Alexey Chadayev. Virtual limb

Virtual limb
Alexey Chadayev

Publication date: February 24, 2004

Not long ago, following a habit that has developed over many years, I went to the website of the Russian Internet Forum to find out about the date and location of the RIF this year. And I find out: in 2004 it will not exist. As an explanation, the organizers posted a long report letter on the index, in which they praise themselves and their many years of work, complain about the scarcity of sponsorship money, and also declare the end of the “first stage” of activities to popularize the Internet in Russia and the beginning of a certain “second” . They do not know what this second stage will consist of and invite readers to think with them. And at the same time, chip in so that the RIF will still take place, as usual, in the spring.

The scarcity of sponsors is the most common excuse in today's Russia: whoever complains about it. But it is extremely strange to see that the organizers of the main professional and industry forum in a field that was until recently considered one of the most promising began to talk about the same thing, with the intonations and overtones of elderly museum workers. (Well, imagine: let’s say, the food industry association refuses to hold its traditional exhibition in the complex on Presnya, citing the lack of sponsorship money!) Moreover, against the general background of talk that the Internet industry is emerging from the crisis, it is finally then real investors come, optimized projects appear, based not on speculative expectations, but on sober calculations, the network is actively being developed by offline business...

Paradoxically, this is precisely the reason for the death of such a format as RIF. Real business no longer wants to pay for endless conversations about halva; campaigns around the “new digital reality” and the “era of computer networks” are no longer the peak of relevance. The Internet has finally ceased to be a newfangled high-tech gadget, the very conversations about which raise the speaker in the eyes of listeners, and has turned into the same everyday reality of life as the telephone, TV and fax machine. Moreover, it has become the professional sphere of the writing and reading community, a kind of technology for recording the current state of the “noosphere,” the aggregate metaether of the linguistic community. And, accordingly, the mythology of the “Runet” has been ordered to live on for a long time: that’s why it is a medium, so as not to have a clear center and formal unity of self-awareness.

Working with the environment requires a professional approach - rubrication, strict separation of technology problems from content issues, the creation of separate topics and directions. For example, Internet journalism should be discussed at journalism conferences, Internet marketing - at marketing conferences, Internet technologies - at programming conferences, etc... And Internet users need to “master” not the Internet, but “real life” - those. not focus on the competition of Internet projects with offline business (be it the media business, sales industry, advertising, etc.), but offer him solutions that he wants to buy and use. Orientate yourself not inside the environment (complaining that it is too small), but outside it.

Internet parties of the late nineties and early 2000s were, alas, extremely incapable of this: all their events were primarily not professional, but cultic ; it was a permanent self-presentation, advertising of oneself and one’s next projects. As one of the founders of EZHE-Pravda put it at RIF-2001, “this is an event where 50 famous people come to drink and hang out, and another 400 come to watch in awe as they do it . ” But since the cult of the great and mighty Internet died out for a long time, those 400 people who came for their money to see several lucky ones “especially close” to the altar stopped doing so.

Meanwhile, the priestly group, left without “feeding” of the cult adherents, is doing its best to perpetuate the pantheon of the founding fathers: Mitya Ivanov is doing this best at nethistory.ru . True, the reader of Mitya’s site is left with a slippery feeling of some kind of irregularity: most of these pensioner memoirs were written by people who, not only to forty, but even to thirty, still have to live; but they all have a strong feeling that their finest hour is already behind them. There, in an era in which the word “Internet” was pronounced aspirated and written with a capital letter. One inevitably recalls Christ’s cruel advice: “let the dead bury their dead . ” Especially when they are virtual dead.