Dissipative humanity

At the rally on December 10, there were many beautiful posters, but what touched me most was the graph of the distribution of votes for different parties by polling stations (the one where United Russia has funny and blatantly implausible peaks on round numbers) with the caption “We don’t believe Churov! We believe Gauss!”

In general, the massive scale of rallies against election fraud - almost a hundred thousand people in Moscow, thousands in all other major cities, and even several dozen near Russian embassies in many countries of the world - makes us believe not only Gauss, but also Prigozhin, and remember that society is a system capable of self-organization.

Not that this was news. We have been using the Internet for many years to solve all those problems that the current government cannot cope with: through social networks, volunteers are found to put out fires, search for missing people and repair children’s shelters, huge sums are collected for the treatment of cancer patients, new blood donors are attracted, signatures are collected for appeals against idiotic bills, the protection of city architecture is organized, and so on and so forth. But until now there have always been distinct centers of crystallization, those specific people who gathered the public around them. And now it has begun to seethe on its own. More precisely, we have all become centers of crystallization to one degree or another.

This is really terribly similar to other examples of self-assembly. There are many elements. They are affected by some external conditions. Because of this, they tend to occupy an energetically favorable position, and from the point of view of an external observer, the result is a beautiful and complex structure. Phospholipids try to turn their hydrophobic tails away from water - and line up into a two-layer membrane, and then into a closed sphere. The liquid in Benard cells strives to equalize the density - due to constant heating it fails, but in its movement the liquid particles form beautiful hexagons. People feel discomfort that the authorities are so demonstratively not interested in their opinion about the parties in the Duma, and they go to rallies.

The government in this unexpected situation behaves like a curious student in a laboratory: it raises and lowers the temperature under the viscous liquid, and observes whether there are more or fewer hexagonal cells in it. Then he writes that he does not agree with the slogans of the rally (i.e., that the elections should not be rigged, obviously), and the public begins to seethe more actively. Then he promises a new party and new presidential candidates (which hasn’t happened in I can’t remember how many years, except for the amazing concept of “successor”), and the temperature drops by several degrees.

The funniest thing in this sense is the communication between the Prime Minister and the people on December 15, because it simultaneously contained both absolutely provocative and extremely calming statements. On the one hand, there is a promise to install webcams at polling stations and a proposal to restore the election of governors (“the same thing,” the public happily thinks). On the other hand, there are several clumsy attempts to present the public as a bunch of idiots: a mention that people came to rallies for money (who would say!), that opposition leaders called their own protesters sheep (without indicating that this there was a direct quote from the President of the Russian Federation’s Twitter), and a wonderful passage about people hanging themselves with condoms in protest - the Prime Minister allegedly mistook white ribbons for them (hmm, that’s a good idea).

It does not yet seem that the final goal is to arrange the entire society into Benard cells, or, conversely, to make a viscous liquid homogeneous. The information space now produces so much contradictory news every day that it looks like a manifestation of the investigative behavior of the authorities: “And if we do this to them, then what are they?” This in itself is absolutely wonderful, because it responds to another important poster from the rally - the St. Petersburg “You don’t even imagine us.” Have they finally decided to introduce us? It's very nice to meet you, civil society.

But, most likely, we are seeing some confusion. Just as we, as a society, now listen to statements from the authorities every day and every now and then we do not understand whether they are serious or mocking - the authorities look at us and also cannot understand how serious we are. It seemed like there were such good people, quiet, calm, but then suddenly they go to rallies, buzz, make people nervous, and organize themselves. It’s unclear what to do. At least hold fair elections next time if they don’t calm down. Who would have thought.

Anastasia Kazantseva