The author of these lines is not some sort of special internet activist. He is not even an internet enthusiast or an advocate for the medium. Absolutely certain is only this: I have been a user of the internet since it reached our area. I cannot say that I specifically track the events occurring in the relations between the state and the internet. Therefore, if it seems to me that there have been too many such events lately, their number probably has indeed sharply increased.
SOPA, PIPA, questionable articles in the American defense budget, Sergey Brin’s speech, regular “attacks” by the Ukrainian state on internet business, the law being prepared in the Verkhovna Rada that would allow closing websites—all this happened quite recently and did not require me to search on Google or rack my brain. I think that if I had undertaken such a search, I would have found many more facts. So, it can be stated that the state has begun an attack on the internet.
First of all, it must be said that this attack has two directions—actions against the internet as such, and the state’s pursuit of other goals that, nevertheless, limit the capabilities of internet users.
The second activity is significantly more dangerous than the first. In the first case, the state is merely closing websites, restricting citizens’ access to the internet, trying to control content, etc.—behaving like an elephant in a china shop. And although the damage from such actions seems large, in this struggle everything is clear and obvious. Sooner or later, the elephant will be expelled and the china trade will resume.
In the second case, everything is far worse. The china shop, trading honest porcelain, is being imperceptibly replaced with some stall selling disposable dishes—plastic cups, no more than two per person upon presentation of a passport with the correct registration.
The state has already lost this war in both directions. True, the same could be said (and some did say it) about the prospects for the Bolshevik coup: it is clear that the Bolsheviks will lose, the whole question is when exactly this will happen. Let us hope that the process will not drag on for seventy years.
What is this war, why is the state waging it, and why will it lose? Before we briefly examine these questions, it should be noted that the word “war” is applicable here not as a designation of some conscious and planned action, but rather as a designation of a chaotic process, the participants of which pursue their own goals.
It can be called a “war” because the ultimate result of this activity is the destruction of the internet, and the fact that this will be merely a side effect of efforts applied to achieving other goals changes nothing in this result. Simply put—bureaucrats are busy producing reports and covering their backsides, politicians are fighting for voters’ votes, and in the course of this daily work they are destroying the internet.
The reason this happens is that the state is incompatible with the internet. Therefore, the very existence of the state will tend to reject this foreign phenomenon.
This incompatibility has two sides.
First. The internet is contrary to the very nature of the state. The state, as is well known, is a group of people possessing a monopoly on violence within a certain territory. Undermining any of these attributes—territory or monopoly—is an undermining of the institution as a whole. In our case, the territorial monopoly is undoubtedly under attack. Thanks to the internet, people gain the ability to communicate and interact without state borders. Of course, this communication was available before, but now it has mass scale and proceeds without any accounting and control. And the matter here is not only and not so much in the dissemination of various ideas harmful to the state and reposting of malicious demotivators. First of all, the matter is in everyday practice, in which people begin to perceive the state as an unnecessary obstacle—which it actually is—in their peaceful and voluntary activities.
Just recently, when you bought (speaking conditionally) sneakers from an American online store, you needed to visit the customs office. It turned out that you needed to fill out a bunch of papers there and pay some money for something unclear.
Having visited the customs office to receive a pair of sneakers—which now approach the price of a small airplane—you will more quickly understand that the customs office’s activities toward you, as a private individual, are equally absurd and obstructive as they are toward any enterprise and regular business.
Second. The internet is contrary to the established practice of the state. Here several things need to be said.
First, with the appearance of the internet, the centuries-old practice of state-organizational interaction is gradually disappearing. The state creates rules that force people to unite into hierarchical structures if they need to regularly interact with the state in some way. Thus, the state transfers people’s activities into a plane in which it is the strongest player and also the arbiter. A large hierarchical organization—the state—interacts on this field with small hierarchical organizations, and, if something goes wrong, always defeats them.
The essence of this process is clearly illustrated by the name of one of our organizations—“dialogue with authority.” And although the state sometimes loses to pressure from organizations, usually this is a loss in the short-term perspective (like, for example, Reagan and Thatcher’s “conservative revolution,” the achievements of which have been quietly eliminated and the failures—hypertrophied). On the whole, the “dialogue with authority” process is well controlled. The main thing is that the state completely controls, sorry for the expression, the discourse. If the “dialogue” discourse suddenly gets out of control, then the state can “work” directly with an inconvenient organization and has many opportunities to influence its activities.
A “person on the street” in such a world, in order to be heard, is forced to join some organization, and thus accepts its existing rules and the understanding of the discourse important to him as developed in this organization during the “dialogue with authority.”
The internet completely changes this picture. Both the “person on the street” and the organization, within the framework of the internet, exist as equal accounts.
Moreover, the internet allows organizing actions without resorting to the creation of organizations. It allows organizing financing (Ron Paul’s money bomb) outside of organizations and allows bypassing the media monopoly, which now becomes completely unnecessary.
Beloved and convenient enemies, built into columns and carefully counted and numbered, now disappear, dissolve into the general mass, which is fundamentally impossible to control. When they say that the internet allows the state to monitor its citizens and use the results of this surveillance against them, they are undoubtedly telling the truth. Moreover, one should expect that such activity will intensify and may still ruin the lives of many people. However, it will bring benefit only to the reporting of repressive organs about the work done. It will not be able to do anything with self-organizing processes.
Second, state propaganda is now completely ineffective. The Russian authorities probably became the first in the world concerned about ideological control of the internet. Having discerned in it a new threat and a new opportunity, they began their manipulations practically simultaneously with the appearance of this medium. The results, to put it mildly, are deplorable. Television remains the main propaganda channel anyway.
The reason is that among the mass of opinions being expressed and discussed, a propagandist action constructed for manipulations either immediately becomes obvious or simply gets lost in the mass flow of the same but completely freely and voluntarily generated idiocy. The problem of Russian citizens is not that their government conducts manipulations on the internet, but that they themselves most often have a pro-government position. But that is a completely different topic.
And, finally, third. It seems that we with you may become witnesses of the decline of the state. The author of these lines has always said that as soon as money ends up on the internet, the state, in the form we know it, will disappear. The state monopoly is based, first of all, on fiduciary money, again, monopolistically produced by the state.
Compulsory taxes, monopoly on violence, and fiat money are closely interconnected. Remove any one thing and the system will collapse. Now an active search is underway for new means of exchange that would exist independently of the state.
And in conclusion, it must be said. The real enemy is often not the one who is maliciously stigmatized and denounced. The real enemy is the one over whom they sneer. In our case, the object of ridicule of both pro-state figures and internet activists is the so-called “network hamsters.” However, it is precisely they who are the real enemies of the state.
As we have found out, the internet is dangerous because it transfers the threat to the state from the realm of political struggle into the realm of everyday activity. And in this activity, it is the hamsters, not heroic fighters and activists, who do the main work. And, by the way, let us note that the state fights not so much with activists as with hamsters, limiting, for example, their ability to download games and watch porn. But, since there are more hamsters and they themselves do not suspect that they are the vanguard of anarchism (moreover, in their statements they are most often sincerely pro-government), the state’s case has already been lost. And thank God.