We should give due mention to what we said on Day 100 in the light of what SUP did on Day 102, removing the ability to create free accounts without having commercials all over the place. We said on Tuesday, We must doubt the Advisory Board's ability to be anything more than a sop to Californish opinion. Turns out that they're even less than sopping: three of the current placemen explicitly said that the end of free would be A Bad Thing, (and Mr. Lessig has not yet made a public comment), yet SUP went ahead and did it anyway. We don't particularly like the language of this complaint to Bradley Fitzpatrick, the third placeman to express his dissent, but the record shows that Mr. Fitzpatrick has consistently been an abysmal judge of character, time after time after time.
While we didn't predict the end of free in so few words, we did point out the disreputable nature of SUP within a day of it flashing its pound coin per account. We said, Owner Alexander Mamut is the epitome of a vulture capitalist. He's done nothing to challenge that notion.
Contrary to the expressed opinion at the time of the purchase, it is clear that SUP does not get the current cultures of the Western arm of Livejournal in any meaningful manner. If SUP were serious in its claim that we don't intend to undermine the culture of LiveJournal, it would reinstate every single provision of the Social Contract as it applied on 1 January 2005. Its continued failure to uphold the culture of Livejournal makes everything else spin and bluster. To give credit where it's due, we suspect that SUP does understand the Russian arm of Livejournal very well: it's primarily a broadcast medium, addressing an audience of thousands, not a conversational medium, addressing an audience of tens.
Last December, we thought that SUP had made a political purchase. We still think that SUP has made a political purchase, designed to put further obstacles in the way of the Russian opposition, applying the jackboot of totalitarianism to the windpipe of free speech. See, for instance, a politically-motivated prosecution against a blogger in Syktyvkar for daring to speak out against the police's anti-democratic crackdown on opposition parties.
Along the way, if Mr. Mamut can enrich himself further, so be it. He's not going to turn down a bit of extra cash, though goodness knows he's got enough. But getting rich through Livejournal is not his main aim. Getting rich by ingratiating himself to the kleptomaniacs who have stolen Russia from the Russians is a far, far greater reward.
Caution: uninformed speculation follows
And it brings a rather disturbing thought to mind. Now, we'll be the first to admit that - in the words of the disclaimer we occasionally see on CNN - this section is Not Fully Thought Through. There's probably something we're missing. Treat it as more of a thought experiment than a firm prediction of fact.
We know that Mr. Mamut wants to ingratiate himself to the Mother Russia party of Mr. Poutine and his hand-picked successor, Mr. (er) (erm) Mr. Medvedev (pictured). The largest self-publishing space in Russia is Livejournal, owned by Mr. Mamut's SUP company.
All this is common knowledge, and clearly based in fact. Now, our point of inspiration is something that Karl Marx should have said, but we don't think did: he who owns the printing press controls the minds of the masses. Russia's biggest blogging site is owned by Poutine loyalists, and our not-fully-baked theory is that they want to bend it further in favour of Poutine's regime. One rather good way to achieve that is to actively put off dissenting voices. Mr. Poutine will tolerate liberals talking to other liberals, but gets shit-scared if free-thinkers talk to his constituency. The fewer people there are advocating pluralism on Livejournal, even if it's in a foreign alphabet, the better.
What's certain to wind up the western Livejournal userbase? Taking away their fanfic is a nice start. Been there, done that, squeezed the easy juices from the lemon - and we note that, according to Chris Alden, SUP and Six Apart worked in close collaboration on developing assets. (Twisting Mr. Alden's words? Probably.) Also offensive to western sensibilities is an atmosphere of fear, an environment where people are encouraged to tattle on each other, to self-censor under the cloak of it might be offensive to the children, where no-one quite knows the rules, where words that are acceptable on Monday is punishable on Thursday. Where the initiates are told one thing, while the plebs can go hang - and this happened on Wednesday, when Russian users were told in News, English speakers were not. The atmosphere is familiar to people from the Stalinist-Brezhnevite bloc, it's what they grew up with. For western voices, accustomed to liberal speech, it's anathema. The voices most closely dedicated to freedom of speech will leave.
And that's what SUP wants. It's too difficult to erect barriers within the Livejournal system, there's far too great a chance that they'll misfire, block the wrong people from the wrong thing, and that people will raise merry hell. By comparison, it's trivially easy to erect bars against other servers. Get the liberal democrats (small l, small d) to leave Livejournal, and it becomes an environment of sanitised pro-Poutine propaganda, and teens from Iowa discussing their favourite shade of pink.
Why does SUP wish to increase its revenue stream? We're drawn to an interview Mr. Mamut gave to the Sunday Telegraph at the start of the year, in which he said censorship is not profitable. What better way to shore up the beginning of the Kremlin's censorship of the Russian internet than by getting the westerners to pay for it.
If this theory is correct, then it should have some predictive power, otherwise it's just finding connections in a pattern of random dots. We would expect some further action deliberately designed to offend liberal western opinion before the end of the year, probably before the Talking Shop meets in Constantinople in September. We also expect to hear more cases of overt censorship and bullying by Russia's internal repression agencies in that time-frame, though we suspect this would happen even if our theory were wrong.
As we've said, we're not at all convinced that we're reading these runes correctly. Treat the section above as a thought experiment, as a pessimistic What Could Have Happened. We rather hope to be proven wrong.
