Reply All - #100 Friends and Blasphemers

Episode Date: June 29, 2017

An online diary used by American teenagers confronts a strange and terrifying enemy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is a reply off. I'm PJ Vote. And I'm Alex Goldman. Okay, so Alex. Yeah? I have a story for you today. All righty. It's a story about live journal?

Live journal. Live journal. Okay. So live journal, obviously, popular early aughts blogging platform based on the idea of like signing on to the internet and putting your diary on the internet, which I remember when like as a high school student, I was like, that is nuts. I would never do that. And what I didn't realize is like actually it was like fairly social. Like people were writing and they were like becoming friends with other people who were writing. Yeah, I was a frequent denizen.

You were? Oh, yeah. I was all over it. I, um, I started my live journal in 2001. What was it called? Uh, it was just, it didn't have like a name. It had a name. Did not have a URL?

Did it was just? Oh, uh, it was so embarrassing. All right, here we go. Yeah. It's happening. I like that you try to convince me that it didn't have a name. Well, it's not like it was like, it was like the unlocked secrets of Alex Goldman Sanky. What was the name, Alex?

The URL was, it was a portmanteau of the word blasphemy and the word ephemera. So it was blasphemera. Yeah, it's super embarrassing. What was your self-image that that was what you were, why did that appeal to you? I was going to college to be a journalist. I was convinced I was going to be an iconoclastic madman in the style of like Lester Bangs and Hunter Hunter S. Thompson. Like I thought I was going to be just this person who had really strong opinions about things and expressed them in very concrete ways. So what type of stories did blasphemer concern himself with?

Oh, God. I'm just going to look. Don't look. Please don't look. Please. It's still up? No, it's not, no, just don't look. Come on, dude, don't look.

Seriously. Oh, God, don't look. Oh, I feel like I'm going to die. Why? I don't know if I can find it. Oh, no. I think I found it. Oh, you're so young.

There's a picture of you and Sarah. Here's like a thing that you wrote in 2009 that at least shows that your personality is static. hilarious name for an actual person, Do Do-Dou-Tobaz. All right, you want to hear September 15, 2008, how you were doing at 402 p.m.? Sure.

So, hey, dear diary, I know this place is basically my emotional chamber pot where I dump all my mcuffins and let them coagulate into sadness stew, but all those internet people who read this are really important to me. Not like, you know, I want to send you X-mas cards, but at least you tolerate it

and someone's comment on it, thereby validating my wish to exist. Thanks for helping me exist. I'm sorry I got fat. I'll try to slim down. Is that a Wesley Willis lyric? Yeah. And then somebody said, I like reading about your life and feelings.

I hope mine are not too irritating to read. You seem like a good egg. And then you said, the thing I like the best about jive urinal, funny joke, Alex, is that I get to piece together personal histories through their verbal subterfuge and those brief precious moments of candor.

Yeah, see? That's what I, that is, perfect distillation of everything terrible about me. But you're also being nice to somebody. In your case, it's especially reverting. I wonder, though, as you grapple with something that I too seem to grapple with, which is sort of a bottomless negativity

and lack of faith in other people if you think that this will ever work itself out. And then somebody else said, you still rule. Have a cool summer. Did you have, were the people that you were talking to on live during, were they people from school,

or were they people you didn't know? They were mostly people I didn't know. I mean, like, so we all thought of ourselves as profoundly literary. And there was like this boosting of one another. I'm basically picturing like a bunch of like 15-year-old boys wearing tweed jackets and like fake massages dressed up as professors having a book club. Were it only that I were 15, but I was 20, I was 21. I mean, I think about the connections that I made at that time.

I think about like they like burned bright in a way that I don't feel. feel like I replicate in my current life. Like, we were all so, we were all, like, just leaving our homes for the first time, our parents' houses. We were all pretty lost. Like, there was something, um, that connection was, like, extremely important to me. Hmm. All right.

Come on. Let's, let's just close it up. We can close it up now. Go ahead and close it up. You can close it. Okay. So the actual reason why I brought you here. So I want to talk to you about this.

Okay. How much do you know about what happened to live journal after you stopped using it? Here's what I know. Well, I think user numbers dwindled in the United States. It became really, really, really popular in Russia. That is also what I had always heard. It's true, but it's like so insufficient to what actually happened. Like the same way like Russia somehow.

is just like, seems to be like infiltrating many strange parts of American society. Like Russia ate Live Journal in a way that is

wild. Can I tell you the story? Absolutely. Okay, so I talked to this journalist named Alexei Kovalev. He lives in Moscow. He says, like, he still remembers

when Live Journal first got to Russia. It was like world's most exciting website. And he knows when it was because he was part of the first group of people to get on. I've been an active live journal users since 2003. At the time when it was an invite-only-based blogging platform, so you had to know

someone to send you an invite code to start an account. And did it, was it at that point, was it like, was it kind of cool? Oh yeah, surely, yeah. It was the kind of thing that you, you were part of an elite club. What's it called? What's live journal? What does it translate to in Russian. The Journal of Life. Okay, so Alexi says, like, in the beginning, his experience of Live Journal was very similar to your experience, Alex. Like, he made friends with other nerds online, sometimes they meet up in person.

He actually met his wife through the site. But things take a really different turn for one big reason. Vladimir Putin. In Russia today, the clear winner of the Russian presidential election Vladimir Putin began to establish the Putin era. Vladimir Putin, the career spot. talks about establishing what he calls a dictatorship of the law. So Vladimir Putin's first year in office, 2000.

2001, he immediately starts shutting down the media. Publication of the newspaper Savodnia was suspended, and the editorial staff of the magazine Togi was fired. Even NTV, which is like the big independent TV network, that gets taken over by the government-run oil company, Gazprom. And so for Alexi and like all of his online journalist friends, They're just watching as all the places they used to write either disappear or get taken over by Putin. They literally micromanage the media.

They call up the editors and chiefs of TV networks and tell them what to cover from which angle, what not to cover, etc. So you couldn't just go to a TV station to express yourself. So the web was the only place. There was this one live journal user who was just super pissed at the Kremlin. this guy named Alexei Navalny. So this is a different Alexi than the one you've been talking about? Yeah, so this is Alexi Navalny. And Navalny decides he's going to use his live journal as a weapon against the government.

Like, look, there's this crazy corruption going on. They state-owned companies in Russia. And people are just wasting billions of billions of rubles on these projects that are going nowhere and getting miraculously reached in the process. Everybody knows that the government's corrupt, but he wants to use his live journal to expose exactly how it works, like how people get paid and how much money they're taking. And he has a plan to do this.

So first step, he buys stock in the big government-run oil company. Gasprom? Gasprom. And he's like, okay, I'm now a shareholder of Gazprom, and so I'm entitled to see a bunch of financial documents. Send him on over. Oh, that's brilliant. And he started, like, posting documents that he was entitled.

do as a shareholder in his companies. Oh, wow. And he's putting them up on Live Journal. Yeah. Yeah. This Live Journal starts picking up thousands and thousands of readers who tune in every week to see which corrupt government agency Navalny is going to get the documents of. And so it's becoming this big thing. And the government is like, huh, we do not like this. And so if you're the Russian government, here's what really sucks about this. You can't shut down Live Journal because it's a U.S. company. The servers are based in the U.S. If you were, you want to stop Live Journal, you are going to have to go to war with the website. And that is what they do. This massive war between an autocratic Russian government and a bunch of geeks with online diaries.

The details of that war? After the break. Welcome back to the show. Okay, so the Kremlin wants to destroy Live Journal. But they already have another problem. Besides the fact that it's based in the U.S., it is very quickly becoming a super, super popular website in Russia. Like millions of Russians are opening accounts. It's one of the top sites. Everybody loves it. And so what they have to do is they have to find a way to ruin it. They started infiltrating LiveJournal. What do you mean infiltrating? With pro-Kremlin comments and blog posts. So like the kind of thing that people were talking about in the U.S. during the election, like paid political operatives showing up and just writing like, really? Yeah. Yeah. Putin is great.

these people would say, and they were paid for it. These trolls were coming from a Kremlin office called the Kremlin Federal Youth Agency. It was a propaganda wing, and messing with Lie Journal was like an entry-level propaganda job in the Russian government. So Putin six all these paid trolls on people's blogs. Does everybody have a sense immediately of like, oh, gee, a bunch of like really pro-Pooten people just showed up all at the same time? Like, did you kind of know what was probably going on? Yeah, it was really, really obvious. emails actually leaked out later that had the rates that these guys were getting paid to troll Alexi and his friends.

It would be 85 rubles for a comment and then a bonus, 200 rubles, if you could trick somebody into arguing with you. That's so funny because I think of it as just being pure noise. I think of it as the equivalent of those people who trick fax machines into just printing out a bunch of ink until they run out of ink. It's like they're trying to distract people in such a way that they're like, well, it's not worth engaging. Yeah, Alexi calls it black noise. But it didn't matter, actually, because Live Journal was growing and growing. There were all these Russians who were coming to it because they were depending on Live Journal instead of the government for really crucial information. My favorite story from 2010, there was like a massive catastrophic hit wave in Russia.

and there were wildfires around Moscow and all of Moscow was engulfed in toxic smoke actually the videos are still online can I show you one of them? Yeah

okay just look at this these guys are like driving through it oh my god right? Like it looks like a movie about people driving through the sun

and it was actually one of the first times when people realized that the government kind of help them because it's just really not equipped to. And people started buying like fire hoses and organizing a live journal and going to these wildfire sites and putting fires out, helping the victims. That's so cool. Yeah. So the other thing that all this does is it makes the government look terrible. Like all these people on Live Journal are being heroes and the government's being left behind. And so this one really young guy from Putin's political party, he has a bright idea. And he thought, why don't I just, you know, jump on the bandwagon?

And he and his pro-government friends went to a place outside Moscow when there weren't any wildfires. So they set a bush on fire. Oh, my God. And pretended to put it out. So. That is so dark. Yes. And so this guy made a video to show how brave he and his friends were.

Alexei actually sent it to me afterwards. Can I just, can I show it to you? Yes. Okay, so we're in a forest. It sort of looks like someone turned a fog machine on in the woods. I know. It's like such a tiny fire and there's so many men putting it out. So the dude in the video he posted online.

And they were two seconds after he posted this. He was exposed. by activists who were actually keeping an online map of all the active fires are in Moscow. And I said, dude, nothing's on fire in that entire region. And what did they do? Was it a scandal? Did they get caught out? Or is it impossible to scandalize folks in like a propagandistic country like that? Well, the guy who actually orchestrated the whole thing, he ended up being elected to parliament. Of course. Of course he did.

So Russian government still controls all. of the real world. But Live Journal is this one little place where when they go on, like, things do not turn out well for them. And so you'd think they'd keep trying to destroy it, but they'd like stop posting on it. And instead, the exact opposite happens. All these really high-level Russian politicians start their own live journals. And that's actually where things get really ugly. Like, this is where things turn bad. Because one of those politicians, his name's Andrei Tarchuk, Tarch's reading live journal one day. And he finds this post by a journalist named Oleg Kachin.

And the post is not nice. Koshin is talking about how the only reason Tarshak's governor is because his rich dad, is friends with Putin, and it's guys like Tarchuk who are destroying federalism in Russia. And then Koshin, like, really insults Tarchuk. He used an epithet, like, yeah, this guy is just a piece of shit. He's not a real politician. The literal translation is covered in shit. That's a pretty sick burn.

Yeah, and so Tarcheck within minutes of Oleg's original post is in the comments. And in his comment, he's like, quote, young man, you have 24 hours to apologize. You can do it here. You can do it in a separate post. But the countdown has begun. And so what actually happens next is there's a video, there's a security camera footage. So it's a little bit hard to see. But here, this is nighttime in Moscow where Oleg lives.

Okay. He's by his apartment. It's black and white. but like you can see that's him walking. Can you turn it more towards me? Yeah, here. So this is him walking. He's getting approached by this guy.

Mm-hmm. The guy taps him and he's holding what looks like a bouquet of flowers. He pulls an iron rod out of the bouquet and just starts beating him. Oh, my God. This other guy comes up, he starts beating him. Oh, this is so brutal. Um, and this was like, like, Oleg is certain that these guys were sent by Tartac. They've been sent by them.

the governor. He hired Hitman and paid them several million rubles to get this guy beaten with the specific instructions to break his fingers so that he knows that what to type and what, not to. That's what they did with an iron rod. Jesus. Yeah. He ended up in a coma. He had to have one of his fingers amputated. Oh my God, that's horrible. But weirdly like political violence, Like, what happened to Oleg, that's not the kind of thing that eventually defangs LiveJournal. In the end, the way the Kremlin is able to finally beat LiveJournal, it's like, it's depressingly simple. So here's what happens.

One day, a Russian businessman shows up and makes a surprisingly generous offer to buy LiveJournal from its American owner. The site gets sold, and now it's a Russian company. And so now, all the censorship laws that are applied to Russian newspapers are applied to LiveJournal. Big anonymous accounts are banned, and people who say the wrong thing on Live Journal, they're fined or they're thrown in jail. And so people stop saying the wrong things on Live Journal. They leave. The final death blow was actually delivered just this past winter. Life Journal became a Russian-hosted website. Like moved the servers out of the U.S.?

Yeah. It's owned and managed by Russians and hosted in Moscow. Which I assume means that... All of your data are available to the Russian security services. Russian security services have access to everything now. Like they have Oleg's blog, they have Alexi's blog, they have other Olexi's blog, but also like Georgia R.R. Martin has a live journal. Russia has George R.R. Martin's live journal. They have your live journal.

Like blasphemer exists in a place where if Putin for some reason really wants to read it, he can. So they just can walk in and do whatever they want on the servers. there? Yeah. But the silver lining, according to Alexi, is that while nobody he knows is writing on live journal anymore, they're all still writing. Like, they're writing things that the government doesn't like. It's just they do it in English language papers or they do it on their own personal websites. Actually, Navalny, the guy who bought the shares in Gazprom and had the anti-corruption blog, he's now the leader of the opposition party in Russia. The Kremlin just banned him from running for president. So dissent still exists. It's just, it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist.

on live journal. Actually, I asked Alexi, like, if he even still had his own live journal, just because I wanted to see it. And he said he absolutely could not show it to me. My personal one is in private mode now. Oh, okay. You cannot see it. And is that for reasons of

journalistic safety, or is it for reasons of, like, live journals are embarrassing? I mean, if you look back at things you posted online 15 years ago, and all of it is still, still online. So a couple of years ago, I just put it in private mode just to say myself the

embarrassment. You know, in the end, the thing that's really interesting to me is that what these guys were posting in a way, it was like blasphemy, but it was also like ephemera. Get the fuck out of you. I hate you so much. I can't believe you did that. It was blasphemer. Reply all is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. show is produced by Shruthi Pinnaminani, Fia Bannon, and Damiano Marquetti.

We were edited by Tim Howard and Jorge Just, production assistants from Sharina Aung. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder. Matt Lieber's an all-frew fruit basket. You can visit our website at replyal.limo. You can find more episodes of the show on Spotify, we're also on Apple Podcasts and anywhere else that you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Glad you picked up in space. You're nice to hear your voice, Matt Lieber. I'm going to be. Thank you.