The Generation of Punchers

What Ilf and Petrov can come up with it?

What an amazing time has come! You need no ticket for a movie or a plane, you just need to switch on TV and laugh watching how harsh careless citizens wearing gabardine jackets run with axes and try to wake up the World Wide Web. And they fail. They got used to clean the web with a newspaper or a duster, and they do not understand how to deal with this web and those who weave it, the web is invisible.

It's a political satire. Fine pens can relax, the regime takes the wheel and writes a bitterly satiric tract. It declares Belarus the state with a digital economy, adopts decree No. 8 on block chains and smart contracts, legalizes digital currency and releases it from any taxes – and immediately blocks the website Charter, and in a month or two pins down all sites, and authors of articles and even commentators to register. They are the one to know how to do it. To be more precise, it is not known. But only with the help of the axe. Those who conquered bronze and iron will stop trying to make people register comments on any site. And it is possible in the Stone Age, yes. Go and register your cave painting, otherwise, you will not get an accreditation.

Don't get us wrong, high standing Belarusian Cro-Magnon men pull off Information Minister Karlyukevich's voice, we might not do it, but it is done in order to meet our legislation with the Russian one. Now their haste is clear - Russia is drowning in its harmony. In it's useless fight with Telegram Roskomnadzor has blocked itself, although it has unblocked all kinds of terrorist sites and porn comics. While the Belarusian minister harmonized bynet with porn comics, Russian premier Medvedev welcomed participants in the Internet-forum and admired creators of new technologies. What Ilf and Petrov can come up with it?...

And it's not possible to destroy the Internet with the axe. You have no power, no matter how strong you are. The Internet is the worldwide free zone of freedom and there are no instruments to fight it. Things happening now in Russia and Belarus is just the generation fight. The generation which stands for the new, freedom. And not the age is the determining feature of this struggle, but the attitude towards freedom of speech and the resistance to any attempt to control it.

For example, my eighty years old mother who used VPN and Tor to bypass the blocking of Charter is a modern generation. And guys born in the nineties and graduated from law departments and initiated criminal cases against bloggers are dull old trouts. The impudent 90 year old Aliaksandr Karyzna detained by the bunch of riot policemen on March 25 is our young generation. And these riot policemen with their batons are a fading generation. Nina Bahinskaya is young and beautiful, and all these judges, policemen, bailiffs who confiscated her summer cottage are naphthalene rubbish.

This entire naphthalene layer fails to understand that freedom of speech can't be destroyed. Their arsenal is eyelet punches used to punch pages in criminal cases, stacks of paper they spoil at the speed of wood fretters; binders and calculators which occupy a quarter of tables. Their jackets were tailored in the thirties and they suffered no changes. As well as their methods. They still think in the term of paradigm of VCR "Electronika" and the set of cassettes about it. Are they going to fight the Internet with the help of axe and punch? What a beautiful innocence...

Iryna Khalip, specially for Charter97.org