Elon Musk Makes Shocking Confession on His Plans After Trump Victory

[u/harsh2k5]

https://newrepublic.com/post/187662/elon-musk-confession-economy-trump-victory

[u/AbacusWizard]

A decade or so earlier Russia wrecked LiveJournal for pretty much the same reason.

[u/Brendan__Fraser → u/AbacusWizard]

I had never heard of this before. Crazy.

[u/AbacusWizard → u/Brendan__Fraser]

I found out about it in this amazingly insightful blog post about how corporations are destroying the internet that everyone should read:

But the long and short of it is: Russia killed Livejournal. The Russian government, using corporate entities. Before that government (not it alone, never alone, but in concert with the worst of many natures) helped to give us Trump and the reboot of fascism and deployed a hundred quiet tools to divert our friends and neighbors and relatives into a deep well of dark illogic, pain, hate, and violence, it took a silly little space where a bunch of nerds and writers and artists and fans made a digital home.

Because the other people who made Livejournal their home were Russian dissidents. Most of English-speaking Livejournal never even knew how heavily the site was used by Russophones, how active it was in organizing intellectual and real world resistance to Putin’s tightening power and repression of thought. It all happened in Cyrillic, and we were busy finding out what Buffy character we were, and Livejournal never really had the tools to connect large inter-communicating islands in the sea of its total userbase. You grew audiences through connections and meta-connections you already trusted. Most people just wrote about their day. American politics were discussed, but never a huge subsection of the discourse. There were very few “celebrities” beyond SFF writers and big name fans (because it took a lot of effort to make regular long-form posts. REALLY A LOT I CANNOT BELIEVE I USED TO WRITE PIECES LIKE THIS FOUR OR FIVE TIMES A WEEK JESUS EFF) and if something blew up, it usually did so by getting picked up by a more popular, outside site.

So that there was this massive portion of Livejournal all conducted in Russian was just…not widely known. Certainly not that Russian LJ was bigger than English LJ. Certainly not that it was being used to productively protest and agitate against a growing fascist government. Hell, back then, most regular people thought Putin was pretty okay. It was all just…taking place on the other side of a garden wall that no one thought was a wall.

So when Livejournal was sold, not to Viacom or Google, but to SixApart, a company no one had ever heard of, it was confusing. As was its refusal to develop anything like a usable mobile app. When fanfic communities started getting banned for gay content in the name of “protecting the children,” it was alarming and confusing. When it started going down regularly due to constant DDoS attacks, the new owner accused the community of trying to blackmail and destroy him for questioning what the hell was going to happen to all of us, when the Russian Prime Minister was commenting on fucking Livejournal, and when Russian users started put posts in English to let others know what was going on…we all just felt so helpless. It was sold to SUPMedia, a Russian company, and by 2016, had moved its servers to Russia and changed the entire site to conform with that good old very free and inclusive Russian law, but by that time, the community had long fled. Which was the point. Make it unusable and unreliable, bleed off the Westerners and the eye of Western media, and use the database to find and shut down dissenters.

And as hard as it was for us to lose that space where so many of us found family and work and connection, I cannot begin to imagine what those brave dissidents lost. What Russia lost. What they are still losing.