Forget Hollywood: The Russian Internet's Anti-Opposition as a Social Movement (do not cite w/o permission of author) (original) (raw)
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The Russian leadership views the Internet primarily as a battlefield of an information war, i.e. an alternative to military action in the context of the ongoing confrontation with the West. Kremlin regards Russian Internet users who spread content critical of the Russian authorities as 'enemy soldiers' in this war. Therefore, the government has stepped up its efforts to tighten control over the Internet by the intelligence services and law enforcement bodies. This manifested itself in a proliferation of preventive-repressive legal instruments as well as in an intensification of illegal practices targeting free expression, the secrecy of correspondence and unrestricted access to information. So far, the government's strategy has had limited success. This is due, to a large degree, to the Russian segment of the Internet being well-integrated into the global network. Together with other technical factors this creates an obstacle for more extensive government interference Hence, circulation of information in social media remains relatively unrestricted while Internet users are increasingly unsusceptible to official state propaganda which is being spread by more traditional media outlets. In this situation, the continuation of the struggle against the freedom of the Internet may pose a political risk for the Kremlin by stoking protest among Russian public.
The Arab Spring redrew the battle-lines between over the control of information between the statist/capitalist elites and the popular classes – raising questions of increased restriction and surveillance, and of the limits of cyber-activism. In some ways this battle is often mischaracterised as being a narrow debate between cool intellectual property technocrats and wild-eyed free-use pirates, or as being a political dispute between authoritarian regimes and free speech activists, with no wider relevance to society. But it is clear that what is at stake is the global ideology (and exploitative practice) of corporatist enclosure versus that of the creative commons; in other words, it is more even than a universalist human rights concern, but is rather an asymmetrical war between the parasitic and productive classes over a terrain of power/wealth-generation known as the knowledge economy.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas described the bourgeois public spheres of the 18th and 19th century in England, France, and Germany. These spheres arose as arenas of cultural critique often arising from reading societies that focused on novels and the like. Cultural critique became political critique as these groups turned to issues of public concern fighting policies of censorship and for freedom of opinion. The public sphere is in the work of Jürgen Habermas conceived as a neutral social space for critical debate among private persons who gather to discuss matters of common concern in a free and rational way. This public sphere is open and accessed for public. Habermas pointed out that media has contributed to the decay of the rational-critical discourse and causing the decline of the public sphere.
Internet and Politics in Russia
Euxeinos , 2012
Spassov, Orlin, ed. "Internet and Politics in Russia." Euxeinos - Culture and Governance in the Black Sea Region, no. 4 (2012).