The term “social media” is coetaneous with the Internet, and most of its definitions focus on communication enabled by web services. They are commonly referred to as “new media,” and their novelty is articulated in distinction with respect to mass media. The mass-circulation press, radio and television are traditional (in a very twenty-first century understanding of the word “tradition”) in the sense that as far as our (short) cultural memory can recall, the dominant model of mass circulation of news, culture and ideas consisted of a one-way, centralized broadcast pattern, relying on expensive, industrial-scale technological infrastructure, whose ownership was centralized in a few hands due to its high costs, and on professionalization of news gathering, editing and content production. Then came the Internet, and everything changed. We all started to tweet, post and chat on the social networks, in addition to reading, listening and watching. The means of generating and sharing information became accessible at little expense, and its abundance was unprecedented. In terms of control of the information flow, the user and the algorithm virtually displaced the journalist and the editor with their professional skills and ethics, and the public sphere both expanded to include hitherto unheard views and opinions, and fragmented into a myriad of filter bubbles. We have all started—as never before—to inhabit echo chambers, wherein most of what we interact with is generated or recommended by our fellow users, namely people we know, but increasingly also those strangers whose profile, according to an algorithm, is similar to our own.
Given this sense of novelty, it is perhaps not immediately apparent how “social media” can be made productive as a category of historical analysis, and in particular how it applies to samizdat. The aim of this chapter is to offer some clarity on the matter, providing a snapshot of dissident print culture as a social media communication environment.
Historicizing social media
Analogies between digital social media and samizdat abound in scholarship, public sphere and even foreign policy discourse. The basic terms of resemblance on which these draw are rather obvious: decentered and networked horizontal communication flows sustained by non-professionals, a sharing economy, the ethos of alternative culture build around the practice of self-publishing, and the role of social media as infrastructure for dissident activism. In the early decades of the Internet, most of the analogies served to buttress emancipatory fantasies invested in the contemporary digital media with a historical legacy, but since the technological present is a moving target, these Whiggish narratives have not aged well.
The cyber-optimist frameworks in which the analogies were deployed in the early days of the Internet differed depending on the position on either side of the erstwhile Cold War divide. As elsewhere in the former socialist Europe, in post-Soviet Russia samizdat became a token of self-identification and a frame of reference for an alternative literary culture of the RuNet (the Russian-speaking corner of the world wide web). Its early adopters, who formed a community, both elite and marginal, resembling the dissident community, articulated the agenda of escaping the politically and economically corrupt post-communist media monopoly to establish a sphere of unbound creativity, undistorted communication and even spiritual community.1
In the USA, on the other hand, the technological variant of post-1989 liberal triumphalism mixed technological determinism2 and the US Cold War foreign policy doctrine of free flow of information.3 According to that doctrine, investing in communication technologies aimed at breaking the monopoly of information of a dictatorial regime produced more informed civil societies which, exposed to truth about the regime, as well as libertarian values and images of prosperity of the West, exerted pressure on dictatorships toward peaceful social change. Thus, for Benjamin B. Fischer, former Chief Historian of the Central Intelligence Agency, crucial to the survival of underground Solidarity and its presses was the secret program undertaken by the CIA under Reagan’s presidency, to furnish the resistance with contemporary hi-tech, including photocopiers, fax machines, walkie-talkies, radio transmitters and the like. The strategy of using “cutting edge technologies to incite political revolt” was apparently already working perfectly in the Poland of the 1980s, “before the era of Internet, Facebook and Twitter,”4 and from this perspective the smuggling in of faxes and photocopiers for dissidents might seem equivalent to the smuggling of Stinger missiles to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Whether or not supported from abroad, the social media revolutions of the first decade of the millennium seemed to be sharing with the revolutions of 1989 a networked communication infrastructure that laid the groundwork for activism.5
In hindsight, the uses of samizdat in narratives of post-Cold War cyber-utopianism, both in the bottom-up, post-Soviet variety and in the top-down, super-power variant, served more to misrecognize our current predicament with Internet freedom than to illuminate the historical experience. Both exhibited the “net delusion” debunked by Evgeny Morozov,6 obscuring the double-edged sword feature of digital social media, whose affordances could easily could be turned against freedom by corporate and state surveillance or any rogue actor with sufficient digital know-how. The promise of the participatory and horizontal communication culture of the world wide web was hijacked for both Huxleyan purposes, offering a sedative pill of Western entertainment to depoliticize subjects of repressive regimes, and for Orwellian purposes, to boost the authoritarians’ apparatuses of propaganda, surveillance and censorship, with acquiescence from corporate powers of the Internet.7 This disillusion was not due only to the cyber-powered increase of repressive capacities of the state, but also to the internal weakness of these movements to create sustainable and governable organizations that could prevail in the long run, which now began to be seen as the dark reverse of the same technological affordances of the social media for political protests, in which the emancipatory promise was invested.8 The easier to connect, the easier to unravel the connection.
Once digital social media’s emancipatory promise failed, disillusion set in and the analogy started to be used in reverse. “Forget Facebook, bring back samizdat,” an op-ed in The New York Times read in 2014.9 Digital social networks began to be identified with surveillance, and the past experience it could serve to illuminate was rather that of Havel’s greengrocer in her—witting and willing, or not—compliance with the system than that of the resistors.10 Against that background, samizdat networks seemed more opaque to the eye of the secret police, and saw no mercenary armies of pro-government trolls. Most of all, they were more resilient. The technological disadvantage of samizdat networks, as compared to the global scope and instantaneity of digital social media, now emerged as its strength, given that the resilience of samizdat networks was predicated upon its embeddedness in the materiality of print publishing.11 The long publishing cycles (as we will learn next) were needed to bring together actions of authors, editors, publishers, printers and distributors, to secure paper, ink and printing machines, to produce and to disseminate printed goods, and to do all that under the radar of the repressive apparatuses. But the long publishing cycle was the right price to pay for full control over infrastructure (outsourcing unlicensed printing to state-controlled institutions happened, but was a risky business), and precisely because it took longer to produce samizdat-based communication, the social bonds between the samizdat activists had more time to forge.
Neither exalting nor venting the disillusion with the cyber-utopian promise ultimately yield a better insight into the media of the past, holding it captive to our current predicament, and whatever the future holds for digital social media. While some scholars propose to forsake the analogy altogether,12 this study works with the assumption that the concept of “social media” can still be made productive as a category of historical analysis. However, that requires a different approach, one that takes distance from the present vagaries and, instead of direct comparison, situates both digital and social media practices and their corresponding imaginaries in the historical longue durée.
T...
