For my second blogpost entry I will be discussing Alex Goldman’s and PJ Vogt’s Reply All. This one was the 100th episode, Friends and Blasphemers. I enjoyed the style the podcast I responded to in my previous blogpost, so I decided to tune into another episode by Alex and PJ. This podcast definitely didn’t disappoint, and I hope by reading today’s blogpost you will be encouraged to check out this story.
The episode begins with PJ explaining what Live Journal is. Essentially, it is a website where you can create journal entries on a public server among millions of others, and people can respond to each post. Think of it as a hybrid between Reddit and WordPress. It used to be extremely popular in the US in the early 2000s, and was a great way to create online friends. Alex then admits he was an avid user of the site, with an embarrassing name: Blasphemera. He thought it would be a cool play on the words blasphemy and ephemera, but PJ just laughs at him. Alex is wondering why PJ all the sudden brought up this old website, but PJ admits he has quite the interesting story for the podcast regarding Live Journal.
After Live Journal paved its way in the US, it became a hit in Russia. There are then a few cut scenes from the podcast’s pre recording of PJ interviewing Alexey Kovalev, a Russian previous user of the site. Kovalev says it was almost like an exclusive online club to meet friends and create connections. However, this soon changed when Vladimir Putin wins the Russian presidential election in 2000. Putin slowly starts to shut down Russian media, and the ones he doesn’t shut down are heavily censored or bought out by big companies. This one other Live Journal user named Alexey Navalney is pissed at Putin and the government, so he decides to use the site as a way to fight back.
Navalney buys stock in Gazprom, which is a huge Russian government owned oil company. He then gains access to government financial documents, and posts them to Live Journal. He created a huge splash in the community and had tons of people tuning in to his posts. The government finds out about this and isn’t able to do anything about it. This is because Live Journal is a US owned server, and the Russian government is hopeless in censoring media posted on the site. The government then concocts a plan to infiltrate this community.
Seemingly overnight, Live Journal is flooded with pro-Putin posts. These posters were primarily from the Kremlin Federal Youth Agency, which was a propaganda wing that paid people to create these troll posts. In 2010 however, wildfires broke out in Moscow and knowing that the government wasn’t equipped to put them out, Live Journal posters took this as an opportunity to shun the government again. To make the government look better, Putin hired someone from his political party to burn a bush down, and document himself putting it out to make people think the government is in fact helping. This was then debunked pretty quickly, as many people found out this bush was outside of Moscow and the whole bush fire was propaganda.
To make matters worse, Russian politicians join in on the fun and begin their own posts. The most interesting scandal on Live Journal regarding this was when a journalist named Oleg Kashin writes a post insulting politician Andrey Turchak. Turchak gives Kashin a warning to delete the post, however this doesn’t happen. As Kashin is walking home one day, Turchak had hired hitmen to break Kashins fingers with an iron rod. He ends up in a coma with broken fingers, one of which needed to be amputated.
The story comes to a close when we learn Live Journal had later been bought out by a rich Russian businessman, who likely had associations with Putin. Live Journal then became a Russian company and was heavily censored like the rest of their media. People slowly stop using it, and all the data from every person who created an account (including those in the US) are now stored in Russian servers.
I found this story to be extremely interesting. It was almost like listening to a dumpster fire unfold. It was hilarious how the Russian government tried to make such a long lived effort to de-popularize the site but it just ended up backfiring on them and made them look foolish. The narration style I found to be great. It was very consistent with the last episode I posted about; the conversation style, having a guest appear on the show, and the lack of background noises/music to create the ambience of the listener being included in Alex and PJ’s conversation. I found it different than the last one in only one way, and that was who took the lead of storyteller. PJ was the person who carried the story in this episode, while Alex was the one reacting to him. In the episode from my first blog post, Alex seemed to be the one carrying the discussion. I am assuming each episode alternates the discussion leader, however I will have to listen to more to find out for sure. I hope you get the chance to listen to Reply All, and enjoy it as much as I did!
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I’m old enough to have had a few LiveJournals…super interesting story! (Matt)