Slowly and then all at once
The strange, sad fate of LiveJournal, vibe shifts and hoarders, BookTok, cross-stitch and the first metaverse
Hi friends. Today is March 25, 2022.
And for the past 15-odd years, I’ve fondly remembered LiveJournal as a sort of mid-aughts proto-Tumblr for would-be poets and OC fangirls.
The blogging platform peaked in the U.S. around 2005, shortly before teenage me stopped using it to trade catty, anonymous insults with my high school opponents. But in Russia, where LiveJournal is now headquartered and where it still sees upwards of 48 million visitors each month, the platform is engaged, to this day, in battles of entirely different proportions.
Researchers have concluded that LiveJournal played “a relatively under-analyzed but prominent role in the rise of information warfare.” Last month, the Stanford Internet Observatory found that LiveJournal is currently serving as one of several platforms for Russia’s “covert social media propaganda efforts.”
And over the past three days, at least 70 of the site’s 150 top posts, as translated by Google*, involved some kind of pro-Kremlin propaganda narrative — alleging, for instance, that Ukrainian soldiers are torturing captured Russians in the streets and that victims photographed by international media are actually paid actors.
How did my beloved LiveJournal end up like this?! As with many such transformations, it happened slowly and then all at once. The Russian media company SUP has owned LiveJournal since 2007, and — in its early years — did little to disrupt the site’s flourishing ecosystem of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian blogs.
But in 2016, when LiveJournal was still the 28th-most visited website in Russia, SUP moved its servers to Moscow, making all content on the platform subject to Russian law and surveillance. LiveJournal also banned “political solicitation” and reportedly blocked dozens of blogs, including many supportive of Ukraine or written by dissidents.
In the ensuing exodus, the platform lost most of its remaining American user base, as well as many of its Russian and Ukrainian bloggers. The few who stayed on apparently include a whole lot of pro-Kremlin/anti-Western commentators, the stunningly racist blog of this study-abroad company, and — God bless the internet — the ancient celebrity gossip site Oh No They Didn’t, still plodding along in obscurity.
Anyway: I’m not linking to most of these blogs in the interests of restricting them to their obscure internet corners. But if you are curious how bona fide, state-backed LiveJournal disinformation reads, an ex-employee of the Internet Research Agency identified 19sokol.livejournal.com as a propaganda project in 2015.
P.S. Thanks to the not one — not two — but three! Russian speakers in the audience who confirmed that Google Translate generally does okay with English and Russian.
If you read anything this weekend
“What You’re Feeling Isn’t A Vibe Shift. It’s Permanent Change,” by Elamin Abdelmahmoud in Buzzfeed. If you liked that trend-forecasting piece in The Cut last month, then you should probablyyyy also read this follow-on, which re-articulates the so-called “vibe shift” as the total collapse of our political, social and economic norms and the world they supported. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“His Software Sang the Words of God. Then It Went Silent,” by S.I. Rosenbaum in Input. For 20 years, TropeTrainer taught people around the world to chant the Torah, becoming an unlikely global archive for Jewish culture and history. But the sudden passing of its developer in 2019 stalled the program — and raised (thorny, profound!) questions about faith, permanence and technology.
“Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse,” by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic. There are some pretty incredible, hype-puncturing insights in this Q&A with Wagner James Au, who has covered Second Life for two decades. “[This new] metaverse hype wave is so similar to 2008. Everything’s being repeated now — the same news stories, the same assumptions, the same mistakes.”
“Walk Away Like a Boss,” by Sarah Resnick in n+1. Not all crypto-bros are motivated by transparent greed and the desire to more fully emulate Elon Musk! This is a pretty incredible deep-dive into economic precarity and desperation that also underlie crypto culture.
“Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?” by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. TIL that the evolving technology in our iPhones means they don’t really take photos anymore — instead, an algorithm collages the “best” possible image from multiple photos.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from the last newsletter was this profile of the guy behind Humans of New York.
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Postscripts
Can BookTok save Barnes & Noble? Can WineTok make wine “cool” “again”? “Crypto has a lot of dystopian potential,” says the man behind Ethereum. The latest and greatest Bitcoin diet. Anna Sorokin’s next grift is art. A cool project that presents songs beside the personal stories left in their comments. We are all “information hoarders” now. The war (and Etsy) have come for cross-stitch. Grimes, meanwhile, went after the last good blog, and did not have the sense not to blab about it.
How algorithms guide medical decisions. How AI could help us understand animals. Inside Ukraine’s Ministry for Digital Transformation and the rush to download Russian Wikipedia. An interview with the guy behind Internet Archive. What news maps hide about Ukraine. “Shame is an emotion, but it’s also a state of affairs” these days.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin