The original post, in Russian, is here → (“The Donetsk Airport is Being Defended by the Cyborgs!”). This remains the only post ever published by its author, and no information on this person is available on the web.
The war in East Ukraine, sparked by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, generated a great deal of cyber-based mythology on both sides. The most significant example on the Russian side is probably CyberBerkut, a pro-Putin hacker group whose name glorifies the notoriously violent riot police that attempted to suppress the Maidan uprising in Kiev.
In his book Cyber-Proletariat (2015), Nick Dyer-Witheford describes “the coexistence in contemporary capitalism of extraordinary high technologies and workers who live and die in brutal conditions often imagined to belong in some antediluvian past. This coexistence is also a connection. Mines and artificial technologies seem to belong to different worlds, but they are strongly linked.” The story of the “cyborgs of Donetsk airport” could expand this framework to include the ongoing militarization of the internet.
See Ben Peters’s superb How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (2016), the first book-length English-language account of Viktor Glushkov’s computer network projects. The present essay owes a great deal to Peters’s in-depth research in previously unavailable archives in Moscow and Kiev. Still, it must be noted that the term “Soviet internet” is as simplifying as it is eye-catching: it reduces Glushkov’s pioneering research into what we now know as e-governance, artificial intelligence, and network theory to a retroactively imposed catchphrase. See also Slava Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network,” History and Technology 24, no. 4 (December 2008): 335–50 →.
Peters, How Not To Network a Nation, 29–32.
The science of cybernetics emerged, to a large extent, from the military industries of WWII. Norbert Wiener, who is credited as the founder of cybernetics, worked on the automated aiming and firing of antiaircraft guns during WWII—research that helped him develop the new discipline of cybernetics. Soviet promoter of cybernetics, military officer, and engineer Anatoliy Kitov, who was the first to bring Wiener’s theories to the USSR, had a background in artillery as well. The significance of wartime experience for the generation of scientists who developed cybernetics in the USSR cannot be overestated. When Svitlana Matviyenko and I asked Borys Malinovsky, one of the pioneers of Soviet cybernetics (and, lately, its leading historian), how he become interested in cybernetics, he replied with a lengthy account of his military service during WWII.
The proposed system was referred to in the Soviet Union by its abbreviated title—OGAS, for “Obschegosudarstvennaya Avtomatizirovannaya Sistema Upravleniya.”
For a detailed account of this fateful event, see Peters, How Not to Network a Nation, 161–66. Long before the globe became more interdependent than ever due to overlapping information networks, the fate of the Soviet network was probably defined by an event that happened in a distant part of the world prior to the meeting: on September 28, 1970, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser died, and Leonid Brezhnev, who went to attend his funeral, had to miss the Politburo meeting where Glushkov’s project was discussed. This emboldened the hardline critics of Glushkov, who used the meeting to ridicule and discredit his ideas.
Alexey Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (2005) analyzes this social condition in the late USSR. It is a frighteningly timely read today.
In the wake of Trump’s election, the sinister implications of right-wing accelerationism are increasingly coming to light. See Yuk Hui, “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries,” e-flux journal 81 (April 2017) →; and Shuja Haider, “The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction,” Viewpoint Magazine, March 28, 2017 →. At the same time, more and more parallels are being drawn between the final years of the USSR and the current state of Western societies. In light of this, it’s definitely worth paying more attention to late-Soviet accelerationism, which is an illuminating analogue to modern-day affirmative accelerationism.
Yuk Hui may be right to call Deng Xiaoping the world’s greatest accelerationist, but Mikhail Gorbachev is a close second. After all, his notion of acceleration brought down the Soviet Union in five short years. See Hui, “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries.”
Many thanks to Svitlana Matviyenko for drawing attention to this episode and to the work of Soldatov and Borogan in general.
This essay is a loose synopsis of the film The Great Accelerator, an in-progress documentary film about the life and work of Viktor Glushkov. All images are courtesy of the author and have been collected during research for the film.
I’m indebted to Svitlana Matviyenko for sparking my interest in the subject and for her feedback on this essay. This research would not have been possible without the groundbreaking writing of Ben Peters, Andrei Soldatov, and Irina Borogan, to whom I’m thankful for feedback on my work. Many thanks to Boaz Levin, Hito Steyerl, and Vera Tollmann at the Research Center for Proxy Politics for the chance to present and discuss this research in its early stage. Thank you to Anton Vidokle, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Lev Manovich for the inspiring discussions, and to Stephen Squibb for the edit. Thanks to my comrades at Visual Culture Research Center, particularly Serhiy Klymko and Ruslana Koziyenko, for support and collaboration on parts of this research. Thanks to Lyuba Knorozok, Boris Mitić, and André Singer for helping to develop the concept of an upcoming film.