Domestic
cyberspace



To understand M.I.T. as multiple interconnected systems that affect each other without total overlap, we must consider their offline geographies. Even though these offline locations do not always mirror online bubbles, physical geopolitics does determine a lot of protocols that govern cyberspace. Back in 2012, research collective Metahaven outlined the influence of U.S. law on the way American social network companies work, even though online they are presented as global (Metahaven, 2012). The uncanny effects that come up while using VPN come from its capacity to transverse these offline borders, and hint on how deeply the domesticity of the internet is embedded. When accessing the blocked content and achieving anonymity, you also inevitably engage in some weird encounters. For instance, the feeling of watching advertisements in a language you don’t understand about a context you have no connection to allows you to experience the friction that comes with the trespass of these domestic borders. On the level of state policies, the uneasiness about an act of cyber trespass is present much more explicitly, as a cyber domain is proclaimed to be a new state territory that requires protection no less than water, land or air (Dyer-Witheford & Matviyenko, 2019).


Nevertheless, we must be careful against taking uncritically the state paradigm that allows for clear cut distinctions of jurisdiction based on the location of data servers, API address or your company headquarters. The 2016 U.S. election is a crucial case to interrogate being critical against the state-centred clear cut. On the one hand, it is framed as the intervention of one state (Russia) into the cyber domain of another (U.S.). The initial cyber trespassing - Russian hacking and distributing of democratic party emails - present more complex geographic division if taken from a non-governmental perspective. The infrastructures of tracking, vital for the propaganda distribution, are created and managed by the U.S. companies. Therefore, the Russian intervention was performed by weaponising already existing systems in place. The question comes, then, brilliantly formulated by Svitlana Matviyenko:


"An ad is a blueprint of fake news; and if we accepted the fact that we can be fooled by ads, why are we so alarmed by other types of fake news?"


On the other hand, the 2016 U.S. election set the timeframe for the discussions of post-truth politics, which could not be applied to non-American information infrastructures. Russian M.I.T. that became labelled in the West as 'bringing about post-truth' and dated 2016 has a very different history and the mode of functioning from the one that is broadcasted by the mainstream media.


Sergey Sanovich brings into perspective the Russian part of the infrastructure used to interfere into U.S. elections (Sanovich, 2017). He analyses the distribution of hacked information as an infrastructure rooted in the history and politics of Russian cyberspace. Sanovich draws attention to the relative freedom of Russian cyberspace in opposition to the Russian TV broadcast, that was monopolised by the government and degraded into a hysterical evidence-free stream of consciousness, low quality of which is a consensus. "This uniquely large difference between media freedom online and offline distinguishes Russia from countries with universally free media and from others, such as China, where both offline and online media have been put under tight government control" (Sanovich, 2017). Such contrast allowed for the tech sector to flourish, which is represented in Russia by local companies much more than international monopolies. Even though Russian IT companies are usually talked about as 'Russian Google' or 'Russian Facebook', referring to Yandex and Vkontakte respectively, those companies established their dominance on the market through their unique features - like advancements associated with cyrilic search entries - that are not shared by their U.S. analogues.


According to Sanovich, flourishing Russian cyberspace came into the attention of the Russian government in 2009, when at the time president Dmitry Medvedev started blogs across several social networks. The unprecedented engagement of Medvedev with an online audience, much more critical and autonomous than anything the government was used to on the state-run T.V., was the initial stimulus for the rise of pro-government bots and trolls. They were aimed at posting "diversionary comments in high profile opposition blogs", already flourishing online, and "retweeting and reposting pro-government messages" (Sanovich, 2017). The human trolls, even though remaining a large part of Russian governmental agenda, became augmented by automated bots. Weaponising the "well established and innovative industry of spam and search optimisation", already developed by the mid-2000s, became vital for the governmental protocols of augmenting 'truth', i.e. 'engagement'. The Russian state prioritised doctoring results of recommendation algorithms and scaling propaganda through advertisement, framing them as "virality". Virality was achieved by a multitude of means, including more conventional non-political content like cats, extensively used by Russian propaganda to whitewash a range of notorious political events like the Crimean annexation.


The already overviewed critical assessment of the U.S. context of M.I.T. could be useful to question a similar pervasive narrative in Russia, which portrays the I.T. sector as by definition bringing progress. Rather than representing developments of information infrastructure as halted and repurposed later by the Russian government, one could see them develop as simultaneously governmental and private. The same time, the Russian perspective on M.I.T. allows bringing forward a significantly different time frame in which such infrastructures emerged. Such difference implies that discussions of addressing malicious content through identity verification are not widespread in Russian-speaking cyberspace. Nevertheless, Russian users are no less annoyed at governmental internet control. While some aspects of digital censorship and propaganda are hardly possible to counter, like a new law on fake news, announced by the government to prosecute anyone criticising the (lack of) measures taken against Covid-19, others, like the spread of misinformation, are open for interventions.


  

  05

Domestic
cyberspace



To understand M.I.T. as multiple interconnected systems that affect each other without total overlap, we must consider their offline geographies. Even though these offline locations do not always mirror online bubbles, physical geopolitics does determine a lot of protocols that govern cyberspace. Back in 2012, research collective Metahaven outlined the influence of U.S. law on the way American social network companies work, even though online they are presented as global (Metahaven, 2012). The uncanny effects that come up while using VPN come from its capacity to transverse these offline borders, and hint on how deeply the domesticity of the internet is embedded. When accessing the blocked content and achieving anonymity, you also inevitably engage in some weird encounters. For instance, the feeling of watching advertisements in a language you don’t understand about a context you have no connection to allows you to experience the friction that comes with the trespass of these domestic borders. On the level of state policies, the uneasiness about an act of cyber trespass is present much more explicitly, as a cyber domain is proclaimed to be a new state territory that requires protection no less than water, land or air (Dyer-Witheford & Matviyenko, 2019).


Nevertheless, we must be careful against taking uncritically the state paradigm that allows for clear cut distinctions of jurisdiction based on the location of data servers, API address or your company headquarters. The 2016 U.S. election is a crucial case to interrogate being critical against the state-centred clear cut. On the one hand, it is framed as the intervention of one state (Russia) into the cyber domain of another (U.S.). The initial cyber trespassing - Russian hacking and distributing of democratic party emails - present more complex geographic division if taken from a non-governmental perspective. The infrastructures of tracking, vital for the propaganda distribution, are created and managed by the U.S. companies. Therefore, the Russian intervention was performed by weaponising already existing systems in place. The question comes, then, brilliantly formulated by Svitlana Matviyenko:


"An ad is a blueprint of fake news; and if we accepted the fact that we can be fooled by ads, why are we so alarmed by other types of fake news?"


On the other hand, the 2016 U.S. election set the timeframe for the discussions of post-truth politics, which could not be applied to non-American information infrastructures. Russian M.I.T. that became labelled in the West as 'bringing about post-truth' and dated 2016 has a very different history and the mode of functioning from the one that is broadcasted by the mainstream media.


Sergey Sanovich brings into perspective the Russian part of the infrastructure used to interfere into U.S. elections (Sanovich, 2017). He analyses the distribution of hacked information as an infrastructure rooted in the history and politics of Russian cyberspace. Sanovich draws attention to the relative freedom of Russian cyberspace in opposition to the Russian TV broadcast, that was monopolised by the government and degraded into a hysterical evidence-free stream of consciousness, low quality of which is a consensus. "This uniquely large difference between media freedom online and offline distinguishes Russia from countries with universally free media and from others, such as China, where both offline and online media have been put under tight government control" (Sanovich, 2017). Such contrast allowed for the tech sector to flourish, which is represented in Russia by local companies much more than international monopolies. Even though Russian IT companies are usually talked about as 'Russian Google' or 'Russian Facebook', referring to Yandex and Vkontakte respectively, those companies established their dominance on the market through their unique features - like advancements associated with cyrilic search entries - that are not shared by their U.S. analogues.


According to Sanovich, flourishing Russian cyberspace came into the attention of the Russian government in 2009, when at the time president Dmitry Medvedev started blogs across several social networks. The unprecedented engagement of Medvedev with an online audience, much more critical and autonomous than anything the government was used to on the state-run T.V., was the initial stimulus for the rise of pro-government bots and trolls. They were aimed at posting "diversionary comments in high profile opposition blogs", already flourishing online, and "retweeting and reposting pro-government messages" (Sanovich, 2017). The human trolls, even though remaining a large part of Russian governmental agenda, became augmented by automated bots. Weaponising the "well established and innovative industry of spam and search optimisation", already developed by the mid-2000s, became vital for the governmental protocols of augmenting 'truth', i.e. 'engagement'. The Russian state prioritised doctoring results of recommendation algorithms and scaling propaganda through advertisement, framing them as "virality". Virality was achieved by a multitude of means, including more conventional non-political content like cats, extensively used by Russian propaganda to whitewash a range of notorious political events like the Crimean annexation.


The already overviewed critical assessment of the U.S. context of M.I.T. could be useful to question a similar pervasive narrative in Russia, which portrays the I.T. sector as by definition bringing progress. Rather than representing developments of information infrastructure as halted and repurposed later by the Russian government, one could see them develop as simultaneously governmental and private. The same time, the Russian perspective on M.I.T. allows bringing forward a significantly different time frame in which such infrastructures emerged. Such difference implies that discussions of addressing malicious content through identity verification are not widespread in Russian-speaking cyberspace. Nevertheless, Russian users are no less annoyed at governmental internet control. While some aspects of digital censorship and propaganda are hardly possible to counter, like a new law on fake news, announced by the government to prosecute anyone criticising the (lack of) measures taken against Covid-19, others, like the spread of misinformation, are open for interventions.


07