The digital revolution is knocking on the door. Russia, open it!
Introduction
There is a big difference between the challenges to Peter the Great, the Bolsheviks and the challenge from the time of Emperor Nicholas I or modern Russia.
The first two spoke of a challenge in the extreme conditions of war.
Peter carried out his project under the threat of a serious external threat, Charles XII planned to divide Russia, take away Ukraine and the northern territories.
Sweden was a strong European state that terrified its neighbors. The young "lion" Karl defeated in turn all of Peter's European allies. But the project of modernization and external westernization launched by the tsar not only ensured the victory of Russia, but brought it to the leading states of Europe, and therefore the world.
The Bolsheviks took power when Russia already de facto fell to pieces, the war was lost because of its complete inability to wage it both by the high command and the general: what is the priest, such is the parish.
They not only gathered the country, but created a superpower with real allies and challenges for competitors.
In more favorable conditions, Nicholas I missed the challenges that were not a direct threat.
The king behind the revolution (the European struggle against reaction) did not consider the essence: the industrial revolution.
The economic gap between Russia and the West, not so noticeable at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, became enormous after the leading Western states, England, France and Germany, went the way of the industrial revolution. Russia, at the top of military power when Nicholas I ascended the throne, at the end of his reign was defeated at the local theater of war.
You can’t fix anything in the past, and when you whitewash such a past, you can’t see the present. Therefore, it is important for the splendor and tinsel of the external successes of the kingdom of Nicholas I, as well as his descendants, not to lose the real meaning stories.
Why do we pay so much attention to the events of the nineteenth century?
Because it is from there, and not from the "calling of the Varangians", the Tatar-Mongol yoke, or the beginning of Muscovite Rus that a trail of modern problems stretches, including a key reason for the 1917 revolution.
Not the mythical money of the German General Staff "made" a revolution in the country, but Nicholas I and his children and grandchildren, who missed the industrial revolution, which had to be "passed" in the twentieth century at the cost of huge sacrifices.
As a result of the changes that took place in 1991, Russia, counting only the Russian Federation as it, simultaneously dramatically lost its territory, population and economic values, became a civilization with a “catching up type of development” that constantly fulfills endless challenges, many of which, being internal in form, are external and / or inspired by external content forces.
There is no end to the challenges, and during the period of the beginning of a new economic system or a new digital revolution with the intensification of the global economic crisis, the challenges increase - like changes in digital technologies, right under Robert Metcalf’s Network Effect Act.
It’s getting harder and harder to cope with them, they really seriously distract (to put it mildly) the state apparatus from the current planned order of government, if it (government), of course, exists in the Russian Federation.
A huge, but systemically and structurally weak state control machine can cope with problems if they are small and do not arise as often, but when calls fall constantly and non-stop, and they are seriously larger than just “trees on the track”, a failure is inevitable:
The governors did not doze off,
But did not have time:
Waiting, it happened, from the south, looking, -
An from the east climbs the army.
They will help here, dashing guests
Go from the sea ...
But did not have time:
Waiting, it happened, from the south, looking, -
An from the east climbs the army.
They will help here, dashing guests
Go from the sea ...
Moreover, there can be no question of any challenges from our country / civilization.
Where do we go?
Earlier we saw that Russia as one of the world civilizations developed according to its historical laws. We wrote about this in a number of articles on VO.
Due to an external threat (for the first time, and for the second time, also with the aim of ensuring welfare and a decent life for the majority), two successful modernization projects were implemented.
During which, gradually, painfully and difficultly, a formula was found for the possibility of interaction between Western technologies and the country's civilization code. These projects successfully existed - each about a hundred years. Successfully, because the first ensured the acceleration of the country before the start of the industrial revolution, and the second fed the population of the economically degraded country for thirty years after the fall of the socialist project, right up to the start of the digital revolution.
On the eve of everything else, a pandemic of cognitive dissonance is rampant in the country.
Here are its important parts.
On the one hand, as during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the ruling elite is absolutely pro-Western, blindly copying its style, methods of work, actions and institutions, periodically dressing in national “costumes” in the past and not even bothering it with the present, hiding behind patriotism for the masses who stubbornly believe in a better share.
On the other hand, one can observe the fatalism of the Russian Orthodox consciousness - “belief” in holy and eternal Russia. About the perniciousness of this view of the country's development prospects and the future, S. G. Kara-Murza wrote in his cult book “Manipulation of Consciousness”:
“Nobody believes that Russia can collapse - not such species have ever seen. Yes, so far I have always managed to get out of the pit, but it does not follow from this that such an outcome is guaranteed. ”
With numerous clashes and wars between Russia and other countries, only three events in Russian history were a real threat to civilization as such. Not the defeat and surrender of territories and material values, but the direct threat of losing their identity: it was a period of “turmoil” - the first Russian civil war, the Great Northern War and the Great Patriotic War.
Today, a new challenge is on the agenda - the digital revolution. It does not just lead to technological lag. Details will be considered in the continuation of this article, but here I ask you not to identify this era with the “smartphone”.
Therefore, an optimistic view of the future through an erroneous interpretation of history is, frankly, unjustified and generally unscientific. The history of civilizations says just the opposite: they perish. But still I want to believe in the best ...
So, probably, the Greeks believed that “everything will be fine,” during the eight-year blockade of Constantinople at the end of the fourteenth century, fifty years before the final fall of the Romance (Byzantine) civilization.
There is no ford in the fire
In the framework of the economic crisis that has erupted in the world and in the Russian Federation, the challenge for the new digital revolution still remains the most important for us.
And we still don’t even have an answer to the question: is digital technology a goal or a method?
The meaning of this approach is clear: when there is no ability and desire to do something with your hands, it is better to sink the problem in discussions.
In this regard, a significant and indicative discussion took place between N.I. Kaspersky and A. B. Chubais at the 2018 Digital Forum in St. Petersburg: a dispute that can be described as a dispute between a practitioner and a government official.
Chubais tried to argue on the hype. He drew an attempt to something
"To withdraw within our own borders, cut ourselves off from everything, including Telegram, and proudly continue to rot in these conditions."
Why 1/6 of the planet Earth, closed, should only rot, he did not explain.
Chubais noted:
“That is the challenge to the country, including in the field of the digital economy, that we need to construct not just our own software, but we need to construct our own paradigm of our development in this digital economy, which we can’t get to. And this challenge, perhaps, is almost more important than all that we are talking about here. "
In response to the search for a “soft paradigm”, N. I. Kasperskaya reasonably objected that the absence of Google in China does not make the Chinese less happy:
“... apparently I suffer a fatal tongue-tied, because for some reason no one understood me. I really do not urge at all to follow the Chinese path. ”
And if N. I. Kasperskaya leaned on specifics, then A. B. Chubais, as the overwhelming majority of the country's top officials, never uses clear phraseology in his speech, such as, for example, “we planned and made,” only abstract and turned into the void "necessary, necessary, necessary."
“Then thoughts transferred imperceptibly to other subjects,” as N.V. Gogol wrote on a similar occasion, “and finally God entered where he knows.”
The head of the "development corporation", instead of telling what a breakthrough was achieved by the company he led, praised Ilona Mask and repeated about the "necessary."
And all this in the presence of the head of the Chinese giant in the "figure" - Huawei, developing by leaps and bounds.
Of course, when you hear from the blue screens the constant “need” of senior officials (“you have to figure it out, it's time to do something about it”, “you need to knock down the sosuli in the XNUMXst century, after all, not with crowbars, but with lasers”, etc. p.), you get used to this “necessary”, but ...
Kaspersky, as a system engineer and practitioner, unlike our government officials, did not engage in campaigns, but clearly proposed goals and means. Why do we need it (happiness) and how to go about it in the digital revolution.
I repeat, unlike officials who offer to digitize everything as yet another bureaucratic companionship.
An Abraham who will not lead to anything sensible, except for the wasted money of citizens.
Kaspersky says specifically. Feel the difference:
“Then we choose priority, for example, industry. The Ministry of Communications says “smart industry”, of course. We want to increase labor productivity - this is the task. How will we do? Yeah, we’ll use such and such technologies. ”
She further emphasized the idea of the need to determine the direction of development of industries and to indicate where digital technologies will ensure the development of the real economy:
“... digital technologies” can provide important development for real or basic sectors of the economy, but there is no substitute for them: today this is impossible. ”
Thus, if we compare the previous modernization and the current situation with the digital revolution, then the systemic unpreparedness for challenges is striking. Is it possible to imagine that Tsar Peter I formulated the following postulates: “We need to do something”? .. That the Tsar reformer said that “at the turn of the eighteenth century it’s a shame to live like we live,” “it is necessary that our thought ”or“ scientists ”“ invented ”something,“ we must, in the end, do something ”, we must, we must, we must ...
Peter took an ax and first built a boat, then a ship, then a new city, poured guns and himself walked under the drums at the head of the regiment, he himself rode on a horse in the smoke of battle. The closest people personally knew how to do it. And he studied, studied, studied!
Digital technology cannot be a goal, as building a ship was not an end in itself for Peter! They are a radical means for the vital modernization of the country and the system.
And so that Filofei’s formula that “two Romes fell, the third stands, and the fourth does not happen” does not become only a “historical monument”, one must learn to face the truth. To start.
To be continued ...
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