"I stopped wanting to go to Chevengur in 2014." Mathematician Misha Verbitsky came out of a holding cell at Yerevan airport and discusses where the world is heading.

In mid-June, mathematician Misha Verbitsky, who works at Rio de Janeiro State University in Brazil, flew to Armenia and was detained by the country's authorities at Russia's request. The Russian Federation accuses Verbitsky of "justifying terrorism." After a few days, the scientist was released and was able to leave the country. Kirill Martynov, editor-in-chief of "Novaya-Evropa," spoke with Verbitsky about his experience of short-term detention, the legacy of the early Russian internet, artificial intelligence and the fate of digital culture, as well as the future of Russia (which, according to Verbitsky, does not exist). Mikhail Verbitsky. Photo: Brazilian National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics. - How was it in Yerevan? - Terrible. It turned out that, like the Mokretsy in Strugatsky's books, I can't last more than a day without a book. I held on for a while, but then I completely fell apart, couldn't sleep. And life is hard enough as it is, and now there's uncertainty about my job [referring to the risk of the semester being disrupted at the university due to the lengthy extradition process to Russia. - Auth. note]. In short, I was terribly nervous. In my youth, when I was in detention, it was somehow easier. But back then, by the way, I wasn't in solitary confinement, which, of course, distracts and hinders work to some extent. - And in your youth, what was that? - It was some kind of foolishness. I was detained at the border with Finland in 1987 on charges of crossing the state border. They scared me, threatening ten years. But in the end, they couldn't prove anything. It was the very day Mathias Rust landed on Red Square. And, like Mathias Rust, I was kept for a week in prison, a week in a psychiatric hospital, scared – and released. Mathias Rust at the plane immediately after landing on Red Square in Moscow. Photo: history.ru. - Did you think that extradition to Russia was really possible, or was it immediately clear that there were few chances? - In Armenia, the same force that was in power before has now won the elections, and they won under slogans of serious conflict with Russia. Both Putin and Lukashenko and Peskov promised Armenia "Ukrainian scenarios" in response. So it was clear: as long as this government is in power, I won't be extradited – that's the calculation I made when I went. I was more afraid of something else: that there's some automatic system – I'm in the database, and they automatically lock me up if Russia sends a request. I wasn't afraid of being handed over, but I was afraid of being stuck there for six months, a year. And at that moment, the promised coup [organized by pro-Russian forces in Armenia] could have happened. - Yes, and you could have lost your job. - Yes, and my job. It would have turned out badly. - Were you going to Armenia for a class reunion? - For the 57th school, yes. We have a very close-knit class – they've all married each other once, then again. Such a big family, I love them very much. We haven't seen each other for a long time, and it's unclear when we'll see each other again: in Brazil, I don't have many opportunities to get a European or American visa, so I mostly travel to visa-free countries. - How did it happen that you decided that Pashinyan won the elections, so it's safe to go? It's quite widely known that Armenia and Russia exchange information within the framework of criminal investigations – this is partly payment for visa-free travel and the ability to travel with an internal passport. - I didn't have that calculation – that they would actually automatically arrest everyone in their databases. I wasn't even sure I was in the databases. - Do I understand correctly that you were in a cell alone for two days? - Three. - So boring. What does a mathematician do in solitary confinement? Is it even possible to explain to a non-mathematician what your professional field is? - I usually answer this question by saying I work in geometry – in a broad sense. But if I were to say specifically that I work on such-and-such fibrations on hyperkähler manifolds, no one would understand anything. Then I could give a whole popular lecture – it's not difficult, but it would take a lot of time. And in the cell, I got a notebook – I filled about forty pages. These are all my debts to co-authors. I haven't been writing articles solo lately, only with co-authors: when there's a co-author, there's moral pressure, and the work gets done. When I write alone, there's no pressure, so everything is done at the last minute – or not done at all. So I finished all my debts, covering four different topics, in the cell. It was pleasant. But, unfortunately, when you're trembling, it's very difficult to concentrate and do something intelligent for a long time. When the debts were finished, I had to do creative work – and then I realized I couldn't at all because I was trembling. - Why did many of our acquaintances split into those who support the war and those who don't? There's a temptation to say that those who don't support the war are good people, but I think that's an oversimplification. Your former friend Dugin, whom you once called a "drunken relative"... - That's a bit rude. Although I continue to follow his speeches with great interest. Mikhail Verbitsky. Photo: Facebook. - But what's his logic? He wanted to destroy the world – and he finally got his chance. - Yes, he wanted to build a big, big "Chevengur" for the whole country. - But how did this choice happen in your case? - Back during the Chechen war, there was a website created by an acquaintance of mine, signed by mostly all well-known internet figures. It was called "This is not my war." Two people made it – Sergey Kuznetsov and Mr. Parker, also known as Maxim Kononenko. I was a bit indignant then. I myself, of course, never supported the Chechen war, but it seemed to me that this common stance of resistance to the Chechen war was the position of the establishment. Now I realize that it was a terrible stupidity on my part to be indignant [about the anti-war initiative]. They were doing the right thing, not me. Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Maxim Kononenko at a recording for the NTV TV channel, "Maxim Kononenko's Collection of Follies." Photo: Wikimedia. But, as is known, during the second Chechen war, Mr. Parker wildly supported it. And here's the "Parker puzzle," with whom I was quite close. He was not an entirely ordinary personality, but an ideologically conformist. He dreamed of pleasing Alena Apina. He wanted to be popular pop music, it attracted him. Then there was conformity of one type, now – another. And so it is with many. People who were liberals in the 90s have now become absolutely... Sergey Karaganov, it seems, now dreams of dropping a nuclear bomb on Europe – and yet in the 90s he was an advisor to Yeltsin. An interesting trajectory, and not just for him. On the other hand, there were various national Bolsheviks. A huge number of them now – I don't know how many are fighting, but they certainly support the RDK. So it was a confrontation with the authorities there – and a confrontation with the authorities here [in the context of war]. And there were also a huge number of people who were liberals and remained liberals. Sergey Kuznetsov, for example: he left, recently managed his school, but, in general, continues the same project as before. But there were, of course, people like Alexander Gelyevich, who were obscurantists back in the 90s, when it wasn't fashionable, but on the contrary – youth and counter-cultural, and they remained obscurantists. All these trajectories are evident, and each can be attributed to something personal – as I did with Parker. For example, Sergey Kuznetsov was the prototype for Sasha Blo from Pelevin's novel "Generation P" – and this Sasha Blo continues in the same capacity to this day, only he opened a school instead. - Now, it seems to me, there is also an attempt to play in the field of nonconformism. Characters appear who say: look, if you want to be young, to be a nonconformist – support Putin and the war; and all this mainstream, the establishment is rotten, all these foreign agents are one and the same. - Of course. The bookstore "Listva," the Republic of Fiume, these "sons of the monarchy" – there's a whole set, a bit like Dugin's youth movement around 2005, when they were no longer national Bolsheviks, but rather plump bourgeois youths with bellies, who considered themselves terrible radicals. These radicals continue to cluster around the same ideas. They worship Golovin, Mamleev. A very interesting form of thought: there are obvious contradictions that they should notice, but everything is so bloated with fat that they don't notice. For example, they present "DPR" as the Republic of Fiume – a comically leaky analogy. Mikhail Verbitsky. Photo: "Neolurk". - In your new blog posts, the idea still persists that if people just want comfort, it's very wrong. But on the one hand, if people want comfort, they won't go to war by default: war is uncomfortable and they can be killed, which contradicts the idea of a cozy mortgage. On the other hand, many of those who end up in the war in Russia do so precisely because they haven't achieved comfort, want to achieve it, and believe that war will give them a chance: they'll get money and lead a comfortable life. - Well, the second is a clear self-deception. They think so, of course, but in reality, they will be robbed, killed, and return as alcoholics without arms and legs. And if they return with money – their wives will immediately divorce them and take all the money. Each of these scenarios is likely to be realized, and they understand from the outset that they will be realized. That is, it is self-deception that allows them to go to war under the guise of "earning money." It is clear that they don't really want this – they want self-destruction. As for the harm of comfort – yes, it is dangerous. "When a person sinks into comfort, they stop wanting to move, it destroys the personality. But on the other hand, it seems to me that for the country, comfort is precisely what Krylov and Rozanov talked about. What to do in summer? Pick berries, make jam. What to do in winter? Drink tea with jam. Lately, I've been thinking about this more and more. Krylov is dead, and every time I feel how much he is missed. He had a dream – to live comfortably, that a Russian person should finally forget all those terrible "Chevengurs" with their ambitions and live comfortably. And after the war began, I realized that our love for Chevengur, which we felt, was, in general, destructive – both for us and for the country. For us – less so, for the country – more so. It was probably a mistake. Despite the fact that I have great love for all of Platonov's work. - What remains of your faith from the early internet era? And secondly – I want a little metaphysics – what guarantees the continuity of personality: Verbitsky in 2026 and Verbitsky in 2001? Why can this person say about himself: then I misunderstood the situation, then my views changed? - I'm not sure I misunderstood. Rereading those texts of mine, I feel a little ashamed, of course – but not in essence, but just like it's shameful to reread my own old poems: there's always a shift in taste. But in essence, I don't dislike it much. And the positions… I had an excess of desire to change everything, which was absolutely wrong. Wrong – because there could have been another path. The Republic of Fiume is wonderful, no one was killed there, they took cocaine and flew on planes. In the optics of 2001, this was attractive. In the optics of 2022, I see that it simply degenerates into a crowd of drunkards who slash passers-by and steal toilets and washing machines. So it's not needed in Russia. Maybe it's needed in Italy, in Slovenia, or elsewhere, but definitely not in Russia. It seems to me that philosophy should be somewhat experimental: first you test a position, convince yourself that it is wrong, and then you change your mind. In 2001, no one expected this to happen. Rather, they expected a slow descent into bourgeois boredom, gradual decay, plundering, and Russia's transformation into the backwaters of Eastern Europe – which seemed bad then, but now seems wonderful. As for eternity and continuity – it's hard for me to say anything here, because from within myself I don't see any particular changes, except for experimental data that have refuted many of my ideas. But not all. "For example, I continue to fight for freedom of speech – despite the fact that many of my friends, after seeing how Trump was elected, how it's done through social media manipulation, are losing ground and saying: maybe social media should be slightly curtailed? But I don't think so. - You position yourself as an anarchist. How does Russia differ from any other state – also built on violence and coercion, on arbitrary borders and restrictions? Aren't we still too much exoticizing Russia when we talk about it specifically as some kind of permanent source of human suffering? - Of course, Stalin's GULAG is a source of suffering, no doubt about it. There is no analogue to this horror even in China, in general. There were several periods comparable in vileness to Stalin's GULAG, but they are completely different. "GULAG in the destinies of people and the history of the country" exhibition, Moscow, December 10, 2018. Photo: Kirill Zykov / Moscow Agency. Okay, that was a mistake. But when this mistake is now being attempted to be restored, they try to present it not as a mistake, but as the very fabric, the texture of Russian statehood that inevitably folds into this figure, inheriting "Epifanovsky Locks" or the self-immolation of the Old Believers. Traditionally, such horror has always been present in Russian state life, it doesn't go away, and apparently, it won't go away until the very end – because the state is now at its end. Either it will all end in some kind of massacre, or in a cocoon like North Korea. I don't think it can be fixed. All laws passed by the Duma since 2002 would have to be repealed. How to do this without revolution? And how to make a revolution if the population is mostly a rather terrible cannibalistic mass that absolutely does not want democracy in any form, but wants to be punished? So they punish each other. In this, I think, lies the difference between Russia and Eastern Europe at the moment. - Don't you think there's a contradiction here? On the one hand, we don't like it when people are tortured. On the other hand, you say that people themselves want to be treated that way. Then why – without calling the population "vat" – not say that this is an absolutely democratic process, this is what people need, they choose such a fate themselves? What then to complain about? - That's a great topic. Look: the most pleasant people I've met – are precisely from Russia. Lots of great people individually. Maybe they'll end up in hell, but they're still very nice. But here they unite into a mass – and immediately turn into some kind of fanatical, insane herd, completely devoid of brains. It's always like that. There's a whole branch of sociology that studies how an individual differs from a mass. So, individual communication in Russia is quite Eastern European. If you move each of these individuals into an environment without horrors, they will function excellently. But collectively… There's a wonderful experiment. There's an animal called a sponge; you can pound it in a mortar, mix it with seawater, wait a bit – and it will reassemble into a sponge. The same is true with Russian statehood: it reassembles into the same format, even though the individual cells themselves may not even want it. Or they want it, but differently. Or they don't think about it at all. Rather, it's about the very fabric of social life. It seems to me that culture, perhaps even language, leads to this – and certainly not the people themselves. The people are exactly the same. I have a lot of friends and co-authors in Eastern Europe and a lot of friends in Russia – and, comparing them, I don't see where they are worse. Well, we are a little closer to the north – there is such a thing as the "Jante Law," a Scandinavian set of principles that strongly limits social life; in Russia, many of them also work well. But where is Scandinavia, and where is Russia. - I remember the philosopher Pyatigorsky, when defining Russia, said that the most important thing about it is "some kind of bullshit." - I keep remembering that phrase. - He said that precisely at the moment when this turn we are discussing was happening. Do you have any analytical definition of Russia? - I won't invent anything new here. There is a hyper-extractive economy, which Etkind wrote about. Russia has traditionally been involved in exporting: first furs, then grain, then oil. And each time it's just export – with the exception of a brief grain period, which, by the way, led to a much more humane government. They export something unrelated to the population, and therefore these military people have no interest in the population doing anything; and if it dies out, that's great. They have guards, they export resources to the West, invest money in guards – and these guards exist alongside the resources. The resource perceives itself as a self-value, and the population is valued at nothing, because it is, in general, not needed. And this is a fundamental difference between Russia and most countries – perhaps except for Nigeria. - There is a hypothesis that as long as you export resources to the West, you don't fight with it – and maybe it would have been better to keep exporting? - I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but you can't take words out of a song – around 2001, we really wanted a war with Ukraine. Because then, they said, this export to the West would immediately stop, all ties with the West would be severed, all the Rublyovka bourgeoisie would be jailed – and the regaining of Russia, restoration, "standing up from its knees," and economic recovery without all this would finally begin. And Putin implemented exactly that – which is completely terrible, because here it is clear that our theoretical constructs were wrong. All this happened – and there is no improvement in social life. In reality, it is a bandit country: there was bandit industrialism in the 90s, now there is KGB lawlessness – and they are no better, in general. Perhaps even worse. It's hard to judge from the outside, but the feeling is that it's worse. - I'm confused about your views on the economy. You still seem to dislike so-called monetarists – Gaidar and Chubais and their American teachers. And on the other hand, I've seen posts from you saying that Saakashvili is great. But these are roughly the same ideas – deregulation of the economy, private initiative. - It didn't exactly work out well in Georgia. Mikheil Saakashvili takes a selfie with his supporters upon arrival at Kyiv Boryspil Airport, Ukraine, May 29, 2019. Photo: Sergey Dolzhenko / EPA. - Balcerowicz in Poland, as far as I understand – in principle, the same thing, only more effective. In Poland, deregulation was also the main idea – "do what you want." - In reality, I don't think deregulation would have played any role. And it's unlikely it played a role in Georgia or elsewhere. What played a role was simply the destruction of the Soviet system. All judges had to be removed, everything that smelled of the Soviet system had to be removed. And that would have been salvation for the country. Just as West Germany did with East Germany – it simply destroyed all the institutions that were there. The result is not 100% good – you can see who they vote for in East Germany now. But the institutional contagion, which, like a virus, spread from security structures throughout society, was nevertheless eradicated. Roughly the same in Poland: everything was closed. And in Eastern Europe in general. But in Russia, it wasn't closed, and in Central Asia, it wasn't closed. In Central Asia, in my opinion, it's better now than in Russia – apparently, the Soviet roots were not so deep there. I am not a supporter of Gaidar and Chubais – I don't care about deregulation, in general – they were also doing the wrong thing; but in retrospect, it's clear that our criticism of them was unfair. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on this without truly misanthropic considerations, so I won't. Cover of Andrey Platonov's book "Chevengur." - We've returned to "Chevengur" several times – in the context of Dugin's quote and some fascination with it. At what point did you stop loving it? You wake up in the morning – and you no longer want to go to Chevengur. - I adore "Chevengur." I stopped wanting to go there in 2014. Look, it's like Mayakovsky said: here's the revolution – and the philistines devour it. There are two opposing tendencies: philistinism and the revolutionary-Chevengur tendency. So, in 2014, we got this philistinism, which doesn't even think it's "Chevengur" – it just triumphs. And if "Chevengur" comes with the triumph of philistinism, then I'm not ready to play with such a revolution. It's not "with a white wreath of roses – leading – Jesus Christ," but a white wreath of roses in front and some mangy dog. And our unchangeable president as a revolutionary leader is absolutely not fitting. That is, it was purely an aesthetic moment: as "Chevengur" was being realized, something much uglier than even our hated 90s and less hated 2000s was being realized. 2014 was the moment when it became clear that we shouldn't have gone into Ukraine and that our national-Bolshevik calls to fight – not only ours, Luzhkov was also actively involved in this – for Sevastopol and Crimea were absolutely destructive. It was a horror. Here, of course, I must admit that I participated in absolutely ugly manipulation. But the idea was this: we manipulate, and then this revolution must be ridden like a tiger [referring to the corresponding concept of Italian "conservative revolutionary" Julius Evola. - Ed.]. We excite the masses, then jump on the tiger and take it to the place we need. Like, for example, the Meiji Restoration, which was carried out under the slogan of destroying everything Western, but in the end all these revolutionaries were destroyed, and instead of destruction, all Western institutions were transferred to Japan. Alexander Dugin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in St. Petersburg, Russia, June 7, 2024. Photo: Anatoly Maltsev / EPA. - Do you see any good future? Is there any picture? We discussed: the 90s were bad, but not as bad as now, the 2000s too. And the world is not in the best condition. What are we fighting for? - That's the problem – it's unclear what to fight for here. Look: in an ideal scenario, America sends in special forces, or Europe does, takes all the nuclear bombs and establishes external governance. Such an ideal scenario is in principle not realized. What is realized is that this is Russia, and now everyone there – deputies, cops, Professor Karaganov, politicians, and ordinary people – are urgently demanding to drop a nuclear bomb on Ukraine. I suspect this is inevitable. The reaction of the West will be interesting next. Perhaps your minimal scenario will be realized: quickly, as in Venezuela, they will seize Russian nuclear silos. The first step is inevitable – the start of a nuclear war. The second step, optimistic, is the seizure of nuclear silos and the end of Russian statehood. And the pessimistic step is when all of Europe is turned into a horror. - You have a good vantage point – better than many of us. I'm talking about Rio de Janeiro. - Yes. It's not that I chose it deliberately, but I ended up there luckily. When I arrived in Rio, Karaganov, it seems, had not yet come out with such a program. - Your active struggle for freedom of speech – unlike many – has led to unexpected consequences: you have become an archivist of the Russian internet of the 2000s. The hosting lj.rossia.org is supported, archives are still alive, you occasionally write about authors whom everyone has forgotten, quote Krylov and others. Since everything else is divided by corporations and is slowly disappearing, and your hosting is holding up, it turns out to be retrofuturism: we fought for a future without censorship, and ended up with Verbitsky's archive – and Verbitsky, who discusses this archive. - This is probably hereditary: my parents kept all sorts of nonsense, and I'm used to keeping every piece of paper, scanning it whenever possible; if I have archives, I post them. When LiveJournal appeared – and it appeared early in Russia, I was one of the first users outside of Russia – I realized that all my archives had to be uploaded. This is still happening. And it really turns out to be an unexpected reserve. Only I'm more upset about the opposite: a lot of things that I didn't save can now be found nowhere – especially from YouTube. I saved texts whenever possible, I have completely insane texts that are nowhere else at all, because they are all considered extremism. But YouTube and, by the way, the press are disappearing. In the 90s, there were fanzines of incredible content, absolutely insane; people printed them. During a search, they took away copies from me that no one else had – they probably destroyed them. - If you were to be extradited to Russia, wouldn't the archive be lost? Do you have everything planned for such a case? - Partly everything is planned. If I'm suddenly killed, then the password will probably be hard to find. But on the other hand, if someone is concerned, they can bring a document from the heirs – they have it all. At one point, I sent instructions on how to manage the site to several people. And there is a large chunk of archives – Lenin.ru and the like. It just lives, I have it on disk, it can be uploaded in its original form. And there's lj.rossia, which uses an engine from 2003; getting it to work on modern hardware is a whole challenge, but it's up and running for now. - There was a short period of universal digital freedom – from the early 2000s to about 2007, when the first censorship case against Savva Terentyev occurred. By the way, I saw him recently – he's doing well, he's not in Russia. - Great. The main thing is not to get jailed; after all, he could have repeated it now – it was Perm, wasn't it? - Syktyvkar. - Every creative person must flee from there [from Russia]. - At that time, LiveJournal appeared, where everyone could write what they wanted. What was important to you during that era? Or who? - I personally set up modems for Bayan Shiranov and Shisha Bryansky, famous poets. And, possibly, I participated in setting up a modem for Rada Tsapina – although Sergey Ryzhkov, the owner of the Moscow provider "Rinet" at the time, also seemed to help her. Who was important? The same ones as always: Mandelstam, Gumilyov. Well, of course, there were a huge number of extremely interesting cultural connections – from Tyumen, our musicians, from Barnaul, from Novosibirsk; Egor Letov. We had a label then, on which we released a huge amount of music. Now all this can be simply uploaded as MP3, but back then it was unrealistic. We were actively releasing music until about 2003–2004. But this is regarding cultural value – and the values are fundamentally the same as always. Unfortunately, I am still mired in culture, although I demand its destruction. - You are one of the few who remembers characters from that era with warmth. "The Pioneer of Lies" recently passed away, who was a crypto-fascist, an anti-Semite, and a proponent of the theory of a Jewish conspiracy on LiveJournal. Also, looking at your recent posts, I remembered the character Oboguyev, who was building a Russian world on his personal plot. And "Sapozhnik" recently died, on the other hand. - That's sad. - What can we say about this diverse environment? Kholmogorov is flourishing: the last thing he wrote in the genre "veterans' souls don't age" is that Zelensky, being Jewish, set fire to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra himself to blame the Orthodox and Kholmogorov personally for this crime. - This is a certain parallel world that existed. The right-wing underground was divided into several groups. There was, for example, "Magic Mountain" – such right-wing esotericists, very far from politics. There were national Bolsheviks – right-left esotericists, very close to politics. And there was also a right-wing addition – natsionalizm.org, such a portal. All our current acquaintances, including Pioneer, Krylov, and Kholmogorov, gathered around this portal. And they used to annoy me terribly, because I believed that the whole world should unite against Yeltsinism – for this, we should unite with communists, with Nazis, with anyone, just to endure. Partly a strange position, and it should be a little shameful – it's manipulative: the idea was to then "ride the tiger" and go somewhere good on it. It's interesting what happened to all of them: for the most part, they either drank themselves to ruin or left for the West. Pioneer is an exception, and the owner of that very "nationalism" is now somewhere in Lithuania. But despite the fact that they annoyed me, they always evoked great interest. Shiropayev was special among them – a brilliant poet and thinker, who at that time wrote such poems: "I await you, reaction, in black, like the SS. Not a one-off action, but a long process." But he, unfortunately, got his wish. And this terribly annoyed me – I thought that reaction was very bad. Despite the fact that later, in 2005, Shiropayev became one of the founders of that very resistance to the Russian state, a new nationalism, to which, in my opinion, he devoted his entire conscious life. Egor Kholmogorov. Photo: Yaroslav Chingayev / Moscow Agency. - In the early 20th century, they wrote that radio would put an end to ignorance: people would learn all languages, radio amateurs would become friends and exchange information around the world, wars would end. Then the radio frequencies were divided among commercial corporations, which set their own rules and began broadcasting within national legislation. And you now look – I went to the so-called "tifaretnik" with some nostalgia – like that very radio amateur in a world where all frequencies are already divided, and you are still broadcasting on your own wave. And your readers are the same. And it looks like retro. - Retro, absolutely. Web 1.0. - What do you think about this current path of internet development? Isn't it turning out that by setting up modems for all our acquaintances, we sent people into a world that we ourselves dislike? I was a techno-optimist for a very long time and probably still am, although it's getting harder and harder. The internet hasn't made people smarter, more educated, friendlier. No one has learned languages, borders have not fallen. Exactly the opposite – like with radio, only worse. - I had another theory – I've told it many times: the internet is a way to bring society to collective schizophrenia. But not always bad schizophrenia. Schizophrenia – in the sense that instead of a consensus reality, we get many different realities, and for the holder of one consensus, all holders of another are schizophrenics. Before, one broadcast, others listened. And now everyone broadcasts to each other. That was my point of view then. Now, of course, it has largely ended: broadcasting has again become monopolistic – within either commercial structures or pretentious bloggers associated with these structures. Nevertheless, the monologue nature of traditional broadcasting has been replaced by some semblance of dialogicity – that very one, according to Bakhtin. And if we use what the French situationists said, then the society of the spectacle has been quite shaken. This is clearly seen in sad events like Trump's election. There are what are called legacy media, old newspapers that speak in unison that Trump is a horror, a fascist, white supremacism; and there are a lot of people who simply don't listen to them, because they are subscribed to mailing lists, and they report every day that the Democrats, as they say, eat pizza, and in reality, children are being raped there. The once popular "Pizzagate" theory – in these parallel media created by right-wing conservatives for their own consumption. The result is not very good, but at least the society of the spectacle has suffered a rather significant defeat. - A wonderful concept of schizophrenia – in the sense of neurodiversity: you were all too normal, here's a little schizophrenia, otherwise you're boring. But then it turned out that schizophrenia can be turned into commodity capitalism, you can earn money from it – influencers, global trade in various types of schizophrenia. And then I don't quite understand what the problem with the society of the spectacle is. Maybe before it was a professional spectacle, and now an amateur theater? It's reinventing the fairground. Trump invented 19th-century politics: "we'll throw shit at all our enemies." It wasn't accepted like that in the society of the spectacle. - Debord has two books on the society of the spectacle. The first is from the late 1960s, and the second, from the late 1980s, is about the distributed spectacle. There he explained that the society of the spectacle has changed: instead of a monolithic spectacle, there is now a spectacle in which outsourcing of pieces of information, pieces of brainwashing, pieces of dehumanization and alienation occurs. And here we have a new edition – a distributed spectacle. Not just a spectacle that carries the same consensus in different directions, but now we have several consensuses. This is neither better nor worse. But it's completely different. These populist uprisings, which we are now most likely to witness in England – and have witnessed in America… Guy Debord. Photo: Wikimedia. I have a favorite English magazine called Spiked Online; it used to be called Living Marxism, they lost a huge scandalous lawsuit. Now they are not Marxists at all, they are quite right-wing, but the main idea is that they remain Marxists in their souls, they just try to hide it. And their main point is that the current populist revolution will save both the world and Europe: the only positive thing against all the horror is that people are finally taking power into their own hands and trying to change things with this populism. They have "Brexit" written on their banner. They believe that Brexit was a wonderful moment when the English nation finally gained subjectivity. A rather strange idea, I haven't lived in England for a long time, I don't want to comment, but such a point of view at least shows that the spectacle has changed. - AI companies have scraped the entire internet and trained their machines on our texts. This was the full embodiment of anti-copyright – and at the same time absolutely inhuman. It turned out that the internet was needed at all to train robots. We fought for the freedom of the internet, for all information to be publicly available – but it turned out that no one reads it. But the robots read everything and gained the ability to do something. - But isn't that good? - Why? - Firstly, because everything that goes into the future is good. This is a general principle: we have a natural reflex of neophobia, and to suppress it, we just need to start from the premise that everything in the future is good. When we look at something new, it always scares us; this is a reflex that we must curb within ourselves. And it cannot be said that artificial intelligence is exclusively private: yes, there are a lot of private models, a lot of people make money from it, but if desired, the same can be installed locally – if there is enough powerful hardware; or there are a lot of uncensored servers that you can pay a little to use. Rather, the sad thing is something else. The masses – not creators, but rather salespeople – have always had a dream: to be able to receive music, for example, instead of composing it. Now we have Suno: you place an order, you get some kind of impersonal, disgusting piece of music – and this piece goes into use. Before, there was, in principle, the format of a library: a person composed music, recorded it, it lay in the library, no one listened to it, but when a radio station needed to buy music, it bought it there. "This format has been completely destroyed by artificial intelligence. There's nothing particularly bad about it. But the fact that we are now under immense pressure from very bad music made this way – that's sad. With pictures, by the way, it's different for me: drawing doesn't cause such fierce irritation as composed music. But in principle, it's a new form of life, a new form of creativity – inhuman. But who is stopping us? We love texts written by someone else, not by us. We will also love texts written by something. - I feel like a skeptic because I agree with you and consider it inevitable: why protest when everything has already happened? But one activist recently wrote a text for Navalny's 50th birthday, which Navalny didn't live to see – and generated it with a neural network. At the end, there was a note like "Do you want me to make this text more personal and emotional?" He didn't even notice it and posted it. And for some reason, it's irritating. - He's a wonderful idiot. But again, how we all suffer from this: articles come to the journal, and it's clear everywhere that they are written artificially, that they are complete nonsense in places – and you have to sort it out, find the errors. Borges' idea of the Library of Babel, which contains all texts, was wonderful. This is exactly the same as a library that contains no texts. - But it seems like the only answer to the situation is to simply exclude the human reviewer from accepting articles. One neural network will check others. - And why should we do that? - Well, for no reason. But that's where it's all heading. How will you fight? - Why is this necessary? It's simply not necessary. It's even good. Some things must die. A typical example is students. - Students must die? - Not students. There are students who don't need to die. But the very format of American liberal arts education, where every student writes an essay three times a week – that has died. Because now all these essays are written immediately by artificial intelligence. And the student doesn't even read them. Well, they probably read them, so as not to have obstacles, and ask to "make it more personal." Because using artificial intelligence for such tasks is punished. But they haven't learned to write for a long time. Unfortunately, this is gradually happening to non-humanities students too, because artificial intelligence is already solving student-level problems much better than a student. But this shows that the standard format of education must die. - Okay, all this will die – what will remain? - We have a wonderful format for teaching mathematics that will live on – it's called the "Konstantinov system." Nikolai Nikolaevich Konstantinov was the founder of the system of math schools in Moscow – a terribly dissident uncle, by the way, I can hardly think of anyone who hates the Soviet government more. Each student is initially given sheets: some definitions, short texts – and a problem, a problem, a problem. Within a week, he must solve this sheet as much as possible and explain each problem orally to an examiner, of whom there are approximately one for every five students. That is, for a class of 40 people – about 8–10 examiners. By the end of the week, he gets plus points for solved problems. Copying from each other is allowed, but you must be able to explain it orally. And the methodological guides state that this is good: if you copied from someone, it means you communicated, learned to communicate, improved team cohesion, and taught each other something; if you found it in a book, that's also good, because a person finally learns to use literature, go to the library, to bookstores. I don't see how artificial intelligence can interfere with this. Nikolai Nikolaevich Konstantinov. Photo: Wikimedia. - But the question is: why learn to solve problems and explain them orally if there is a supercalculator that will solve them for you, more accurately and economically? The problem is not whether an education format based on dialogue will survive. The problem is that the functions themselves that dialogue is dedicated to become unnecessary. - Then artificial intelligence cancels not education, but intellectual activity in general. I'm saying: it doesn't cancel education in a reasonable format – it cancels those formats of education that we ourselves hate. Because when a person submits a written solution to a problem, and I have to read it – how can that be? But when there's a live situation, I can say: this is not very good here, this could be rewritten; I find it interesting, and it's useful for the student, they'll learn something. And simply "he submitted it to me, I gave him a plus" – my God, who needs that? What will happen to humanitarian thought, I have absolutely no idea. With mathematics – it's very simple. The fact is that artificial intelligence is still clumsy, it lacks aesthetics. "When it develops aesthetics and grace – then it will truly replace mathematics, and nothing else will be needed. But for now, that's a long way off: it lacks taste, it lacks clarity – it distinguishes "yes-yes" from "no" very poorly, it always lives in a certain spectrum. That is, an artificial theorist is more analogical in thought than a person. And if we consider that mathematics is some problems that need to be solved, then we will probably eliminate such mathematics to a greater extent. And if mathematics is a way of thinking about the world, seeing beautiful structures, and talking about them clearly, then artificial intelligence is still a long way from that. Although who knows: maybe in five years we will really have to eliminate mathematics. But I doubt it. I will be glad rather: and thank God – we will read their works and grow beyond ourselves. - When I visited your page, I caught myself thinking: the blog platform in its current form is super-nostalgic – also because most of the content there is from before 2022, and therefore before neural networks. If a post has a date, say, 2015, you are sure it's not a neural sludge. And you think: this is handmade, people made typos, they had some creativity, they weren't "groomed" later. And now many write like this: they write something, and then ask the computer to check – not only spelling. It's very unifying. - Yes. Even in scientific publications, I try to re-read it thirty times with my own eyes and don't use artificial intelligence – just so as not to relax. - I gave a lecture for students of MIPT, where I was invited before I became an enemy of the people, in 2021. I was just saying: guys, I'm a little worried watching this, because, possibly, human culture as we know it is ending. There are several problems with the idea that we will read the works of artificial intelligence in mathematics and grow beyond ourselves. Firstly, they can write such a quantity of works that no one will read, even with high specialization. Secondly, it seems to me, they can invent mathematics that is poorly accessible to people. Can you imagine mathematics that exceeds the cognitive abilities of mathematicians? - Very easily. There is, for example, the four-color problem: given a map with countries drawn on it, you need to color them with four colors so that adjacent ones have different colors. It's a very old problem. It's solved only with the help of computer calculations, and it was solved almost in the 1980s with the help of a computer. And this solution is so long and ugly that it is beyond human reasoning. Perhaps a more beautiful solution exists, and if someone gets it, they will receive much more honor than the one who invented the computer solution. Because mathematics that is cognitively inaccessible is, in general, useless to anyone. This is not good, it's bad. Undoubtedly, 99% of what will be produced will be neural sludge, incomprehensible to anyone. And what's the point of that? I hope it will be understandable, because then we will have a very cool colleague who can teach us something. This is more of a positive scenario. And if they write incomprehensible problems with incomprehensible solutions – let them read them themselves, what's it to us? - We have a mathematician who is currently popular in the Russian-language internet, Savvateev – he is for the Tsar, for Orthodoxy, for the war, for the fact that mathematicians are the smartest, and everyone should be like him when they grow up; also for the Soviet education system and for creationism. What is this phenomenon? And isn't it time for you to stand up against Savvateev – to become an anti-Savvateev? So that it is clear that not all mathematicians publicly speaking on non-mathematical topics are fascists. - I don't really want to speak ill of Savvateev – I've known him since he was in the seventh or eighth grade, we studied at the same school. Savvateev was never particularly sharp. Alexey Savvateev. Photo: Wikimedia. - You said you wouldn't speak ill! - I don't know how to say it correctly. Well, as in the cartoon: "distinguished by wit and intelligence." Lesha is not a "Talking Bird." He started at the New Economic School, was, in essence, an economist, and all his scientific activity is related to economics – and not that there was much of it. He defended his doctorate in mathematics in Irkutsk; a lot of people cursed about it, including even his school teacher Sasha Shen (Shen was also my teacher, I revere him immensely, and everyone, it seems, reveres him). He has no particular relation to mathematics as a profession – rather to economics. And he seems to have just gotten hooked on Orthodoxy. It's all Dushenov. Dushenov, besides being an Orthodox activist and writing in the newspaper "Zavtra," also led some kind of club at the Palace of Pioneers, and Lesha somehow fell into mental dependence on him. This Dushenov died a long time ago. And Lesha continues this line of some dreary Orthodoxy. At the same time, he is, of course, very energetic, personally very likable – and thanks to this, he is popular on YouTube. I'm not sure I'm ready to share this niche with him. I don't want to – who needs it? Dushenov in the newspaper "Zavtra," by the way, is one of the stupidest authors. He spouted some kind of Orthodox-monarchist nonsense. - It's even intriguing – who was the smartest author in "Zavtra"? - Very easy – it was Borodai. Seriously. - I know who Borodai is – from the philosophy department. - I don't know him personally, although we have mutual friends. Also Prokhanov's son, Fefelov stands out among them. - We started with me asking what you did in the pre-trial detention center, and you said you suffered without a book. What makes you happy and what do you read when you have a choice? - I read a lot of historical memoirs about the beginning of the century. In poetry – again, mostly the beginning of the 20th century. And in fiction, I read Chinese prose and web novels. This is a strictly new youth genre: authors write a chapter a week and get some money or praise for it. It originated, apparently, on the internet – I assume in Japan or China. There are, of course, also in America and Russia: in Russia, it's the "Avtor.Today" website. A stunning new cultural phenomenon, actually. And in China, it's some kind of long prose of a semi-religious nature about how a person opens their meridians through meditation and "cultivation." Cultivation is a form of meditation: first, he opens his core, this core creates another core, cores spread throughout the body, and he becomes an immortal sage. And all this is multiplied by training in a magical sect, in a magic school, duels – practically Harry Potter. I'm not sure if everyone finds this interesting. I'm only sure that I find it interesting.