Censoring With Extreme Prejudice in Russia

As best I can piece together from such posts as I have seen Yegor Prosvirnin died after falling naked from a window with a knife in one hand and pepper spray in the other. Just before New Year's he published his last post. Here it is, as translated by Yandex.

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In the past year, there have been several tectonic shifts that many people have noticed, but few have understood. Let me try to think about these shifts.

2021 is the year of the death of money. The total capitalization of the cryptocurrency market at the time of writing this is $ 2.5 trillion — this is the entire GDP of the Russian Federation. Tens of thousands of people became cryptomillionaires, huge fortunes were made literally from nothing. The story of DOGE is significant — if exactly one Elon Musk is able to turn a joke into a financial phenomenon with his tweets, then money no longer means anything.

Another example is the rise in gas prices. If the same product with a difference in a year can cost both 200 and two thousand dollars, this means that money is now a pure convention. Of course, the economy is important and necessary, but economic success should now be measured in the production of a real product, not a monetary equivalent. Monetarily, in 2021, another Russian Federation on the blockchain has grown — only if the real Russian Federation has trillions being cast in new roads, fighter jets and factories, then the blockchain-based Russian Federation has trillions going to funny pictures with monkeys. I bought the picture on time and became a millionaire. In 2022, with the development of play-to-earn games, the money issue will only concern the old, stuck in the past generation.

Just kidding, just kidding, in 2022 and beyond, working for money will only mean one thing: you are from a lower social class. The real economy still exists, and it still needs movers and grain growers, whose work is poorly and expensively automated. The work of "white-collar workers" is automated perfectly, and the vast middle class, the further it goes, the more it sits its asses in sinecures, investing its savings in crypto. Mid-level managers use x10 leverage trading bots to drive porn coins, and then use their profits to buy cars, houses, and congressmen. And you work, work — you have several lifetimes, and you can spend one of them hatching eggs in the office.

Since the decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard, money has become a convention for states. Now they are becoming a convention for the broad masses of the people.

Hence the consequence: the main sales pitch no longer attracts liberals. All this " Liberal democracies are thriving. In order for us to thrive, we need to make liberalism, the market and free elections" does not work when anyone can buy a picture of a monkey in time and become a multimillionaire. Those who want and are able to change their lives are already up to their ears in crypto speculations. The rest of us will continue to mope around on straight lines, begging for handouts from the state.

Accordingly, political agitation promising prosperity will henceforth only work on absolutely worthless buratins. The rights, freedoms, and participation in managing one's own destiny are already guaranteed to everyone on the blockchain. The future of anonymous autonomous individuals disconnected from the state infrastructure is already here, it's just that it's not evenly distributed. Both opposition and pro-regime politicians need to think about what they can offer to free, prosperous people, the active 1% instead of sad chants about elections, Maidan and corruption.

Only power.

The emergence of cryptomillionaires as a political force (lobbying in Congress) It has already started in the US, and they have literally nothing to offer the US system. In the Russian Federation, the process will be even funnier — after the opposition uses the DAO to master the process of anonymous decentralized financing and management, we will see what a typical state employee is ready to do for the sake of 100 thousand dollars paid in ether after fulfilling the terms of a smart contract.

The new opposition will be anonymous, decentralized, and ruthless. Paid orders to leak incriminating materials, paid sabotage of industrial and military installations, bribing government officials, mass anonymous attacks by alcoholics and drug addicts who are ready for anything for a dose, completely uncensored media in Web 3.0 — you can't even tell whether Durov is having fun or the whole CIA department is working. Although in fact it will be the tricks of the top 1% who did not get into the cooperative "Lake".

All this will cause a retaliatory state terror. Tightening the nuts. New articles of the Criminal Code. New landings. States that went bankrupt with Covid and the Green Transition will finally achieve their legitimacy by fighting anonymous counter-Elites, foreign intelligence agencies, and their own deputy ministers who sit in for ministers. What we see in the "dark" political telegram is a kindergarten compared to what will begin with the mass adoption of Web 3.0.

The new opposition will speak the language of money. Appealing to ideas and ideals will become a trademark of state apparatus employees — oppositionists will simply anonymously offer to go to a rally for $ 100,000, pumping internet funny money into real actions. The first person to rally for $ 100,000 guaranteed by a smart contract will be the beginning of the end. He will sit down, get the money, and his family, posting a photo from a third country against the background of a new villa, will bring everything down. Putin offers connections, power, and corruption. Opposition — get podzhopnik for free. But what if they start paying for podzhopniki? What if the political struggle becomes financially profitable? What if Putin can be disliked for a very large sum of money, which guarantees the device to you and your family for life?

The state can only respond with terror, which will drown in a wave of well-paid sabotage in law enforcement agencies. The state will have to reinvent itself, social handouts and an electoral circus will only cause laughter against the background of tens of billions of dollars falling from the Web 3.0 opposition.

For an oligarch, money is a serious matter. The oligarch stole money, he killed for them, almost sat down, the oligarch won't even give a ruble to anyone.

And the person who bought a picture of a monkey for $ 50 and found out six months later that it was worth 500 thousand?

Money is a joke. The consequences of this for the Russian Federation, where everything is controlled by money and feeders, will exceed all expectations. Let me just remind you that Khodorkovsky sat down because he bought part of the Duma and the general staff and started yelling about the upcoming military coup.

And there will be hundreds of Khodorkovskys. Anonymous Khodorkovsky. Hundreds of Russian anonymous Khodorkovsky's.

There will be no Russian (or non-Russian) national state — nationalism is impossible without idealization of the people, idealization requires ignorance. There are people out there somewhere, over the hummock. He's probably a good guy. Odnoklassniki alone did more to destroy the narodnik myth than all the intellectuals put together. People will climb on the blockchain, forgetting that nothing can be deleted from the blockchain. It would be monstrous. Similarly with liberal democracies, communist dictatorships and other regimes that rely on the invisible mass of the people behind the hummock. Now the masses of the people will present themselves in all their glory. The beauty will be collected, parsed, passed through neural networks and lead to conclusions that Hitler would have been too shy to voice. And I'm not talking about the Russian people right now — I'm talking about all nations, everywhere.

The state will also shudder, starting to pay workers an unconditional basic income-just so that they don't throw "roses" at investigators for a thousand doges on particularly important issues (in a real case, the investigator was killed by order of a drug dealer from Hydra, and the murder was organized almost by a teenager). After that, it will become clear that the top 1% - both the government and the opposition - have more in common with each other than with the amorphous 99% who play play-to-earn. The only question is who will be the first to openly talk about rigidly hierarchical technocracies with new models and methods of power that exclude the "mass public" from the decision-making process, even at the level of rhetoric. Blockchain will become a new source of legitimacy — do you want to choose the authorities, decide the fate of the country, and are you ready to record your actions for at least a year and show the whole world for the sake of suffrage?

Just as I thought.

In 2021, the Russian Federation passed a critical fork-it began to fight with the blockchain. The fight looks like this: The new Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Street organizes an NFT auction, where it sells some of its works. Ether for the works sold goes to a Cyprus company, which then transfers money to the New Tretyakov Gallery using fiat, because the state institution does not have the right to accept crypto. The director of the New Tretyakov Gallery himself tells about all this with laughter. Telegram in the Russian Federation has already won — but even in its development (with TON) this is only 0.01% of what will be on the blockchain.

Resistance is futile — while the illiterate sign petitions against NFT in Stalker 2, half of the Philippines has stopped working because of Axie Infinity. And in Russia, a stream of cryptomillionaires is coming: with money, ambitions and opportunities to transfer money to the authorities without any risk. Who will Comrade cop come to ask for funding anti-state activities? To a pixel NFT bunny that was anonymously sold for $ 200,000?

The drug dealer who killed the investigator, by the way, had to be lured to Russia during a special operation. Otherwise, I would still hire homeless people with roses to throw at the cops.

Cryptomillionaires organize, as in the West, closed NFT clubs with a hard entry threshold. Sooner or later, anonymous whining about "how tired everything is" will result in an organization and anonymous actions. Then cryptomillionaires will discover that it is possible to shit the authorities anonymously, but it is impossible to rule anonymously. This moment, the moment when cryptomillionaires from Web 3.0 meet with Soviet brontosaurs, will be decisive in the future fate of Russia.

Of course, you can say that I get carried away, that they also promised a lot about darkweb, and where is this darkweb? But the introduction of the dark web itself did not create huge new fortunes for young ambitious people. Only among the right-wing dissidents I know, about a dozen people speculate on crypto. Then there will be hundreds of them. Thousands. And then inevitably one of them will succeed. Of course, cryptomillionaires can choose to emigrate to the West and live a comfortable life — but even if there is not at least one among them who is ready to compete for Russia, is this Russia worth anything?

No. In any case, even in the mildest scenario, the socio-political consequences of mass adoption of the blockchain will be nuclear. Artificial intelligence, implants, augmented reality and quantum computers, as it turned out, were just a collection of technologies. The blockchain brings them together into a new reality. We live in this reality, get used to it.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot, in 2021 ,the "long XX century" finally ended. The Spanish flu epidemic after World War I claimed 100 million lives, but did not prevent post-war recovery. The covid epidemic has disrupted supply chains and led to a growing global economic crisis. It became clear that for the collapse of the "world village" only a couple of lockdowns are enough — and now in front of the astonished townsfolk empty store shelves and crazy price increases. This means that large states will undertake to build capable, isolated national economies. And since there are no restraining fetters of mutual trade, it means that it is possible and necessary to fight.

In China, Comrade Xi finally broke the state built by Deng Xiaoping, turning the PRC into a one-man dictatorship. Against the backdrop of poor economic success (the CCP legitimized itself through rapid economic growth), only conflicts and wars remain to lift Xi's popularity.

In the United States, the public continues to stubbornly cling to the obsolete past — the American right is seriously hoping for a Trump victory in 2024. But Trump is old. Trump is from the 80s. He is the past. Transgender black Marines are the future. And while this future devours the United States, the Americans themselves are trying to realize it. It's bad, and it's going to get worse.

The European Union, which drove itself into an energy crisis with a "green transition", has become a complete laughing stock. If the crisis is not enough, let them try to explain how many vaccines and lockdowns are needed for Europeans. And, most importantly, why. "Do you want it like in Europe?" in 2021 became a non-ironic threat. The landing of Navalny allows the EU-oriented "liberal ""opposition" to pretend that the opposition's crisis is due to repression, and not because of a lack of ideas.

The Russian Federation, slipping into Soviet-level repression, allows the "oppositionists" to focus on the fight against the regime. We'll get rid of Comrade Major — and then we'll think about how to live on. But the Major is a tactical problem. Strategically, all the counter-elites of the Russian Federation from the XX century, against their background, even pensioner libertarianism looks like something new. Public policy in the Russian Federation is dying, and this is a good thing — the political circus of the Russian Federation was neither interesting nor at least funny.

The 2024 problem (also known as the "successor problem") is also not a strategic one, but a tactical one. Well, one brontosaurus will be replaced by another, in the process something will be divided, someone will be killed, and a couple of relatively fair elections will be held, in which as much as 30% will go to the opposition candidates. How will this change the fact that the Russian elites are obsessed with secrecy, informal connections and manual control with the selection of deputies on the principle of "just don't sit out"? I do not blame you, all these practices would not even be a vice if the Russian Federation were located in Papua New Guinea or some other God-forsaken tropical Barbadosia. But the Russian Federation is not only in Europe — the Russian Federation has entered into a conflict with Europe about disagreements on the land issue. Loyal cadres even at the gubernatorial level are not enough in the Russian Federation itself-God forbid we will conquer or join someone, how can we manage new territories with the telephone right instead of the state? This is not to mention the fact that the growth of sanctions pressure requires an increase in the competence of the state apparatus. The only thing that saves dear Russians so far is that there are also cretins on the other side of the front. Nevertheless, the Russian Federation will have to transform itself into a real state, enter into a full-fledged conflict and win — or collapse. The Brontosaurs are still hoping to have a little tanchiki ride and then settle everything quietly, not even realizing that they have become scapegoats, all the sins are on them, no one will decide anything, and even after tanchiki-even more so. Russia once again needs to win a place in the sun. To do this, Russia needs to become a state. To do this, the ruling elites must share their power with State institutions.

And Putin doesn't like to share power. And his successor will also not want to share power. Here is a strategic problem that no one even discusses in the public field. Liberals who talk about state institutions cannot say that these institutions are necessary for war. Patriots who talk about the war rely on the God-Emperor Putin, and the very idea of replacing His Holiness with impersonal institutions terrifies them. Neither liberals nor patriots are capable of a complete vision, which presupposes that we first set strategic goals, and then, based on these goals, propose a transformation program. This is our public political class: people can't say what they want or how to achieve it. The people are traditionally silent. The security forces behave as if they have a reserve army, where they will also be colonels and generals. In ten years, the conscience of the nation has not written a single book that is mandatory reading for a cultured person. The Donbass wave dissolved into the sands of Syria and Libya.

The only interesting factor is the anti — covid protests, but even they did not reach at least European proportions, with mass beatings with the police. Don't be under the illusion that the "regime will collapse" — even if it does, it won't give you any new ideas. Don't expect the regime to transform — the Brontosaurs can only transform it into a twentieth-century state. State of the XX century in the XXI century. The only person who publicly writes something minimally meaningful about the future of the Russian Federation is, oddly enough, Surkov. But his technical ignorance, the mannered flourish of simple thoughts and the soul-eating resentment lead to the fact that all his texts are perceived by the public as abstruse gibberish. Others broadcast whistles and sniffles from the past century, trying to find out from the emerging algorithmocracy whether it is for Stalin or for Hitler.

I am bored. In 2012-2015, I made the best Russian political magazine, blah-blah-blah, which was based on a few simple concepts. And I shot only because the background and competitors for this magazine were mothballs from the 90s (even if it was based in the tenths with a nice pink color). Everyone praising the " great Satellite "most likely remembers a couple of posters from it, historical longrides (which could have been published anywhere) and assistance to the Donbass (a bogoudny case, but not unique). If you start asking the praisers, they will say something about Sputnik showing that Russians are not ashamed of themselves, " and other euphemisms for "you were a balm to my hurt self-esteem."

Healing pinched people is simple, rewarding, profitable, and boring. Russians should be ashamed — 120 million people cannot produce a capable national intelligentsia. Nationalism cannot be intellectual, because it rationalizes the call of myth by political rhetoric. Historical longreads were read by God forbid 10% of those who had a paid subscription (and the most popular texts almost entirely consist of"Again the animals cut people"). It's a shame to advertise blood and soil with glamorous posters. Helping the Donbass is a standard reaction of a sane adult. The fact that it is considered something special is a disgrace to the entire Russian people.

No, I'm not going to make a new Sputnik. The new "Satellite" is called "make an appointment with a therapist". I can only add to the list of "What are you complaining about?".

In 2019-2021, I thought a lot and rethought a lot. In 2022, I need to decide whether I am ready to take on the titanic task of explaining and promoting tsarism-on-the-blockchain (with the risk of turning into a mad old man pestering passers-by with schizophrenic screams), or whether I can already retire at the age of 35, the crypt will feed me.

I'm a downed pilot. My health is bad. I went into esoteric cabbage monarchism, sold out to the Kremlin and whatnot.

And, besides, you've just been gloomily fucked up by what you've read.
And I haven't even started yet.

Happy New Year 2022, happiness and good luck to you in the new year!

• Yegor Prosvirnin, Editor-in-chief of Sputnik and Pogrom and Tsarist Television, 1986-2021.