The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 has triggered amazement—how can a jet with world-class technology vanish from the earth while a tiny device like an iPhone can be located with an app?

Peter Pomerantsev describes a self-inflicted powerlessness of Western governments in the face of supra-national institutions like the European Union, and developments such as globalization. Then, enter Natalia Poklonskaya, the new, Russia-appointed chief prosecutor for Crimea.

Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, formerly in charge of the armed forces of pixelated Novorossiya in eastern Ukraine, and Marat Musin, of the Abkhazian News Network Agency “Anna News,” entertain a monologue-as-question.

asdasd

In her seminal poem, Akhmatova narrates the atrocities and injustices of war and the Stalin era. But she does so with a voice from deep within the situation. The lyrical take on the Don river turns dark, as the poem reveals a gripping secret that affects our relationship to the narrator directly.

What happens when interfaces tell you what to think, and interfaces are about reality.

Benjamin H. Bratton talks about the scale and depth of forensic digital capture of global events in an age of surveillance. Cut from the archives of The Sprawl.

An intercepted phone conversation, considered to be connected to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July, 2014.

A subtle reflection on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

“The Stack is understood as a massively distributed technological infrastructure, in which, on which, and with which we organize our cultures, economies and societies, but also as an abstract model to conceptualize subdivisions of political geography that are not just about horizontal adjacencies, but about vertical layers.”

Two men speak on the phone in an intercepted recording by the Ukrainian secret service, a day after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by a surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

BBC News, February 7, 2014: “An apparently bugged phone conversation in which a senior US diplomat disparages the EU over the Ukraine crisis has been posted online.” The conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, is now a classic, appearing to show how, behind the scenes, US politicians control the Ukrainian government. The authenticity of the recording was never contested.

Tolstoy returns as Maryam Monalisa Gharavi warns of the aesthetization of politics, where art becomes deployed for motives other than itself or freedom.

The territory of the platform—the physical shape of planetary-scale computation.

Enjoykin’s massive 2014 YouTube hit “Nyash Myash” celebrated the Russian annexation of Crimea through a remix of a press conference by its Putin-appointed chief prosecutor, Natalia Poklonskaya. Also known as the “prosecutie,” Poklonskaya became an internet sensation in Asia and a subject of anime drawing.

A confrontation between two ideas about truth. Peter Pomerantsev vs Nikolai Berdyaev.

What is a psychological operation? The Sprawl visits the premises of an abandoned “internet troll farm” in St. Petersburg, Russia. There is nothing left but special effects.

Oh, Novorossiya. Imaginary motherland, spiritual Rorschach.

“The West” and Russia have radically different explanations of the “color revolutions” that took place in various parts of the world since the mid-2000s.

The last scene of The Sprawl.

By design, a planetary-scale digital culture engenders distortions of perception, beginning at the level of the interface.

Nowadays almost every event in the world can, seemingly, be reconstructed through its digital traces. This is not unproblematic.

I live in the megastructure of the cloud, where any truth may be uploaded or downloaded in an instant.

Peter Pomerantsev discusses changes in propaganda: from an alternative political system (in Soviet propaganda) to the undercutting of the provability of truth itself (in contemporary Russian propaganda).