Dobraya Mashina Pravdy (Добрая машина правды)

» see mashina.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The premise was a mirror image. Alexei Navalny argued that the Russian state ran a machine for manufacturing public opinion, and he announced at the opposition rally on Pushkin Square on 5 March 2012 that he would build the good version of the same machine. The original name was the Good Machine of Propaganda, and it was softened to the Good Machine of Truth at some point nobody bothered to record. The definition he put in his blog was deliberately loose: the machine is its people, volunteers who have taken on an obligation to spread truthful information, in whatever quantity and format suits them.

Mashina.org went live on 29 May 2012. It was a registration form more than anything else. You signed up, described yourself and described how you were willing to fight propaganda, and the plan was that a structure would be assembled out of the answers. The site ran with heavy interruptions for a few hours and then went down, which Navalny attributed to a DDoS attack, and only 2,975 people had made it through registration by the time it was switched off. A blogger counting from the other side put 8,868 authorized users on it by lunchtime two days later.

What followed was a year of campaigns rather than a platform. Volunteers were asked to abuse Wi-Fi and Bluetooth names, repost, drop leaflets in elevators and mailboxes, stamp slogans on banknotes and write on fences and asphalt. In June 2012 the stamped roubles went into circulation and people reported shops taking them without comment. From 21 to 25 June about 9,000 participants aimed roughly 100,000 VKontakte messages at Krasnodar, by Navalny's count. On 29 June, a canvassing day in the town of Gagarin drew forty people.

The best of it was the smallest. On 12 November 2012, working with RosPil, the project circulated a leaflet in a regional governor's own name advertising his 11.7 million roubles of Mercedes purchases. The purchase was cancelled the following day. A browser extension shipped on 6 August 2012 that rewrote phrases on any page you loaded, turning the ruling party's name into the nickname the campaign had given it. For a crowdsourced propaganda project, a Chrome plugin and one cancelled car order is a thin ledger against fifty million people.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the site says now ~

The last thing mashina.org ever published about itself was a sentence saying the Good Machine of Truth had been frozen for a while. That was over a decade ago and the freeze has never been lifted. By late April 2014 the address had been given over to a signup page for the Anti-Corruption Foundation's mailing list, with a link back to the old site, and the project's own page was gone. Its homepage had been sixteen kilobytes in February of that year and was three and a half by the end of April.

~ the dating problem ~

Russian Wikipedia cannot keep its own story straight. The article's opening says the project effectively ceased to exist in 2013. Its infobox says operation ended in 2014 and that the site has not worked since that summer, and the category filed on the page agrees with the infobox. The archive sides with 2014, since the real homepage was still being served in February of that year. Filed here at year precision because two of the three signals point at 2014 and none of them points at a day.

~ the retrospective ~

In an Echo of Moscow interview on 16 October 2014, Navalny was asked about this period and gave an answer that works as an epitaph for a great deal of early-2010s political technology. We, and I in particular, at some stage overestimated the Internet, he said, and then named this project as the thing he had been thinking of when he believed mass propaganda could be run online. The organization behind it went on to become far more consequential than its propaganda arm ever was, and it did so by publishing investigations rather than by recruiting a volunteer army.

I was reading about Russia from Ankara in those years, not inside it, and the thing I take from this grave is a product observation rather than a political one. The machine's hardest problem was structural. A distributed network of volunteers needs a campaign running in order to exist at all, and when the campaign ends there is nothing left holding the members to each other. The two membership counts anybody ever published were 2,975 and 8,868.

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