation began to grow in Russia. This was based, on the one hand, on the mighty Soviet engineering potential and strong school of physics and mathematics, and, on the other, on private initiative and networks. This produced a string of unique computer programs and home-grown IT leaders with global ambitions, such as the afore-mentioned Eugene Kaspersky. But it failed to create a sphere of technological, intellectual or civil autonomy, or an innovative environment like Silicon Valley in California. All attempts to create such an environment, such as Skolkovo, were closely tied to their state patrons; and in the current conditions of the financial crisis and economic sanctions they are stagnating.[40] And in Putin’s third term, when the authorities set out to clean up and nationalize the information and hi-tech sphere, they simply went back to the bosom of the authoritarian state.
It has become common to describe Putin’s regime in ‘hybrid’ terms, and here we have yet another ‘hybrid’: hi-tech authoritarianism, embedded in the structures of the information society. This phenomenon was described in the anti-utopian works of Vladimir Sorokin (Day of the Oprichnik; The Sugary Kremlin; Telluria),[41] where a future Russia, having shut itself off from the West by a wall, and having restored the monarchy and the customs of the Middle Ages, uses artificial intelligence devices, mobile video telephones and the advances of bionics and genetics. In this way, Russian traditionalism works hand in hand with the iPhone in exactly the same way as Islamic State: the patriarchal consciousness and archaic social and political institutions blend perfectly with postmodern technologies that have been bought or stolen in the West or developed under the control of the authoritarian state.
We can see, therefore, how in the modern world authoritarianism has adapted to the demands of the information society and uses its infrastructure for its own survival. In their book, How Modern Dictators Survive: Cooptation, Censorship, Propaganda and Repression, economists Sergei Guriyev and Daniel Treisman write about how in the past few decades a new type of authoritarianism has arisen, better adapted to coping with a world of open borders, global media and the knowledge economy. Illiberal regimes, from the Peru of Alberto Fujimori to the Hungary of Victor Orbán have learnt how to concentrate power in their hands while avoiding isolating their countries and engaging in mass killings, and, at the same time, working cleverly with information. Although they may resort to violence from time to time, they hold on to power less through terror then by manipulating society’s consciousness.
The same thing is happening in Russia. On the one hand, the regime controls the flow of information in the traditional media and on the Internet; on the other, it tries to monopolize the hi-tech sector, bringing it under its own interests and preparing structures to possibly shut off the country’s access to information. This is the looking-glass of authoritarianism: namely, those areas where new networks and civil autonomy could be born – this digital frontier which could become the space for freedom – is being used in Russia to create archaic means of authority. Once again in Russian history, technology is working not to free society but to strengthen the state; the axe is once again becoming not the carpenter’s instrument but a weapon of repression. And if Russia in the future shuts itself off from the world with a ‘Kremlin firewall’ created by state-of-the-art technology, then by its very nature this wall will still be that of the Middle Ages.
38
https://www.svoboda.org/a/27686926.html Radio Liberty, ‘Kremlin Firewall’ (in Russian), 20 April 2016.
39
The vast majority of the territory of the Soviet Union was ‘closed’ to foreigners: they were not allowed to go there. There were also numerous ‘closed towns’ – sometimes large cities – where even Soviet citizens needed a special pass to live or visit. For foreigners there was no such thing as a visa for the Soviet Union. The visa stipulated the places to be visited and was valid for travel only within a twenty-five-kilometre radius of the centre of that place – provided no ‘closed’ areas fell within it.
40
In 2009 it was announced that the Russian government was to create a place of technological advancement and innovation at Skolkovo, just to the west of Moscow.
41