Uncategorized

Russia’s New Encyclopedia Helps Fight Online Noise And Disinformation

69 Comments

We are living in an age in which everything electronic is praised as newer, better, and more advanced.  The internet, we are constantly told, is the new oracle, is able to dispense absolute truth at the push of a few keyboard keys.  This attitude has seeped into the arena of book publishing, where many observers have given electronic books unqualified praise as “better” and more “convenient” than print books.

This was why it was something of a relief to read about Russia’s decision to issue the latest version of the Great Russian Encycopedia (GRE) in hard copy.  The entire thirty-six volume set will be available within the coming weeks.  The GRE is the successor to the venerable Great Soviet Encyclopedia that existed before 1990.  If you ask why this event is important, you should consider the reasons behind it.

The old Soviet Encyclopedia

Sergei Kravets, the editor of the GRE, has pointed to one of the disturbing truths of our times:  that we live in a “post-truth” (as he calls it) era in which factual information can be easily manipulated.  He might also have added another disturbing fact:  information itself in the electronic age is more perishable than ever.  Computer technicians tell us that we can barely even read emails written twenty-five years ago.  How will our descendants, three hundred or four hundred years from now, ever know about our history, if everything has evaporated into an electronic nothingness?

Kravets made this point:

Russia needed a new encyclopedia that reflects modern society and consciousness, so this one is not a continuation of its Soviet predecessor.  When we began, we lived in the epoch where ‘truth’ was valued. Now we seem to be going through a time of ‘post-truth,’ where all sorts of marketing, PR, and other kinds of dark information are circulating. We regard our encyclopedia as the territory of truth and objective assessment. It’s where people can go to check their information, and balance their views.

In an age of shifting and transitory reality, we need physical documents to touch and hold on to more than ever.  Physical books have saved civilization in the past, and they will do so again in the future.  Some of the most precious literary treasures of antiquity survived the Middle Ages on only a handful of manuscripts; for some authors (e.g., Tacitus) there was literally only one codex.

Before the age of the printed book, the vellum manuscript book was king, but such books were extremely costly and time-consuming to produce.  Yet they did have one advantage:  they literally could last many hundreds of years.  I have seen vellum manuscripts from the thirteenth century that look like they will last, with proper care, for many more hundreds of years.  Can we say the same thing about our electronic era?  How many websites will even be around in ten, twenty, or fifty years?

A medieval Book of Hours from 1260. It will last many more hundreds of years.

When the age of the first encyclopedias dawned during the French Enlightenment, the philosophes (especially Diderot) imagined that such books would serve as both anchor and bulwark.  They would provide an anchor for knowledge to prevent its deliberate corruption by the enemies of truth; and they would serve as a bulwark against ignorance and superstition.  Modern encyclopedias in the West have lost sight—if they ever cared in the first place—of this mission.  Encyclopedia Britannica stopped publishing a printed version of its books in 2010.  Everywhere we go, we hear companies being praised for abandoning print.  But the perishability of electronic information remains troubling.  Without some sort of physical existence, knowledge has no permanence, no independent “reality.”

Perhaps the future is not online, despite what everyone says.  Perhaps our descendants will become weary with the endless “choices” and “options” offered by the internet and instead opt for the simpler, more comforting choice of opening up a book.  Printed books have a proven track record of many hundreds of years.  Electronic books have no track record at all.  Time will tell which form will outlast the other.  Remember that the people living through the so-called “Dark Ages” also had no idea that they were mired in ignorance.  It is true that the internet has helped disseminate knowledge, but it has also helped disseminate an extraordinary amount of mindless bilge.

Does this look secure, permanent, and reliable?

But if you were raised in an era before the internet, you will understand the value that a heavy, rich, printed encyclopedia has.  As a boy I remember my father bought a used set of the Encyclopedia Americana at the annual Quaker book fair in our town for only about twenty dollars.  It got a huge amount of use and, looking back, helped generate an interest in the wider world.  The old Soviet Encyclopedia was published in sumptuous leather volumes, and can still be found here and there in Russia today.

But even the GRE’s future is online.  Kravets makes it clear that “this will be the very last paper encyclopedia we ever produce.  The future is online.”  He is surely right, at least for the foreseeable future.  But the GRE still has a role to play:  it will serve as the launching point for a  Russia version of Wikipedia.  If this can help reduce the amount of marketing, propaganda, and “dark information” online, then it will be a welcome addition to the arena of knowledge.

Read More: The Criterion Of Certitude

69 thoughts on “Russia’s New Encyclopedia Helps Fight Online Noise And Disinformation”

  1. Globalists want to brainwash all of us, might be time to move to Russia and burn your American passports better to die there then here. No more of this fucking bull shit i just want to get the fuck out of here jesus fucking christ man.

    1. While you may wish to leave the USA, I would suggest Russia is not the place to move. When times get hard, cold countries become difficult places to live.
      Plenty of 3rd world countries with great infrastructure, but where you can find a wife who can still hunt and gather, and her own rice farm or patch of jungle.

  2. There is twice as much good information as in the past, unfortunately, it is diluted by 10 times as much disinformation.

        1. I don’t really. But funny you mentioned it because I’ve trying to remember the name of that website for about a week. Glad you jogged my memory

  5. Great article. We all know about geocities, social media censorship, hacking, Word 95 or earlier documents, loss of magnetic capabilities in hard drives, running out of cycles in SSD memories as well as many other technologies or projects that are no longer continued. If the elites want to take my encyclopedias, they’ll have get out of their houses, come to mine, and physically get rid of me. That’s their only solution.

    1. Always keep your data on several platforms.
      My extensive book collections are on CD, DVD, Thumb drive, NAS.
      Just about to copy them onto Blu-Ray.
      Come the Zombie Apocalypse, I probably won’t care all that much about reading. But I’m sure there will be a battery or two around somewhere.

  7. I had no idea Encyclopedia Brittanica was only available on the internet. How about brittanica etc stays online only but you can only access it by buying it from door to door salesmen?
    Actually this a very serious issue. Electronic memory is indeed incredibly easy to erase. What happens when the Waybackmachine goes down, or the web goes down for any number of reasons?
    We all know the above, but the recent end to IMdB forums really brought this home to me. So many people, including myself contributing hundreds of hours of their time to expressing their opnions – all of which was social commentary of some sort. Sure it may not be literature or expert opinion but I’d like to think at least some of it was important. And then with a couple of weeks notice: all gone, including all the criticism, and dissent levelled at Hollywood subversion and social engineering. All gone in an instant relatively speaking.
    The other thing of course is that wikipedia etc can be edited by partisans who can effectively hijiack a page to ensure it expresses their viewpoints and not those of others – there are online left-wing guerilla groups of editors dedicated to just that , and the you can be damn sure they they care very little about maintaining balance or accuracy

  8. I’m all for physical books, but my current preference is for electronic. For me, they hold several advantages. One is storage. My physical bookshelves are full. I only buy a physical book anymore if it’s a rare book, or I really want it, and there are no electronic options.
    Another is convenience. I can take my phone or iPad anywhere, and read what I want, and nobody has to know what book I’m reading. I also never have to worry about forgetting to bring a book.
    Also, barriers to entry. Without electronic books, chances are yourself and Roosh may never have been published and gotten your information out.
    But you’re right; permanence is a factor. I get frustrated with formats. Some books are only available in ePub, others mobi. They are not cross-compatible. And will either format be viable in 5-10 years? Those are legitimate concerns.

  9. I got a set of encyclopedias when I was about 10. Whenever I got curious about something I picked the appropriate volume and looked it up. Sometimes when I was bored I would pick one up to read just for the hell of it, imagine that.
    The net though, is really amazing, whenever I need to figure out how to do something, somebody else has already figured it out for me and put it online. If I want to know about ANYTHING it’s at my fingertips, it’s kind of mind blowing when I think about it.

    1. “Whenever I got curious about something I picked the appropriate volume and looked it up. Sometimes when I was bored I would pick one up to read just for the hell of it, imagine that.”
      Yes!
      The world-wide-web is like an endless set of encyclopedias; isn’t it? The drawback is there’s so much BS on the web that we do a lot of digging to get to the bottom sometimes.
      A good encyclopedia gets us right to the point.

      1. The web is probably why I’m skeptical of most everything these days, but having all that information is still great.

  10. You have to wonder what the world would look like in a “Russian Century,” where people outside of Russia who wanted to get ahead in life in a global economy had to study the Russian language, we bought goods made by Russian companies, we saw Russian films in theaters, we read translations of Russian books (other than the classics we have now), many of us converted to Orthodox Christianity, we ate Russian-like foods served by restaurant chains, etc.

    2. Wold it be any different to the way we rely on the Chinese for everything at the moment. I think not.

      1. It wouldnt, Chinese started their way up when USSR was going downhill, trust me, there was nothing high tech in USSR when it fell apart aside from some rocket/space industry prodcuts, the rest was low quality, crude, piss poor quality garbage that nobody in the west wanted to buy.

  11. I think we are currently living in the dark ages. Equality between the races, genders, religions, and sexual preferences??? Open borders, multiculturalism and miscegenation??? As millennial woes says, we are living in a mad house.

    1. Couldn’t say it better. In a hundred years they’ll look at us like fire-worshippers.

        1. Google is paying 97$ per hour! Work for few hours & have longer with friends and family! !dg301c:
          On tuesday I got a great new Land Rover Range Rover from having earned $8752 this last four weeks.. Its the most-financialy rewarding I’ve had.. It sounds unbelievable but you wont forgive yourself if you don’t check it
          !dg301c:
          ➽➽
          ➽➽;➽➽ http://GoogleFinancialCashJobs591ShopPerfectGetPaid$97/Hour… ★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫::::::!dg301c:….,….

      4. So women fight fiercely against prosperity for the sake of Socialism! Now I understand why Zeus raped Europa while transformed as a bull!
        Darn those ancient gods and their vices, they at least were full of symbolism.
        For the one’s scratching their heads on why the bull represented prosperity the answer is that the animal, renowned also for it’s strength, used to pull the plough through which land became ready to receive the seed which would grow to the plant that in the end it would be harvested and then sold to be processed into flour so as to be used as food hence bringing prosperity.
        So the bull brings prosperity through hard work! that is what socialism fights against: hard work and it wants prosperity without work. Which, for grown men not kids or kids in the mind*, is unsustainable and in the end it is based upon “eating” the wealth of the previous generation.
        *In other news millennials voted to remove the working class memorabilia from monopoly to be replaced with… toys. The rest will follow.

    3. can somebody make a drawing (or a statue) depicting the “fearless” girl just after the bull trampled her ? just to remind the reality to people overestimating what they are.

  14. I’m not swallowing any of this article.
    It first seems to suggest that just because something is in print, it is not being manipulated and therefore it is trustworthy. I know this to be untrue on its face. And the specific example we’re asked to consider, the Great Russian Encyclopedia, is itself commissioned by the Russian Government – hardly an organization without an agenda.
    We’re then asked to consider that ‘our times’, the electronic age, is ‘post-truth’ and where facts ‘can be easily manipulated’. I don’t find anything peculiar about being in the electronic age, if we’re comparing apples to apples. Let us not compare the printed encyclopedia of yesteryear to internet message boards or even modern news outlets. If we’re looking to measure the difference of what being in the internet age makes to a printed encyclopedia, it needs to be limited to using the internet to download a photograph of the printed encyclopedia pages. Or a scan of some ancient manuscript. This was even done in the article, with the Book of Hours. It’s right there, in digital format, accessible to many many more people than it otherwise was, and in non-manipulated original text, and it’ll last much longer than ‘many more hundreds of years’. The electronic age has actually made history and real information more available.
    It seems to me the problem isn’t the electronic age itself, but rather the people living in it have lost the ability to discern what constitutes truth.

    1. The problem is not that manipulation is possible, it always was, the problem is the ease of manipulation. Take for example DRM books or online articles and encyclopedias, in our age they can be easily altered and automatically redistributed without a previous warning in order to make them say whatever they want. This is especially true in a politicized subject like History. Even e-books that you have bought might (or will) be susceptible to these “updates” and corrections in the future, something impossible with physical copies…classics online or in DRM books will not (or are not) trustworthy since they will be prone to be edited to comply with the political correctness doctrine of the time…
      And I haven’t even started with all the possible ways in which a massive failure of our electronic devices might take most of us back, not to the Middle Ages but to the Stoneage…especially those in the cities…

      1. But along with the possibility of such editing, right now there also seem exist a fairly robust culture of exposing such edits. If that should fail, academic scholarship will continue to exist. And even in an age of extreme suppression, subversives will continue to exist. Heck, at a minimum, (and I find this has been overwhelmingly true throughout human history) if truth cannot be found, smart men will still be able to realize what is being told to them is compromised in some way.
        I’ll grant the problems with DRM ebooks, et cetera. I’ll refer to my earlier suggestion that such things are not reliable sources, requiring an ability to discern. A better treatment of this in the article would have tempered my criticism somewhat.
        And, well, you don’t have to start with all the possible ways the failure of our devices will hurt. I’m of the opinion the next large scale power failure (à la Northeast blackout in 1965) will kill millions within 24 hours.

        1. But along with the possibility of such editing, right now there also seem exist a fairly robust culture of exposing such edits. If that should fail, academic scholarship will continue to exist.

          I guess only time will tell if that’s going to be enough to stop those post-sale editing or updates. By the way, the fact that among economists and anyone with a functioning brain, the wage gap is a myth, doesn’t mean most of the people either in the U.S. or around the world are aware of that, most people I am afraid believe that BS in one way or another. What I mean is that even if unedited versions of the classics and historic documents survive in the academia, the damage of mass “updates” to make those documents comply with the political zeitgeist would take generations to repair.
          Take for example all the myths about the middle ages that even to this day persist, that were initiated and seeped into the public 300 years ago.

          And, well, you don’t have to start with all the possible ways the failure of our devices will hurt. I’m of the opinion the next large scale power failure (à la Northeast blackout in 1965) will kill millions within 24 hours.

          My fears are along the lines of a Carrington event or the sabotage of a hypothetical centralized knowledge management system on which the people rely completely if we are too stupid to think that every bit of knowledge produced by man should stored in a centralized system (a sort of super cloud) and local copies were forbidden. In this scenario (the centralized knowledge center) those dependent upong such a structure would be left in the cold, insta-Stoneage in other words…

        2. […] would take generations to repair.
          I hear you. You won’t find me putting time limits on recovery.
          […] the wage gap is a myth, doesn’t mean [most people] are aware of that
          I did say smart men. 😉
          And, yeah, server side storage is a terrible idea. Consider Google or Microsoft or Amazon is just a company, and they exist – heck, even the ability of their employees to travel to and from work exists – at the mere pleasure of the government in power at the time. It’s staggering to consider all of the businesses, local governments, individuals, that have wagered everything upon the uninterrupted existence of any single one of these companies.

        3. While true for most Americans, It wouldn’t worry me as my wife knows how to forage for food in the jungle, from when she was a kid, and only ate what she could find.
          Could never understand preppers in the USA with their bug out home full of guns and supplies. Far cheaper to move to a 3rd world country with a lower population pressure and marry a woman that can live off the land.

        4. That is something I have always wondered about preppers.
          They have tied themselves down to one location, surrounded themselves with a supply depot that others will want to take from them.
          They made themselves defensive targets.

        5. It would be hard to have to keep watch 24/7, and never let anyone out of the bunker. Unless you built a place that would contain 4-8 adult fighting males, it would be indefensible from a single sniper.
          Many preppers buy farms/smallholdings, not much use if they can’t go out to feed the animals and plant/harvest the crops.

      2. DRM on books is easy to remove.
        If we were back inthe stone age, I’d worry more about swords, food, water and antibiotics than books.

  15. I’m not sure about the “post-truth” statement; people have always been manipulating information. The internet is great if you know how to read through the bullshit. I always do a quick google search when I’m not sure whether my liberal-leaning history textbook is being objective.

  16. Britannica is the standard for encyclopedias. My parents got a set when I was young, hard copy and the authors I respect for their perfect and pragmatic grammar.
    Ideally for a script that will endure, lambskin is good but ultimately an inorganic substance like gold leaf or a gold alloy sheet etched will never oxidize and would last a million years. Also fine crystal glass etched could last thousands of years. I’m sure somewhere in the cosmos is some civilization where you go into the master library and check out a glass jug and read it.

    1. It is unsettling that the Russians are probably the most reliable for publishing the unedited, unrevised truth in the current world.

  18. “1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
    2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
    3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
    4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
    5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
    6 For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,
    7 EVER LEARNING, AND NEVER ABLE TO COME TO THR KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH.”
    -2 Timothy 3:1-7 (emphasis mine)
    Does this sound like the age we’re living in? I certainly think so.
    The solution?
    “5 Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord.
    6 For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.
    7 Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is.
    8 For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.”
    Seek learning out of the best books, my friends.

  19. Great article Quintus.
    And I do prefer the feel of a book in my hands to reading an e-book.
    As a youth I had World Book Encyclopedia and Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. One of the best feelings in the world (to me back then) was reading the knowledge contained in those sets of encyclopedias.
    All the exposure to the world without leaving the kitchen table. It was great.
    I wish a publisher in America would publish a hard copy set of encyclopedias once again; if only one more time.
    Anyway, great article. And I like your YouTube channel.

    1. I prefer ebooks, but from different reasons:
      1. They occupy no space in my house;
      2. They are weightless and I can carry them wherever I wish;
      3. Saving trees. I always joke at school saying that I am more of an environmentalist with my memory stick than many Green Peace activists.

      1. I have Kindle on my computer. And I have several terrific e-books. But I still prefer the hardcopy. For example, I have Bang! in hardcopy and e-book. And saving trees?
        Yeah! Why not?

      2. i love ebooks too – but they don’t save any trees. in fact, the reduced paper use may actually result in fewer trees. it’s like saying that if you stop eating bread you’ll save some wheat – while less wheat will be grown if it’s not needed.

      3. I don’t care either way, both regular books and e-books are legit in my view. That being said:
        1. I like having several wall covering bookshelves filled with the books I’ve purchased over my lifetime.
        2. Trees grow back, the coal used to power your ebook doesn’t.

        1. Purchased, but have your read or plan to read them or use them only as decorations?
          (In millions of years the coal with be back and its not like books magically assemble themselves, they too consume considerable amount of energy to be produced together with toxic waste from production process.)

      1. Where do you see Russia as being masculine?
        Is it the rate at which the country dies out? Is it the high rates of alcoholism, HIV, drug abuse or child neglect, high levels of prositution? Or perhaps its because of those old pictures of shirtless midget riding a horse or fluying with cranes? Head of the church being your regular pedo?
        Which ones exactly?

      3. Russia is not patriarchal, search for russian porn – it is about how Mothers take their Sons. They are not masculine they are mad and ill. Average livespan for Males is 55.
        They don’t have an work ethic – that’s why their country is completly destroyed. And that’s why they attack other countries.
        Western Idiots like you just are so destroyed that they belive every asshole who is acting like an idiot is “masculine”. It is the same idiotic thinking like girls who think “bad boys” are males.

  21. Google is paying 97$ per hour! Work for few hours & have longer with friends and family! !dg301c:
    On tuesday I got a great new Land Rover Range Rover from having earned $8752 this last four weeks.. Its the most-financialy rewarding I’ve had.. It sounds unbelievable but you wont forgive yourself if you don’t check it
    !dg301c:
    ➽➽
    ➽➽;➽➽ http://GoogleFinancialCashJobs591ShopPerfectGetPaid$97/Hour… ★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫★★★✫::::::!dg301c:….,…..

  22. We are ushering a new, or as many people who have dared to studey medieval history from non-Commie-approved sources, a true Dark age. The 20th century was the age of political reprecushions, concentration camps, gulags and work-to-death countries (How else may one refer to Pol-Pot’s Cambodia?) national cleansing and the advancement of mediocrity, that lead the worlds first countries to bulge and lose all that the previous generations worked hard and spilled their blood for. But it is the age of light!
    The spirit of the modern civilization is vague, empty and full of obsolete sciences, beliefs and culture that no one ever could have imagined. If archaelogists will exist in the future they will say that our time left nothing, which if it gave no indication of it’s thought or theories it would truly be a good thing, as they would be summarized by: god is dead, racism and misogyny. This might be a simplification but still it remains a valid one: the good things of the previous century are too few to cover for all the bad ones.
    So, the middle ages, the times that brought in the end the basis for future European prosperity and success were demonised with the sins of the modern era of irrationality, an era where feelings and spontaneity governs all, thrown with an anathema in the same way that fabrics hide a mirror. Because if the modern man looks at a real good mirror he sees nothing that is of worth.
    *EDIT accidentally posted*
    So the hate of the modern “civilization” that fed itself of the achievements of previous generations for the written paper is no coincidence. It wants to hide it’s own inefficiencies and inner hatred for it’s self. On top of that, lastly, It wants to erase the light of previous generations and so what would it be for it to live any evidence of existence?

  24. “Now we seem to be going through a time of ‘post-truth,’ where all sorts of marketing, PR, and other kinds of dark information are circulating” – thats exactly what the Russia’s run media is all about these days, lies, 4GW, infoops, yet, people like author tend to fall victims to Russia’s fake “the right guy” image.
    That much about the alpha male mentality here, some look more like alpha sheeple to me, when I read this kind of praise of Russia’s BS tactics.
    Its called being useful idiot for Russia’s benefits.

  25. I noticed that Breitbart has started to undermine Putin (while simultaneously jacking Israel off).
    (((They))) never stop with their duplicitous machinations.

Comments are closed.