Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Here, one could simply once again laugh at these Russian obscurantists, who throttle everything that is alive and progressive; or talk about this particular period of heightened paranoia in the history of Russia, when the siloviki have seized power and see conspiracies and threats everywhere. This would certainly be partially true; but the real piquancy of this situation is that deep down they really do feel a threat to their very existence: these amusing cartoon Pokémon characters announce the arrival of a new reality, one in which today’s Russian authorities – or, indeed, any others – simply have no place.

What we are talking about here is a new cartography, which is writing new laws of sovereignty and citizenship. Historically, the modern state was defined by geographical maps. This was how it happened: it was not the state that drew the maps, but the modern epoch, with its geographical, geometrical and cartographic imagination, which gave birth to the state. The state is a geometrical entity; it arises out of Cartesian rationalism, Hobbesian empiricism and the lineal geometry of Euclid and Newton. In his fundamental book The Power of Maps from 1992, the American culturologist and geographer, Dennis Wood, demonstrated how, at the start of the modern age, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, people began, with the help of maps, to imagine and then construct the wider world and political order. The cartographical images of the world led to the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries; and following on from that, colonialism and the ideas of state sovereignty and the nation-state. Lineal cartography gives us borders, regularity, planned and organized life, a controlled population living within the boundaries of defined territories: all the elements that make up the modern state. In fact, it is from maps that the idea arises of sovereignty as a territorial dimension of power, and the idea of citizenship as belonging to a particular territory.

At the end of the twentieth century, with the appearance of computer networks, the idea of territorial sovereignty received its first serious blow: networks became widely pervasive and transborder; a transaction could take place remotely from the server; space lost its connection with a particular place; the so-called ‘space of flows’ appeared (such as the Internet, the global financial market and satellite television). But the desktop computer was still joined to a cable, a provider and an IP address, which meant it could still be controlled and registered. With the appearance of the mobile Internet, all these restrictions were removed. The individual is set free from cables, providers, coverage areas and national operators: with his smartphone and tablet, he is instantly connected to millions of other users within a global information sphere. A new cartography is born before our very eyes, one without borders, states and the usual institutions: this is Google Maps, working in real time, in which a person with his gadget (and soon this will be one and the same thing as we turn into one biotechnical item – an android), linked to an anonymous GPS satellite, becomes an anonymous point of coordinates on the global map.

And suddenly Pokémon appears like agents of this new space, and with them a new cartography of reality, which is not even tied to street names. In the Pokémon Go interface there are no street names, only nameless areas and crossroads with special places marked out by the programme. It reminds one of navigating by orientation points, as was done before maps existed: ‘Go as far as the big rock; turn left and keep going until sunset.’ The game does away with the rules of linear cartography of the age of reason, with its hierarchies, borders, institutions of power, territorial rules and administrative regimes. Millions of people wander around the streets as if these streets don’t exist; they are moving according to an alternative map, paying no attention to cars, trees, fences or law-enforcement officers. And herein lies the actual threat to the authorities. Pokémon Go is a global ‘occupy’ movement, a rethinking of the principles of urbanization, borders and the boundaries of the city; a radical rewriting of the social space; a desacralization of the concept of ‘space’(the Holocaust Museum in Washington has forbidden the capture of Pokémon on its territory). It is a round-the-clock flash mob with no clear political goals.

Yet it is just a single step away from politics. The whole concept of the city and the city state – the cradle of politics and the object of the social contract, and the reformatting of the new cartography – is an act of politicization. Pokémon Go is a challenge to territorial splits and divisions; on the West Bank of the River Jordan, Palestinians put Pokémon on the other side of the border wall or in Israeli settlements and, in attempting to catch them, a warning appears: ‘the mistake of apartheid’. I won’t be at all surprised if rare Pokémon turn up in Kim Jong-un’s secret bunker or in Islamic State camps. This organization may be officially banned in Russia, but not on Google Maps.

Yes, Pokémon may be just a game, a mere fad of the summer of 2016, which quietly died away with the coming of the severe winter in the Northern hemisphere. But they are, nevertheless, emissaries from the future, forerunners of an augmented reality, which, with each passing day, will take a stronger grip on our imagination, our communications, our cities and our streets in a way that has proved impossible for, say, NATO or Islamic State. What’s more, no state can possibly build any barriers to defend itself against this reality. An ever-increasing number of users will make their way onto this map, outside the control of the laws of sovereignty or citizenship, and they will spend ever-increasing amounts of time in this fluid and flexible space, earning and spending money, falling in and out of love and living by their own rules. Enhanced reality will take the place ever more strongly of what is ‘real’ (but is it actually ‘real’?). Just look already at how fans of Game of Thrones , disappointed by both candidates in the 2016 US presidential election, created their own political party. Soon the state itself will have to go into its own augmented reality, creating there its own virtual objects.

As a result of this, the Moscow city government is planning on creating a Russian answer to Pokémon, an app for iPhone and Android called ‘Know your Moscow’, where instead of cartoon characters you will be able to catch the doubles of the poet Alexander Pushkin, the first cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, or the rock star Viktor Tsoi, and take a selfie with them. And International Memorial, the historical-educational and human rights organization, has since 2013 supported a site called ‘The Topography of Terror’ (the idea and the name have been borrowed from the museum of the same name in Berlin). On an interactive map of Moscow, sites are superimposed where the Soviet Terror was carried out: apartments of those who were repressed, prisons, torture chambers, sites of execution and burial. It is possible that this project could be expanded into enhanced reality in such a way that, as you walk the streets of the city, everyone would be able to see the hidden archaeology of repression, meet the ghosts and hear the voices of the victims of the Terror… A variety of frequently contradictory realities will cross over each other in the city, users of the app will be able to migrate between them or live in a number of them all at once; and with time the state will become simply one layer of this hybrid world – what’s more, far from the most interesting one.

News from the world of Russian hi-tech sounds ever more like information reports from a battlefield. Natalya Kaspersky, the President of the InfoWatch group of companies and a co-founder of ‘Kaspersky Lab’, has introduced a system to record telephone conversations in the office. The police are going to use the GLONASS satellite tracking system (the Russian equivalent of GPS) to remotely turn off the engines of offenders’ cars: since 2017 all cars produced on the territory of the Customs Union of Post-Soviet Countries [36] The Customs Union gives customs-free travel for citizens of the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. have been fitted with special modules that allow them to be tracked and controlled with the help of GLONASS. Furthermore, Russian commercial centres have welcomed the new Russian Federation law on protecting personal data, which means that they have to keep the personal information of Russians living in the country: many Western firms were forced to install special equipment in Russia in advance. Russian hi-tech is preparing for the construction of the century: the creation of a digital iron curtain, an analogue of the ‘great Chinese firewall’.