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This article about cyber warfare in connection with the recent Russia-Georgia stand-off caught my attention today:

Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple D.D.O.S. attacks. The researchers said the command-and-control server that directed the attack, which was based in the United States, had come online several weeks before it began the assault.

So, the conflict has de-escalated, but the problematic issues are far from solved. There is no solution for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, even though I guess Russia will seek to have the two break-away parts of Georgia integrate closer to Russia.

This article from today, which is highly critical of Georgian actions in this conflict, is quite interesting.

There is a strange symmetry to the situation. Ossetia and Abkhazia, outnumbered 30 to 1 by Georgia, turned to Russia for help. That caused Georgia, outnumbered 30 to 1 by Russia, to turn to the United States for assistance. But there the symmetry ends. The US is 5,000 miles distant, while Russia is adjacent. Georgia is not of vital national interest for Washington, whereas Russia has already fought two wars (with Chechnya) to defend its frontier in the Caucasus.

Meanwhile, Ian, the British ex-pat working in a Georgian NGO, has decided that he is leaving the country. It is truly sad if international NGOs pull out of this country.

All along, I saw this conflict as a way for Russia to give a signal regarding NATO, and this OpenDemocracy article seems to support that claim

[…] what Russia is really doing is a preventive strike against Nato, which happens to take place on Georgian territory. Moscow wants to teach Georgia a lesson for Tbilisi’s open and defiant wish to become part of the west; it wants to send a message to the United States and Europe that it will not tolerate further encroachment on its zone of influence; and it wants to make clear to other countries in its neighbourhood (Ukraine first of all) that they are in Russia’s backyard and should behave accordingly.

Sunday morning. First thing I do is to check BBC and other news sites for update about Georgia. I read that Georgia pulls its troops out of South Ossetia. About bloody time. But I wonder what Russia will do now. The way I read Russian politics, they have long been waiting for an excuse to punish Georgia, the breakaway region (Georgia was the first region to declare independence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991, days before the Baltic States) that has NATO aspirations.

I must admit that I do not have much love for Saakashvili. I have noticed his fear of Russia in tense rhetorics which comes close to paranoia. Of course, we all know that Russia is aspiring to be seen as a great power again and wants to extend its sphere of influence, but it is very unclear to me what their plan has been with Georgia. Do the Russians want to make Georgia the theatre of conflict for the extension of NATO? As you may know, Georgia and its pro-USA leadership wants to join NATO as well as - with time - the European Union. It is my impression that Georgia is one of those countries that Russia Really does not want to see as a NATO member.

It is the smoke and mirrors of propaganda that gets to me. I don’t trust Russian news outlets much, but I don’t trust Georgian news much either. And, like the Solzhenitsyn episode some days ago, the internet is abuzz with groups, messages and mud-throwing this way or that.

Here is a quote of a message posted to the BBC News discussion page:

I think the blame for this conflict lies with the Georgian leader and his American Supporters. They have been trying to provoke Russia, which has shown a lot of restraint untill now. I do not agree with Putin on many issues the same I do not agree with Bush on many others. However, this time Russia was provoked by a childish Georgian leader. Stop crying like a baby and defend your self now! you started it! I hate idiots.

I read another message

Seems to me we are hitting Russia too hard. Georgia made the first moves of agression against Ossetians it appears. IF that is the case, Russia has the right and obligation to defend its citizens. Also if it is true Georgia used heavy artillery etc against Ossetians seems to me they are justified in using any and all means against Georgia. If someone attacks me with a knife and all I have is a gun…would I let him kill me simply because my weapon is more powerful? Should russia fight fair?

And yet another

Well Western Europe…you’ve been pining for a counterbalance to American power for a few years now. A more “multi-polar” world order. And here it is, so enjoy it. The U.S. will NEVER again summon the will to sacrifice our sons to defend you. Two times was enough, particularly considering your ingratitude to our grandfathers and your reflexive anti-Americanism. You’d better pray they confine themselves to Georgia and squeezing off your gas, because they could roll over all of you if they wanted.

Meanwhile, I read Ian’s excellent blog and I hope that the latest developments de-escalate the conflict, and that the Russians do not see this an excuse to do more in the region.

From a Financial Times article about the South Ossetia / Georgia escalation

“Georgia warned on Friday that Moscow and Tbilisi would be in ”a state of war” if reports of Russian tanks, military trucks and troops entering South Ossetia proved true.

”If it’s true that Russian troops and armaments have been sent to Georgia, it means that we are in a state of war with Russia,” Alexander Lomaia, secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, told AFP.”

What does Georgia, really, gain by stating that they are at war with Russia? Do they expect the world to come to their rescue? NATO?

There are so many layers to this conflict. Even after months of interest in the region I don’t fully understand it. Particularly I do not understand Why Russia wants to extend its sphere of influence to include South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Some months ago Russia offered Russian citizenship/passport to a large % of the Abkhazian population. Why? So that when something “goes wrong”, Russia can call in the troops, saying they are going to “Protect Russian citizens?” By “going wrong” I mean for instance some men in Georgian military uniforms starting attacking a village, or doing other acts of violence.

I will now look for some English-languaged blogs that focus on this conflict.

Yesterday, I received this sms from a Georgian friend:

The Russians started bombing the city Gori and Kareli. I am ready to go to war. WE ceased fire against separatists and Russians bombed again. This our destiny! Please spread this info, Thank you!

“This is our destiny”. Words like that scare me deeply. It reminds me of all kinds of conversations, like for instance talks with Serbian friends a few years ago about Kosovo. These were moderate Serbs, well-educated, who themselves were fighting against the right-wing forces in their country. But some of their words concerning the Kosovo Albanians really made me worried.

Yesterday, once I got online after a mostly offline day, I did some of the usual news searching about the South Ossetia conflict. I felt very sad. Sad for the country of my Georgian friends. Sad because rhetorics grow so thick in any way. Sad because I know that even though a lot of this is just a play for the gallery (Russia wants to Really make sure Georgia does not join NATO, Georgian leadership sometimes seems to have a cold-war approach to Russia), people are dying.

I don’t think that Russia will go into an all-out war on Georgia, like they did with Chechnya. But they will rattle their swords, throw somb bombs here and there, kill some innocents. Georgia will on its side defend itself against the behemoth of a northern Neighbour. The battles will mostly take place in South Ossetia or Abkhazia. The people living there are the pawns in this macro-political game of strategy.

The last day of my stay in Georgia in May/June, my friend Tornike took me to his university where he met up with a few friends of his and they sang traditional Georgian songs for me. Here is one of them:

Georgian folklore from dltq on Vimeo.

I listen to this song, and I think about all my Georgian friends, and I feel like shit.

Two days ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. Having read his Gulag Archipelago recently, my immediate reaction was sadness for the loss of a champion. A dissident in the Soviet as well as The West, he always strived for a more enlightened debate.

Today, I read an excellent article in OpenDemocracy called Russia: Ideology becomes a mash-up, which covers how the Russian blogosphere reacted to Solzhenitsyn’s death.

I recommend anyone interested in the development of new media to read it. A few quotes:

The internet may have given us the infinite world of hyperlinks but only at the cost of well-documented footnotes, which regularly fall through the infinite cracks of online conversations. Yet history without footnotes is a mere black-and-white parody of itself; it’s a history without subtlety, great for propaganda but useless for serious inquiry.

In the blogosphere, arguments never end, they only acquire new hyperlinks. To win in most battles that take place in the Russian cyberspace, one simply needs to have access to a bottomless reservoir of statistics and a mastery of italicised fonts: how many people really died in Ukraine’s Holodomor, how many wars the US really started, how many Albanians really disappeared in Kosovo, how much money the Yeltsin government really wasted. Maps, budgets, photos, scanned pages of the original manuscripts - it’s all out there at your disposal, to help you cook the greatest historical soup of all times: your customized version of world history, downloadable directly to your shiny iPod.

A great article by Evgeny Morozov which also wrote this good write-up of the Citizen Media Summit in Budapest June 2008

First: I am working on getting rid of my internet addiction.

Since 1995, when I first got online at a public library in Roskilde, I have been hooked. Not just to the internet, but to computing in general. Games. Social interaction. I started blogging in 1999, on livejournal, stopped, started again elsewhere, stopped, and in 2004 started again, on this DLTQ platform. 2004 was also the year I discovered videoblogging. Since then I have made hundreds of blog entries and published hundreds of videos. I helped organize VlogEurope 2005 in Amsterdam and 2007 in Heidelberg, and will also co-organize VE 2008 in Budapest (October 18th-19th).

I have read thousands of blog entries. I have often reminded me about the dltq core - Don’t Lose The Question. To not forget the basics because the stream of information keeps on moving. But the zeitgeist draws me in, the mood of the moment. Micro-second.

Yes, with twitter and similar micro-blogging services we have entered a phase with even shorter attention span. It’s like we are all on crack, the internet crack, and we cannot stop and pause very often.

Sometimes we do, and sometimes we write great blog entries as a result of it. But far too often, it just continues, faster and faster, ever more blog entries to scan, let the eye be trained to quickly disseminate the core of an entry in half a second. Interesting? Not?

As John said in his Information Dystopia promo “I didn’t go anywhere, I just stopped making videos”.

Do we become invisible if we stop posting new stuff? If we stop twittering, facebooking, friendfeeding, deliciousing, blogging, vlogging, commenting, linking, trackbacking, and jerking off to internet personas? Does that tree in the forest exist if nobody is there to observe?

The internet culture is very narcissistic, it breeds that narcissistic core in us, breeds it, breeds it, forces it forth. You can’t even link to something important without the focus on it being Who linked to it. You start a twitter meme, discussion, and before long it turns out that all it does is feed your own twitter-status. More links to your blog where you give more information. Subscribers. The attention hierarchy.

In 2005 when I started working for a blogging consultancy in Norway as a customer relations guy and “the blogging expert” to hold workshops for corporate/organizational clients, I kept asking myself these questions. How much does this organization Really want to break through the membrane between them and the public? What do they want to do with their blogging?

The questions grew, my doubt in my ability to show these people the potential of the medium grew, and I kept running around in circles. It stopped me, halted me, and I started to mumble. There was something about all of this that made me uneasy. Despite the potential. Despite the amazing potential this has for solving so many of our communication challenges.

Sometimes I meet a new person, and we go through the usual “So, what do you do?” and I tell them about what I do, my expertise, and what we in Visibility will do. I remember the last time I talked about this to a girl, mid 20s, studying sociology, and when I talked about this, her eyes lit up, and she said, “That’s so interesting“, and I was like “um, yeah, but”.

Why the but?

Is it the fear that we have been given a tool, like the fire, and all we use it for is to burn down the forest?

Is new media just going to turn into the old way of doing things, with a few twists? The attention hierarchy, the simplistic measures of success, the eternal quest for the Next question, the Next conversation topic, without really building on the previous ones, building on them, processing what we learned.

I don’t mean to be all sceptical, but the question has been with me: Why blog? Last year, after I was assaulted and suffered the head concussion, I had frequent sick-days (had severe nausea about once a week, making me unable to work for 1-2 days). The autumn I tried once again to be involved, and I started writing on Radikale.net which is the online forum for my political party. When October came, and the parliamentary elections were announced, I got involved with that, the videoblogging in politics, and we were a few people who made videos in our party that election, like in 2005 in Norway. The election results were not uplifting - our party lost some seats in parliament, and what we tried to do with our videos - talking with regular citizens about political issues - were not proving very successful. I still suffered from the nausea at times. I had quit my work in the academic bookstore because of the election work, and later that late autumn I decided to move towards new media again, and together with Mikkel Sarbo I eventually established Visibility (website coming soon).

This winter the situation back home got worse and my mother became entangled in a court case fighting over custody for her youngest son, my 14-year old brother. I did not do much to support her, not much I Could do from here, but it was all eating me up inside. A million little ants.

In May I got the opportunity to go to Georgia as an election observer and to do some video shooting. After I got back on June 4th I went into paralysis again, and it has kept me still for the last months.

Would you Blog about these issues? Or rather talk about it with a few friends you know well? My mother lost her court case, by the way, and she is now going through appeals process. My brother (a video of him from a few years ago here) is still living in this home for youths, where all the other inhabitants there are very mentally handicapped, scaring him. This all leads back to the 80s, a very different story, and our 1996 win of our case against the Norwegian government. Things that I do not blog about, partly because I don’t define myself in terms of those aspects of my background, and I rather prefer that others do not do so either.

Those who know me well, like A-K, K or P or even J, know of my relationship with my past, with organizations, and my own attempt to get rid of these eternal questions that riddle me. To me, videoblogging cannot ever be reduced to yet another distribution channel for the same attitude like earlier. There are companies and organizations that get that, and others that do not. I consider my job within Visibility to find ways to help them get it. That the blog is not just about You, it is neither a way to re-cycle articles written and published in national newspapers.

With one of our clients now the contact person really wants to understand and use the media to its fullest. The next weeks I will be busy working on that case, making sure that their corporate blog does its best. Next week I will also become more actively involved with Canal Africa, including my own show on there. With my background in internet video, broadcast tv is a new area. I will do my best to blend the two approaches.

To blog or not to blog. That is not the question. But it is often difficult for me to talk about whatever are the shiny new objects or interesting projects from around the world when my home area is troubled. It’s how I work, while I know others have no problem either blogging about externals (linkage) or internals (subjective storytelling) in their own crisis moments.

August is here, and it will be an exciting autumn. If all goes well, I will be going to Azerbaijan in October to cover their presidential election, there is VlogEurope 2008 in Budapest, and there are also the Visibility clients and Canal Africa station.

Sorry about this long, rambling post, but I think it is important for me to see this blog for what it is: A personal blog.

Hope you all have a fantastic sunday!