On Social Media, Censorship, and Writing

In his immortal Master and Margarita, Bulgakov writes about a demonic apartment, from which people would occasionally disappear, literary overnight. So there was a family, and one morning it is all gone. Than someone moves in, lives for a while, and also disappears.

Bulgakov is obviously mocking a peculiar Stalinist practice of arrests, when the secret police agents would come to the apartment in the middle of the night, arrest whomever they wanted to, and next day it would be all quite as if nothing happened and nobody saw anyone.

Well, what Bulgakov presents as some demonic trick, is happening now with increased speed on social media. There are friends, and acquaintances and interesting voices, and then they disappear. People disappear, posts disappear, links and comments disappear. And the whole thing continues as usual.

John Donne could talk about the bell, who tolls not just for neighbor but for all of us. The disappears of anyone diminishes everyone. One more soul, one more intelligence, one more breath is being wiped out. It is our loss.

That thought, obviously does not disturb the bosses who run the social media, its giants, like FB or Twitter in partiular. They are more comfortable with these disappearances without a trace, than any Stalinist prosecutor.

This is getting positively irritating. I am glad I have an account on VK, and I feel that a blog will provide an access to fresh air. I am placing here "my greatest hits" that are currently inhibit this demonic apartment, known as Facebook. I also intend to write something more "upscale" here, something that the semi-literate polizai, hired by FB from the stables of Atlantic Council won't be able to reach or comprehend.

I didn't stay in my own motherland, when the harassment of these polizai became intolerable, and I certainly do not intend to stay in this fucked up dwelling, which I actually honor by my presence.

So yes, f..k you, stupid censorship that presents itself by the orwellian term of "community standards." From my Soviet days, I remember these substandards well, when people were silenced because they undermined the foundations of the first socialist country, or the morality of the proletarian state, or the principles of communism, or whatever crap petty minds of the treacherous and cowardly scriveners would come up with in defense of their own little asses.