BarCamp 2010 Almaty

 I am at BarCamp this weekend, flew here straight from Aktau and it feels so good to be surrounded by a huge number of geeks! Here they are, dragging around laptops, wires and charges, video cameras and AV equipment and it's really familiar and refreshing. BarCamp this year is tending toward more commercial, with a lot of new projects presenting their wearz, and lots of glitter from sponsors. There was little actual talk of policy, politics and issues was rare and mainly showed up in intimate little circles around the tables in the break room.

Finally, on the second day the Soros foundation sponsored a panel where they invited a government and a civic representative of the organizations responsible or somehow positioned in charge of controlling and developing kaznet. The politics is boiling underneath and it came out immediately boiling and unordered... There are a lot of opinions and a lot of arguing and the conversation immediately reminded me the kind of non-conversation that shows up whenever things like DRM is discussed in the US... The main thing is - regulating the Internet is very very difficult and basically impossible and it is all about politics and political leanings and ideas. The tempers run high but the majority of the audience is bored... the girl next to me is playing sudoku on her phone.

There is a lot of criticism, but there is little concrete suggestion, there are many fairly myopic statements and the professional commentators point out the issues with the commentary. They talk about the reality of central asia where users are powerless and regulating is a hard question. The most disconcerting thing about this panel is that it is very short (only an hour) and includes five very smart people from all over FSU, but only two are giving presentations and accepting questions from the audience. It was a space to vent and people vented  but as the only time to vent it was not very constructive.

In general, however, barcamp was a lot of fun despite my general allergy to all easy net-based money-making schemes and pronouncements on the account of the brilliant future of the Internet. The energy of IT guys was really infectious and the fact that some people managed to smuggle kyrgyz bloggers across the very much closed border to participate was impressive. There were bloggers and IT developers from Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia, Armenia and of course Kazakhstan. These appear to be the most active countries on the Internet from the FSU space if you don't count the baltic region (who have a wholly different relationship to the FSU in general). What was curious was that there weren't many actual IT developers and many bloggers freely admitted they had very little IT knowledge. There was little overt and official political discussion, but politics was everywhere, in the very presence of the Kyrgyz, in the occasional snippets of personal conversations around various tables, in the very groupings of people (who they sat with and who they talked with). There was little discussion of social impact and even less discussion of the political potential of the Internet, but the subtext was obvious...

Overall, there was an impressive amount of energy and the startups were interesting because many were not only about advertisement money but also developed as real attempts to change the physical environment through new media and to do it both on the level of the government and on the level of the average user, interested in where they live. These people really cared not only about developing great successful resources that might make them money, but in some cases the kinds of resources that actually might change their world.

There were other interesting moments, however. At some point, one of the biggest Kazakh bloggers who had won a bunch of awards for his blog, pointed something really important out to me. The kazakh language bloggers were not mixing with everyone else. They talked to the Kyrgyz a bit and to the Uzbeks but generally they were hanging out by themselves. He pointed out one particular ethnically Kazakh blogger who blogged in both languages (kazakh and russian) but because he was hanging out a lot with the russians, the kazakh tended to shun him and to ignore his posts. 'You just can't win and this is really dangerous', my guide told me and fretted, 'it's just starting and it is already really evident and we just can't afford this kind of splitting, we won't be able to accomplish anything then!' For their part, the Russian language bloggers simply dismissed these worries, although occasionally acknowledging the presence and the influence of the kazakh language bloggers. I heard a lot of straight out racist - 'the kazakh are just lazy and besides they don't have a diaspora, who do they need to talk to' kinds of statements even from people who are deeply aware of the politics and generally tend to be very much of a liberal bend. It was startling and at the same time kind of expected - these ethnic tensions have been in place here (and everywhere else in FSU) for eons, there is no reason for them to change and there is every reason for them to become glaringly obvious as they get reflected on the Internet.

After Barcamp was over, I kept running into various participants all over town. Almaty is a small city and the wireless hotspots are well known it appears.

laws, politics and the everyday

I've been looking for explanations of how people who run Internet resources here in Kazakhstan deal with government control. Today, I got a story complete with details of each move and what happened and how things are managed. I wanted to post it here and suddenly realized that I can not because even if there is that vanishingly small possibility of this post being seen and read and figured out by someone from here that might do damage, I simply can not afford that chance. So I will simply contain my observations to generalized commentary and some stories of some less controversial that I had today. I guess like everyone who has done research in areas like this, at some point you encounter stories that explain a lot about what is going on, but turn out to be ethically untellable, unless in intimate company with a lot of drink, safely out of the way of any public forums. This place is complicated, the Internet IS politics and the people that talk to me end up trusting me if they tell me stories like this. I am lucky because I have what they call here 'a light hand' - that is in the course of hanging out with me people find that things, random events, seem to come out the right way and luck generally comes together. So people tend to trust me, they tell me that I am so American in being so open, but they enjoy it and somehow tell me things with little prodding and with minimal convincing that their stories are safe with me... But they are safe...

Aktau is in many ways unique because they are not one of the two main cities, they are a small town but they are fueled by oil money and a steady number of foreigners hang out here on that account. That means that there is a reason for developing the Internet and making it available and there is a steady base for internet-based businesses or at least one of them to develop and make money. The particular business in question is focused on providing a business directory to the local consumer and they have done well enough to generate a separate business (now owned by someone else) that includes a forum for discussions (because people desperately wanted to talk). The most interesting thing about the business directory is that it includes a system of comments by the users, where the owner spent a lot of time cultivating a culture of cogent, smart commentary, often even deleting comments that were within the rule boundaries but were basically nonsensical. After installing a rating system for comments, he finally got the space to the level the majority of commentary is of very intelligent level that is useful to others. Of course he constantly moderates comments and tells me that he basically does not sleep because a lot of commentary is made at night. He also drives around the town every couple of days because a lot of his business partners and clients require in-person TLC for the extraction of money owed for the services. This is an Internet-business with an intense in-person aspect which is typical of Kazakhstan in general but is probably even more important in areas outside Almaty and Astana.

Generally, in my conversations with average Internet users in Aktau, this particular site shows up among people interested in local events and in the goings on in the country in general. It was telling when the 20-year old I interviewed yesterday brought up the site and the most important, but then expanded on how she self-educated and is interested in the local developments in the country on the account of her chosen profession of international relations. The bunch of 20-year olds that I spoke to today, did not look at anything that did not initially smell and act like a major search engine (yandex.ru or google.kz) or a social network site (moimir.ru). Whereas their a bit older boss immediately brought up not only the local site but also several other very much kazakhstan-related news sites like nomad.su or zonakz.net and even admitted to occasionally checking respublika-kz.info (and given here bashful admission of occasionally checking this oppositional site I did not start pressing whether she might have checked the comments section to, since that section is actually normally blocked in Kazakhstan in most places although not in Aktau, but that is where the sharpest and the most oppositional opinions are discussed).

As she sat there, in her office, underneath the portrait of the president, I did not have the heart to press her about her political curiosities, given the amount of time that she had devoted to me. Instead we talked lightly about how the youth was less interested in the local and found the global connections so much attractive, how they are not yet interested in the place where they actually live. I wondered why that may be the case and when I asked the group what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the Internet for good, they all gasped in horror. But when I asked what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the SNSs and other socialization tools, the reaction was one of resignation- well then some of those connections will get lost... and that's not so good, but not so bad either, because the people you care about, you already have their phone number. Besides, everyone needs a break from SNSs from time to time anyway because they get boring, so that's ok.

The most fascinating thing about today though, was to realize just how scared people here are, especially people in business of the 'big guys' and how powerless they feel. All of the youngsters were talking about either Russian or Western sites like Yandex, Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte, Mail.ru, Facebook or Google as their main sources of social contact or information. Even if their eventual destination is some place inside the kaznet space, they start with the search engine anyway and it is always either yandex or google, where they normally get their news as well. The business owners are simply waiting for Google, Ebay etc to come into the market and take over, and they hope that they will be the logical choice for the local representative. I can no longer count how many times I heard the statement - we have no chance, we just have to hope we don't remain in the stone age for too long. I must admit the fear it logical because Kazakhstan has few resources and even fewer sources of knowledge and brilliance, given that education is for sale and the particulars of power make sales, contacts and immediate gain far more important than longer range planning. The fear, the desperation and the resignation is palpable... and then this morning I got woken up by a phone call telling me that the largest forum in Kazakhstan has been shut down... what gives?

Aktau and the Caspian sea

I made it to Aktau this morning and I am fascinated. The city is a combination of oil development and pure old soviet aesthetic. The Caspian is pure emerald in the distance but turns into an odd boiling brown soup of algae right by the shore in the city. People fish and kids catch shrimp among the sea rocks - the whole thing is oddly serene and beautiful in a very run-down falling-apart kind of way. The people are really open and nice, nothing like those in Almaty and Astana.

There are two interesting things about Aktau. One is that because it is an oil town, there is quite a bit of money to go around so the town is considered rather wealthy despite the appearances of it being rusty and run-down (although the rumors of it being extremely expensive did not turn out to be true). This means that many people have access to the Internet, even those living in the little villages surrounding the city (or so my taxi driver from one such village claimed as he complained about the Internet being very slow). The second is that Megaline, the Kazakhstan main provider does not offer much of the Internet service here. This is left to one of the smaller providers here who is using the Azery hardware and happens to kind of forget about that whole blocking thing. So there basically is no blocking here in Aktau - LJ, Blogger and everything else is available. I was at first taken aback when my first interviewee told me that she had HEARD about blocking but never actually experienced it... now it makes sense why that is so.

The hotel where I am staying is one of the old legacy soviet hotels, which means there is no Internet there. However, there is a bar next door that offers free wifi with the purchase of a beer and I am one of the three laptop equipped customers here at the moment (the only three really). Every single one of my four cabbies so far has Internet at home, complains about its slowness and tells me how really, the Internet is very important these days. Mostly.... it's important for skype... with relatives. In fact, Skype remains the winner in just about every conversation - the all-important equivalent of the phone but free or very cheap and when free, it comes with the added benefit of being able to see the interlocutor. Even when people explain their use of SNSs, there comes a moment where they explain that the most important moment was getting everyone's phone numbers and skype id's, but now they just go see the updates and really it's a lot less important. Russia and Kazakhstan took to cellphones like wildfire as it somehow fit into the specific cultural needs of relational maintenance and live interaction. They talk about the emotions they experience when hearing each others voices.

In one story, a girl told me how one of the russian websites was running a free calling promotion where it was possible to call home phones in Russia from anywhere in the world for free during the International Women's day via the skype setup of the site. She called one of her best friends who now lives in Russia but the connection was so bad, the best friend couldn't hear her at all. She texted the best friend and said - I can hear you fine, just talk to me - and the best friend talked, telling her about everything happening in her life. She was near tears by the end with emotion and still unable to say anything in return. She still talks about this incident with a lot of passion - because hearing someone's voice and their intonation is important if you can't see them.

 Generally, Aktau seems much more relaxed and genial. There are two young people sitting at a table near me, in the sports bar where I am using the Internet and incidentally eating some of the best shashlik of the trip so far. The both showed up with laptops. She has been hanging out on vkontakte from the beginning while he put on headphones and turned on skype for the first half hour, talking to a friend until his laptop died. Now he is waiting for the laptop to charge as she is typing away on her laptop across the table from him. Maybe it's time to barge in and see if they are as nice as everyone else that I had met in Aktau so far...

Mobiles, Internet and forms of control

I am inside a small cafe on the Left bank of the river in Astana where all of the new government buildings have been built. The cafe is empty as I strategically arrived here just after the lunch rush. There is one table occupied besides mine, where three people are hanging out with their iphones on the table in front of them. They periodically pick up the iphones and check on a point in conversation, usually in jest. There is wifi here so they are freely browsing the Internet, talking about googling (googlit' in Russian) and the particulars of Russian and Kazakh languages and how transliterations return really funny results.

These kinds of moments are common both here in Astana and in Almaty. A lot of people carry more than one phone and many carry a regular phone and what they call a "communicator" - usually an iphone or some form of smart phone. They use these devices to access the Internet extensively. In fact accessing the Internet through the phone is common, even for people who do not own a computer or really have much access to the Internet outside limited access at work or through an Internet cafe. Even regular phones with small screens are often used to read and respond to email and check status updates from any one of the three popular social network sites. I once spent an evening hanging out with five young Astana professionals. It turned out that between the five of them, they carried 13 phones of various kinds. At least four were 'communicators'. These weren't very rich 'professionals', but people who thought long and hard whether to spend about the equivalent of $8-10 on a meal and usually refrained. Young and only a few years out of college, they considered the Internet an integral part of their life so data costs were important and food could be bought cheaper elsewhere. Phone calls and data are NOT cheap here and many cut costs by having several phone numbers one on each provider because they are usually deals for within-network calling, but this isn't case all the time. Sometimes an old simcard is used to call just three or four phone numbers exclusively because that's the number that's always been used. Sometimes a phone is used because data costs on that simcard are cheaper and calls are cheaper on another one, both from the same provider. The practice is so common that there are special pouches for sale that accommodate more than one phone. There are now phones that can take two or more simcards and switch between them with a click of a button.

Mobile Internet is an important part of life and it is used here far more frequently than I have seen it used in Europe or US especially by non-iphone users. Many times I've heard the statement to the tune of 'we don't have the money for a laptop, but you can access the internet with your phone and check email, so you don't really need anything else." Once again, this is a case of Internet is for finding people and talking with them rather than for information seeking. The majority of information seeking seems to be more work-related for people who do not use the Internet extensively. Some of it has to do with showing off the websites of relatives to co-workers but these are rare occasions. Moreover, workers know that their IT managers watch their Internet use closely, sometimes clamping down with severe sanctions. In one story a young man was using a social network site that he usually left on in the background while he worked. After a few months of this he got a notice that indicated that he had used the Internet improperly and that as a sanction, his access to the Internet was going to be cut off for two months, which happened the same day. This almost sounds like a parent grounding their child and indeed at first he was distraught, but now he is used to it, although he is really looking forward to next week when his Internet will finally get turned back on. No, he won't be accessing SNSs anymore... but there are other things to do on the Internet.

The two most common jokes that I had heard about the Internet so far have been: you get on the internet for 10 minutes and 3 hours rushes by; and... if you are in the internet.. there is nothing but you don't want to leave anyway, that's why farmville is so popular (yes farmville is here and LOTS of people play it). In general though, the Internet is still peripheral to some extent - an opportunity, a way to maintain relationships, but the real maintenance happens through phone calls and visits anyway. Yes there are instances of reconnection with long lost friends or relatives, but these are exciting and at the same time uncertain and vaguely unsettling. There are stories of activating remote social ties in work situations, when a quick translation or advice is needed, but with many companies blocking SNSs this doesn't happen very often anymore. Certainly there are stories of finding life partners on the Internet, but it is seen as just another place to meet at first... the real test comes in physical encounters. In many ways, it is almost as if the Internet adds to the background noise of possibilities but the gray reality of the everyday takes over, especially here in Astana, where people work inordinate amounts, usually get paid very little if they work on government jobs, and feel exposed because they know they are constantly watched.

Internet and gaming - virtual and real

I was never particularly interested in games even if it was MUDs that got me into this whole HCI business in the first place eons ago in a galaxy far far away, called undergrad. After undergrad I did not want to have anything to do with games. Not that I found games uninteresting, I just knew that if I were to start studying games I would never graduate - I am addictive like that. So I never looked for games and gaming really, here in Kazakhstan... gaming however, had other plans. When I was in Almaty, gaming showed up a little bit here and there... some old classmates told me how playing counter-strike was the big motivator to upgrade both their computing hardware and internet connection exclusively for this purpose (for everything else the very old comp with a very slow connection, apparently was just fine). Some people mentioned getting addicted to farmville or several other SNS-based games. During one meeting, one of the people in the room simply couldn't stop playing a silly little game on her smartphone even as she explained how she really didn't have any time for the Internet. Every now and then I would come across a large internet-cafe directed exclusively at multiplayer games. In one such space I was blatantly told 'sorry lady, we don't have JUST internet here' as the kids around the room made excited noises while playing WOW. Most of the time though, games did not make appearances in conversations, did not play a significant role in observations and generally were not all that visible.

Astana, however, was a different story and games seem to be waiting for me nearly at every corner, rearing their heads in random conversations, appearing out of nowhere. Games and chatting... games and a way to make friends in a new place... games and a way to find like minds... games and a way to disconnect from the everyday... games and business ventures... in short, games everywhere. There of course is the striking proliferation of Internet cafes here with mostly gaming contingent present (this may have to do with the fact that there are more bored and moneyless youth here since work is harder to come by). So the young boys play WOW and Counterstrike and some russian games nearly everywhere. Even in very small internet cafes with really bad equipment some gaming is going on, but mostly there are the dedicated clubs with relatively cheap access. There are, also, references to SNS-based games and the kind of addiction these games breed, motivating players to wake up early in the morning to check in at Farmville or to plant strategically so that they can limit the need to have to check on their crops.

But there are also chat-based games, where there are whole chatrooms devoted for example exclusively to playing Mafia or Word and Question games. These chatrooms are old and some have been around since 04-05, based on very rudimentary clients. These are still in circulation although I am starting to get the sense that the players are there now mostly out of some nostalgic sense of things past. And then... there is encounter and the hybrid reality nature of it. They call it 'alternative entertainment' here. At this point I have spoken to about a half dozen various participants and players who all agree on at least one thing - playing encounter enables them to grow their social network. By building connections through very very silly activities (like racing child-tricycles) and by meeting in random basements of abandoned buildings in the course of solving a puzzle, they get to know people from pretty much every walk of life. These are like-minded people and so they become a sort of distributed yet local community, situated and connected through the physical exploration of the city while following internet-based clues.

Why is it that such games are so popular here, in Russia, in various other countries of the FSU, in China... what is it about this hybrid of physical, local and technological that pushes together strangers and makes them into what some would call friends, others would call guanxi relationships? Is there something specific to the historical, social, political and economic factors mixed with cultural peculiarities that makes such game more attractive, or am I just not aware of similar games in the West (or maybe they do mean something different here)?

One late evening, I was hanging out with a group of entrepreneurs several of whom were just starting a media company producing TV soaps. We talked about the Internet and media possibilities for the new venture although they were tepid on that account. One thing there were willing to discuss, however, was the idea of creating an entertainment-gaming space to accompany the soap opera. Is it possible? Can something innovative be created here in Kazakhstan, or do we have to go outside Kazakhstan for talent? I had to remind these gentlemen that for example Skype (which they ALL use) was developed by Estonians and Chatroulette was an after-school project of a Moscow teen. The notion of games is attractive for business but it is also oddly seen as not serious enough, as an unlikely source of income, as somehow a foreign notion.

Internet and politics in KZ

By some odd stroke of luck, the hotel where I am staying in Astana was the site of a KazMedia event the first evening I was there. By another stroke of luck, the people I was meeting at my hotel for an interview, knew several people involved in the event. This event was notable for two specific reasons. First, this was the birthday of 'KazContent' which turned one year old and second, this event marked the launch of several local kazakh resources - social network (ilive.kz), a blogging platform, and most notably, a legal music and movie distributor (urta.kz).

A little bit of history to explain why this is actually notable. Several years ago, the venerable father has ordered that KazNet is physically created (that is the Kazakh infrastructure for Internet - the fiberoptic lines, the cables, the servers, dialup connections and eventually broadly accessible broadband, etc). Kazakhtelecom dutifully created the infrastructure (although the reports of its extensiveness are difficult to verify, given the amount of money actually spent on building is hard to identify). At the time, there was little actual content that was specifically Kazakhstan-related so the majority of internet traffic went outside the country to Russian and International resources. There is a tendency in every post-soviet country to think in terms of 'our' and 'theirs' and to see connections outside the country as unpatriotic. In order to remedy this situation, Kazakhtelecom created 'kaztorka.kz' - a membership torrent site for downloading movies and music. Within a few months several other torrent sites joined the official one and the internal Internet traffic in Kazakhstan soon overtook external connections and they could proudly report this fact to the government. In Kazakhstan, nearly every user accesses the Internet more for downloading movies and music than for anything else (of course this has more to do with the speed of downloads that often takes days of dedicated attempts). In my conversations with a range of people I repeatedly heard that yes, there is a lot of internal traffic but KazNet is still empty (i.e. there are few useful and interesting .kz local sites to visit) and Kazakhtelecom is not particularly happy that nearly all of the internal traffic is torrents because they overload the network but there is no money to be made on that.

About a year ago, the venerable father discovered the fact that KazNet is empty (there are many stories of exactly how this happened but none seem even remotely plausible). He was incensed at the fact and ordered concerted development of KazContent which resulted in the creation of a company by such name (which of course took seed money and then money for their project) and in the creation of a company called KazNetMedia to do the design and development of base sources that can motivate the populace to create their own content. Both companies are for-profit but heavily government funded (otherwise, why would anyone do any of this) and there has been an inordinate amount of money promised for the projects.

Six months ago, the minister in charge of Internet development was told he was not doing a good enough job because well... KazNet was still empty, so he was replaced with the head of KazakhTelecom who actually is an engineer and an IT professional rather than simply a manager. In fact the two were swapped in their positions so the effect might be interesting given that KazakhTelecom will have to undergo changes in its practices as well. At about the same time, Beeline, a Russian telecom company, entered the market not only as a cellphone provider but also as an eventual Internet provider as they were putting in a fiberoptic line connecting to their Russian network, rather than renting the KazakhTelecom hardware. The internet offering is just about to start and Kazakhtelecom companies are feeling the pressure and lowering their tariffs. What is interesting about the whole system that there is a law on the books that everyone must follow, that states that telecom operators and Internet providers are equated to infrastructure projects and thus can not charge differential tariffs based on population density. So Almaty residents get the same tariff as the residents of the tiny villages around Taldy Kurgan (in those areas where there actually is coverage, although theoretically there is supposed to be coverage everywhere). So the lowering of tariffs has to happen everywhere, not just in areas where Beeline is available. So Beeline's presence in Astana and Almata and it's presences as an Internet provider only in Almata is actually likely to result in price-cuts everywhere in the country.

Beeline's presence has another small implication - Beeline has very little incentive to block any internet sites that Kazakhtelecom blocks. The government has no official policy on the matter and Kazakhtelecom prefers to act as if no actual blocking is occurring on any of the resources except for LJ since there actually is a court-order for that one. Nevertheless, none of the blocking is official and to continue blocking and to compel providers like Beeline to block, the government would have to develop an official policy that then can be officially attacked. A quick note about blocking - Opera Turbo servers are inaccessible here in Astana and became inaccessible just a few days ago (according to my informants) along with several other well known proxy servers. Either the blocking in Astana is simply more earnest, or something else is going on.

Now let's go back to the launch that I accidentally got to attend upon arrival here in Astana. The most remarkable thing about all of the presentations was the emphasis on production of local, Kazakhstan based content that would be about life in the country as well as the lives of its people. It was about both professionally producing interesting content and about creating platforms that would encourage citizens to produce their own content. The platforms were a crazy hodgepodge of everything that is already out there, apparently built on the idea that it is possible to take all of the best features, put them together and the result would be something everyone would want to use. Moreover, the social network resource was to attempt bringing the content from all of the social network sites where users are already involved together into one place, thus motivating users not just to switch social network platforms, but to consolidate everything they have on one. Attractive notion, don't you think?

Then there was urta.kz - a site that was committed to changing the illegal pirating practices of Kazakhstan citizens and finally paying royalties on content, thus becoming a law abiding internet space. I spoke to the owners of urta.kz and asked them how they planned on changing the prevailing culture of free that kazakhtelecom in fact built up. They told me that they were committed to the changes and they are in fact financially committed because as soon as they are launched they start to pay royalties on the content so they have to make sure they advertise and educate in a way that makes them money eventually. At the end of the conversation though, as I kept pushing about that culture thing, the guy simply said - look, we just make getting it for free very difficult, we can do that, we have a very good relationship with kazakhtelecom and besides they are already doing that in Russia so we just do the same in Kazakhstan and people will simply have to buy. There was no mention of Beeline... and their servers and their access and the fact that the only place in Russia where there is any movement to really curb pirating is some posturing in Moscow in the last few months with some seizure of servers. So there really isn't any attention to them 'people' but the traditional brute-force approach of getting things to pay... eventually... when government coffers run out.

The Potemkin Village

The glorious capital of Kazakhstan greeted me with its perpetual cold winds and towers of glass in a frozen steppe. I got an unofficial taxi driver to take me to my hotel. He was a local, born and bred in Tselinograd that eventually became Astana. Extremely proud of the city, he showed off the local sites and did not stop talking until we got to the hotel. The city looked very impressive from inside the car, with towers of glass and intricate architecture. On closer inspection though, things didn't look so glorious. Although there are many buildings that look beautiful the majority stand empty. There aren't enough people here to buy apartments and certainly not enough to afford the new pretty buildings.

The height of the buildings does not do them any favors either. The wind here is so strong that anything higher than about 30 or so stories starts swaying. Besides, the wind rips off paneling and wall decorations from the outside as well. Even the most expensive hotel, the Radisson (that is apparently the most expensive Radisson in the world), looks like portions of it are missing. What's more, the odd thing about being here is that it feels like I am in a suburb with very tall buildings. There is no charm to this place and everything is too new to really look interesting.

This place has pretty fronts but every time I walk inside these pretty buildings they turn out to be half built and already falling apart. Unlike Almaty, however, there is an internet cafe here on every corner. Most are very empty, save for a few young men here and there, always playing computer games. Even the people at the front desk are playing. There are also groups here playing hybrid reality games, like the Encounter - en.cx There is more playing here than I saw in Almaty and I wonder whether it has something to do with the general weird emptyness of the place. I have the eerie sense that I am trapped in an odd version of the Potemkin village.

About the neighbors

It's raining and the weather has been crazy this week, going from sun to rain to snow and then back to sun in a matter of hours. People huddle in coffee shops or under their umbrellas as they go about their days. It's calm and quite in the streets of Almaty... impossible to guess that less than 200 kilometers away people are getting shot as they go about deposing their government. The media has of course reported the events, but not in a particularly forthcoming manner. Within hours of the beginning of the events in Kyrgyzstan, the Kyrgyz government shut down access to the Internet, locking down Twitter, Youtube and all social networking sites. Twitter still functioned because it could be used via sms, but most activists had more important things to do than send too many Twitter updates. Several LJ bloggers posted minute-by-minute updates that they had received from friends or family or via Twitter. Neweurasia.net and Globalvoices posted several articles and updates, but the majority of the updates were very similar. Youtube videos and grizzly photographs got posted in various locations and then reposted and linked. None of this activity seemed to be of much use to people actually in Bishkek, but was used to calm down and inform the onlookers who cared for personal, professional or simply curiosity reasons. As one of the Kazakh activists in charge of the upcoming BarCampKZ had mentioned to me - organizing in protests of this kind via social media can be very dangerous for your health and only those that feel relatively safe have the luxury of updating the world on the local situation. There is more here, but I do not have the data and speculation is for later... I do think social media use is far from straight forward or clearly beneficial in the case of uprisings or revolutions. This revolution, by the way, still doesn't have a color... I guess the West has lost its taste for color assignments.

There is a headline in one of the 'lightly oppositional' newspapers today. It reads: 'The Kyrgyz have sorted out who is the head of the household!' With a subtitle reading: 'The neighbors got their freedom and citizens of Kazazakhstan got Internet blocking.' Indeed several sites, including youtube and respublika-kz.info (this last one by the way is a curious site, where the content is generally available from Kazakhstan but the comments area is always blocked), got blocked about a day after the events in Bishkek started. The reaction was generally fairly tepid - certainly people commented and sighed, but with an expectation. Everyone had the explanation - the government is scared we might do something similar - and had a good laugh on that account. Some LJ bloggers complained that running youtube through a proxy slows down already slow access to the site and several others pointed out that maybe this will motivate finally, the development of kaztube instead? In general, however, most people responded by pounding Kazakhtelecom with confused phone calls. less than 48 hours later, both sites were accessible again and there had been no official statement from any of the agencies. It is tempting to think that the citizen response and the media stories had an effect, but I've been here in Kazakhstan long enough to come up with a cynical and oddly somewhat more believable story - likely some high ranking official wanted to watch something on youtube and found it blocked, got annoyed and called kazakhtelecom with a complaint... when the NECESSARY people complain, policies get changed very quickly. 

Center of Mass - ct.kz - one year later

It makes complete sense that people are what people seek on the Internet. There are many manifestations of this kind of search and the most viable online businesses have involved a very social angle. ct.kz for example, is the largest kazakhstan forum and the only homegrown purely online business that is making substantial amounts of money. I've been following this forum fairly closely since I found out about it last year in Kazakhstan.

CT= center of mass, is a forum that hasn't really changed it's appearance since its inception and has been around for 10 years (in fact this year is their 10 year anniversary). Despite the pronouncements of occasional bloggers that the forum format is dead, ct.kz seems on track to remain viable for years to come. The forum is steadily growing, with over 200 thousand registered users to date. For a country with just 3 million users, this is a substantial share of the market.

When people I speak to bring up ct, it is usually in the context of "you can find everything there.... just everything!" If the Internet is about searching for people, then ct provides access to a very large and diverse number of them. The discussions cover every conceivable topic from charity, financial questions, law and order, emigration, and technical questions to sports, cars, beauty and love. There are three main things that the forum does not cover: ethnic and nationalist tensions, politics and the president. The forum is heavily moderated with two goals in mind: to keep the conversation off the forbidden topics and to manage "downers"- people who turn every conversation into a flame war. Moderators are unpaid volunteers who put in untold numbers of hours doing their 'job'.

The majority of the CT users live in Almaty with Astana a distant second. Heavy users of CT speak of a particular culture of getting things done and helping each other that has grown up on the forum. For example people who hang out in the discussion thread of everything related to Auto maintain what they call an 'emergency list' - a list of phone numbers in locations around the country that are willing to help if another CT user is in trouble. People literally print these pages out and keep them in their cars just in case. There are many stories of people breaking down in the middle of nowhere in Kazakhstan (not a difficult thing to do given that population density and the quality of roads around here is very low) and getting help first from other CT users and then from the equivalent of road-side assistance. CT users have stickers they put on cars that serve as identifiers. Within Almaty, if a car with such a sticker breaks down, others are likely to stop and help.

CT users also have discount cards where business owners who also hang out on CT give discounts to other users. Getting such stickers and cards is a point of pride and requires substantial participation in the community. The community itself is not just online, with meet ups and events scheduled often for various subgroups that discuss various topics. Just recently there was a big meet up of koreans from Kyzylorda who now live in Almaty.

In the course of 10 years of its development, ct.kz has grown from a small bunch of enthusiasts to a huge confluence of people. The enthusiasts have perpetually complained that the newcomers never really understand the 'culture' in ways probably similar to what had happened during the invasion of usenet by the 'unwashed masses' of aol users. The moderators have done a lot to maintain the pre-existing rules and agreed upon ways of behavior, which had resulted in pages upon pages of rules and regulations. When people are warned about breaking rules, the moderators actually quote the particular rule number and paragraph that they may have broken.

Despite this meticulous maintenance of the community, the audience of the site has changed over the years. There are many more teenagers and young people now and the topics they discuss have changed. What is more, the level at which things, for example cars, are discussed has changed. For example, where half a decade ago it was expected that people would post asking about buying relatively cheap cars, the average asking price has now increased nearly 10-fold and people seeking older and cheaper cars are looked down upon. Basically, the conversation is similar, but the conversationists are trying to exude a lot more 'cool' in what they discuss.

No matter the changes, ct.kz is a collection of diverse and very strong communities. In my conversations with one of the moderators, she told me a story of one of the auto-thread participants ending up in a horribly disfiguring accident. Medical care in Kazakhstan is very expensive and he couldn't afford some types of re-constructive surgery. A friend had posted the news on ct.kz and within 4 days they had amassed enough money for surgery and subsequent medical and in-home care for nearly 6 months. People simply handed money without even leaving their names and the sums ranged from a few dollars to thousands. Stories of such expressions of kindness and support are common, but what is remarkable here is that people who spent a lot of time on ct.kz and who mentioned the site to me talked of it as a space and a community they could depend upon despite a lot of crabby growling about the rules and the 'downers' and the flamers...

Amid all of these feel-good stories hides one particular aspect of this forum that distinguishes it from the old usenet type forums of yore. ct.kz is profoundly local - with Almaty being the strongest and most populous community. Even for those that do not normally post on ct.kz, it appears to be a good source for very local information - that kind where advice from other people and word-of-mouth are really important. It's sort of a yelp.com on steroids where nearly every single business in Almaty, from surma shops to high end clothing and auto sales, is discussed at length. In fact, some businesses, such as car insurance sales people, several prominent banks, telecom operators, actually have people hanging out on ct.kz and answering questions or addressing concerns. CT.kz is very strict about attempts at getting free advertisement however, so all of this communication with actual businesses is closely watched.

Ct.kz is not a neutral space, it is most certainly a political space, where politics, government monopolies, the pitfalls of official policies or issues of ethnicity and language are pointedly not discussed. Sometimes however, such discussions happen anyway, and there are stories of people making formal announcements that they did not mean a word they said. The forums are watched by members of internal security (FSB) and ct.kz openly hands over ip-addresses of the people in question. ct.kz is not in the business of freedom here... to be frank, if they were, they would not have survived this long and they would certainly have not been a business.

The Internet is where you find people

"The Internet, that's where you find people" my grandmother's 80-year-old friend told me once conspiratorially. At the time I thought it quaint, but to my surprise this was by far not the only time I had heard it... What IS the Internet for anyway, have you ever thought of it? I suppose now that it is so integrated into daily life, it is hard to name a single purpose, although if I had to, I suppose that would be 'to find information.' The fact that in Kazakhstan for a particular social strata of people it is about very specific kinds of socializing I think is quite important. I heard similar statements from a young woman who works 12 hours a day intermittently selling and painting cars, from a young man who maintains the IT infrastructure of a travel bureau, from a middle-aged taxi driver whose car was so old he had to turn if off when standing at traffic lights, the list goes on. For the most part these people tended to be relatively poor, less educated, less involved in the technical sphere, but this was not true for everyone who expressed these statements.

The promise of socializing has been one of the main drivers for starting to use the Internet. The most popular sites in Kazakhstan (as well as in Russia and most other FSU countries) are social network sites and search engines, but I wonder whether the search engines are used for a similar purpose - to find people. Maybe this has something to do with the role and meaning of social ties here in Kazakhstan. As I sit at a coffee shop here writing this, people around me are hanging out, chatting, sometimes trying to solve problems.... the problem solutions always involve people - family, relatives, friends. One of the most popular expressions here is - "I have a person there" when discussing some organization or need. A friend's son had badly broken his arm and she showed up at a small classmate gathering straight from the hospital. The first thing the rest of the people at the table asked was whether she knew anyone at that hospital and whether she needed some contacts. She did not so another classmate dug up the phone number of one of the heads of the hospital in question. The worthyness of the hospital was evaluated based on the number of people known and their reputation.

People then are the main sources of information, ways of getting things done and solving problems.

Content, monetization, development

"Everyone is only interested in money" announced the dean of the International IT University of Kazakhstan in the course of our conversation as we discussed potential trajectories of development of Kaznet. The needing to fill Kaznet was his big spiel and he was extensively talking about monetization, opportunities, commercial development and the oodles of money that the Kazakh government is about to dump into Kaznet. Then he tried to offer me a teaching job...

The issue of what KazNet and internet in general might bring to Kazakhstan and what might make money through the Internet, how might something like Facebook originate in Kazakhstan is on the minds of many business people, politicians and regulators right now. "Do you think something big can actually be born in Kazakhstan or is that the prerogative of the West and North America and we just can't manage, our minds are too closed and not enough?" asked me a business man who runs all of SAP implementation in Kazakhstan right now and is developing a professional information exchange forum as a form of public service (from his point of view).

KazNet is empty but the current buzz is that despite its emptiness more than 3.16 million users actively access it on at least a bi-weekly basis and nearly 5 million are passive users (those that have their friends or family access the Internet for them). The active number so far has been confirmed from several sources - this is over 20% of the population on the internet. The passive number is an odd one because it is not clear to me how that was actually calculated but the policy guys really like throwing it out there in conversations. Over the course of the last three years, the Internet has become more affordable, and, surprisingly, more users are coming through mobile connections. This of course, generates some expectation of monetization potential.

There is no real way yet to accept payment over the Internet for local businesses but that is coming (and the person developing that service told me that it is coming this summer. He was expecting a huge jump in usage from the development of local commerce and of local content. Of course, this was also the person who asked why I bothered researching Kazakhstan since by all general markers, the Kazakh market looks exactly like everywhere else - we all access search engines and social network sites more often than anything else, so that must really mean we are all the same.

The local content point is real and important - there is little local content produced inside kaznet (the most read blogger sites are blocked, many alternative news sources are blocked, and the kind of local that is allowed to develop is no more interesting than the regular local newspaper). How such local content might be developed and be more interesting than extensive discussions of everything local on the ct.kz forum nobody knows and the ct.kz originators scoff at the notion, but there indeed is a push to localize KazNet because it is seen as the only way to really get it off the ground. For now, the internal traffic on KazNet is people downloading pirated movies and music and nearly everything else is external. What is even more curious is that none of the internet developers that I have talked to, the dean of the IITU included, know much about how people actually use the Internet... aside from the traffic patterns they see from KazakhTelecom. When I explain that many people see the Internet as a place to find other people, they are surprised and then come up with their own explanations for why this is an unimportant insight, not useful to the overall thinking of how to monetize the Internet... after all, everyone is interested in money.

That language question

The issues of language come up in many conversations here in Kazakhstan and that is not surprising of course given the historical context of the area. Officially, there has been a concerted effort by the government to both promote the language and to increase the number of people speaking it. Kazakh is the official language of the country which means that all of the government and every legal document has to be in Kazakh. Talking about kazakh language in general and kazakh language on the Internet generates different reactions. Where the official line was that kazakh language kaznet is developing and although there are few kazakh-only resources yet, they are increasing in number and range of offerings. The less official line is that while the Internet offers a way to provide learning materials in Kazakh and a space for self-expression of national identity, very little actual kazakh content is online and the leading companies, such as Yandex for example, are not yet providing morphological search and the main Russian-language social network sites such as vkontakte and odnoklassniki have not yet been translated into Kazakh. Google and Facebook on the other hand are available in Kazakh and this means quite a lot to the young kazakh-speakers.

These kinds of pronouncements make sense, although why kazakh youth would prefer for example to use Wordpress instead of KZ's own Yvision has fewer and weaker explanations (based on several Google searches, it is certainly evident that Yvision gets indexed just as well as Wordpress). In the course of subsequent conversations it becomes clear that in fact Yandex provides morphological search in Kazakh as well and their search quality may even rival Google's and odnoklassniki and moimir are translated in Kazakh as well. These changes are recent however.

Amid the confusion it is hard to say what role Kazakh language, nationalist leanings or post-colonial sentiments might play in the kinds of resources produced, available and utilized on Kaznet. Kazakh has a somewhat tortured history as a language - stunted in its development for 70 years because of the Soviet policies, it remained the language of villages and remote areas where modern life rarely made its presence known. The Kazakh spoken in larger cities was augmented by Russian words to add the vocabulary of modern life. Such english-based words as 'airport' and even more common words such as 'coat' made its way into Kazakh language in Russian, sometimes with Kazakh endings. Since the nationalization and Kazakh becoming an official language, many such words have been converted to Kazakh words that seem to appear somehow out of nowhere. This of course continues to create problems as government and technical documents need to be translated into Kazakh that not only does not have the vocabulary, but where there is a strong movement to ensure non-Kazakh words do not become the standard. This is not a new policy, the Quebecois for example have a system that they use in order to preserve their version of French without untoward influences. The problem in this context is that there is no real system so documents translated and written by one person then become unreadable by someone else because there was never an official process or even a record of created words. How much of this story is true and how much is something made up to deal with the general madness of the Kazakh government I do not know, but the language issues seem to be cloaked in a number of stories that in some ways devalue the language itself and make it seem impossible for the language to become usable any time soon.

Yet examples of language policy and language development failure abound regardless of the ethnic background of my interviewees and interlocutors. There are many language learning systems (one of them was handed to me as a present the other day) which cost a lot and the production value is relatively low. There have been ideas to create integrated language learning systems online with existing physical language learning systems for sale, but none of these ideas have generated much traction despite the funding for these ideas being available. Kaznet is empty because there is so little local content produced in both languages - Russian and Kazakh and also because the kinds of language, ethnic and national identity issues as well as post-colonial tensions are evidenced not only in the patterns of use but also in the patterns of financial support and technical development here in Kazakhstan.

Uncertainties of youth and language games

My work here in Kazakhstan is largely opportunistic, dependent on the kinds of contacts I have and the kinds of contacts they might have for me. As I traverse the city, it is becoming clear that this research project is taking on the shape of something much larger than a tempered one-person thing... I am trying to put together a micro-sociology from below with an assessment of structural factors from above and all of this is happening at random. One thing I have tried to do much more this time, is have more conversations with the kazakh-speaking population. Note I don't mean 'ethnically kazakh' because those are two different things. As someone told me last night, there are two types of kazakh people here in Kazakhstan - Shala Kazakhs and Naryz Kazakhs. The former are those that are ethnically kazakh but do not speak the language and are generally russified, while the latter are what Sarah Palin might term 'real'. There is most certainly a tension between the two kinds and confusion about ethnic and national identity development is that much more intensified especially as the government makes pronouncements about the importance of kazakh language but then nothing is done to ensure its development.

To figure out what the kazakh-language Internet use and production of kazakh-language resources look like on KazNet, I started tracking down both kazakh-language bloggers and kazah-speaking Internet users. Turns out language is very important... and it is a sore point and most people have a hard time really speaking about these issues openly. However, language is also a way to delineate borders and to some extent to divide spaces on the Internet. Basically, KazNet is split into two parts right now, the kazakh and the russian-language parts. This split of course is only evident to the russian speakers since kazakh-speaking internet users all speak russian as well and many also speak english, chinese or turkish. The kazakh-language blogosphere and internet is nascent and is barely now developing. As the russian speaking blogosphere is trying to rise up against internet filtering and the blocking of LJ under the banner of freedom of the Internet, the Kazakh internet has different goals - they want the freedom to write and to explore the potential of the Internet for self-expression. In that sense they seem to feel that the russian-speaking sphere is working against them to some extent by creating a more dangerous situation and by attracting the attention of the authorities.

Prominent russian-language bloggers, writers, movers and shakers generally seem to dismiss the kazakh language content production as very little interesting that is not worth the time. The kazakh-language bloggers know this but they also acknowledge that the kinds of people writing in kazakh are different. Where the average russian blogger seems to be an educated IT professional in his or her 30s writing about political, economic or social ills of the country, the average kazakh blogger is a young woman in her 20s that writes about kazakh culture and poetry. The kazakh speaking audience is younger and more extreme... they are writing about language and language politics in kazakh, but mostly their posts are discussed within very small circles of readers. What is even more interesting that most of these blogs are sitting not in the kz space but on wordpress (which worries many of them because the government can block access to a blogging platform with little cause and no announcements). I asked why they are on wordpress and on one of the kazakh blogging platforms like yvision.kz or odin.kz. The answer essentially came down to whether Google is going to index these sites if they move over to the KZNet space. Most were convinced that wasn't going to happen and since Google (according to them) is the only search engine at the moment that does morphological search in Kazakh (although this is contested by the more technical people), it seemed imperative to have kazakh-language blogs on wordpress.

Wordpress was also perceived as far more technically superior to kazakh blogging platforms and a lot more social in creating an immediate sense of presence by showing all of the new kazakh language posts recently posted by other users on the start pages at login. Kazakh youth were excited about blogging as one of the ways that could potentially express their ethnic and national identity - something that is seen as impossible to do 'in real life' because it is politically inexpedient and somewhat persecuted by the government. Kazakh college students are looking for ways to express themselves and for potential directions beyond the static business and state journalism options that have known until now. Whether new media can in fact become both a space for self-expression and an avenue for a different career is certainly an open question, but they are excited to explore it now.

Access, blocking and competition

One of the important aspects of Internet use in Kazakhstan has to do with provider monopoly (Megaline Kazakhstan from Kaztelecom) and blocking of particular internet domains that the government (and by some odd extension Megaline itself) considers incendiary or inappropriate, based on some untold, unspoken and largely unknown rules. For example whole domains like livejournal or blogger are simply inaccessible, while wordpress is accessible sometimes and not others. While I knew that LJ has been blocked in KZ for several years now, the blockage of blogger is relatively new and came about with the growing blogging community here. Many kazakh bloggers have they blogs on wordpress or LJ. Wordpress comes under fire often as well for the same reason especially since KZ's own blogging service - YourVision (yvizion.kz) - is gaining popularity.

Since last year, however, monopolies and Megaline's dominance had come under some pressure as new companies are moving into the area and providing access via infrastructure that they rent from Kaztelecom. Beeline, a Russian telco is even putting down its own fiberoptic in order to create competition for Megaline. Of course the first thing everyone noticed with the arrival of minor but available competition is that prices of course started trending down quicker than before. However, the presence of this competition has yet another effect. The Russians really couldn't care to go through the motions of blocking sites and domains. So at the moment, when I am at my friends apartments, I can't access some sites, but I am free to blog on blogger or read LJ without the trouble of proxies at a cafe that is within a block and a half of walking distance and that offers free wifi. This is confusing as hell because it is not obvious which company is providing the connection for which area or location. However, I wonder whether this will be important for business as well. Imagine, you could have megaline at home - and never access blocked sites, but you could easily walk a few blocks to a nearby cafe and blog and read LJ all you want without being tracked... Of the three cafe's within walking distance of the apartment that I am renting, only one has unrestricted access... Guess where I am spending most of my time?

Internet cafe observations...

There are several types of Internet cafe's in Almaty. There are modern coffee bars that serve coffee, a full range of food items and sweets as well as allow free wifi access. These are usually full of foreigners and college students. There are several high powered brand new (and seeming relatively empty) internet cafe's that offer both wifi and terminals for internet access, built to look sleek and modern with blaring electronic music, like many of the large european internet cafe's of about 10 years ago, where 100 minutes of wifi internet access costs 500 tg (about 2.5 eur). There are several large gamer-oriented spaces where young boys rule the roost and I get stern looks as I try to enter. Finally, there are little spaces usually in basemenets or small dark rooms, with very old technology uncomfortably sharing the space with phones. These last ones are spaces where migrants and poor people come and access here is very cheap - about 120-200 tg (1-1.5 $) for 45-60 minutes. It is the latter type that I visited for a little while.

The small internet cafe has about a half dozen computers, about as many phones and a TV blearily blaring in the corner. Internet access is very cheap - about the cost of a tea at a cafe (or even less than that - less than a dollar). All of the computers are instrumented with russian, chinese and korean alphabets, the operating system is windows in chinese and qq and myworld are prominently displayed as shortcuts along with IE and skype. IE opens with moi mir shortcuts on the top bar with a northern chinese search engine as the homepage. The computers are OLD - I haven't seen 15" CRTs THIS old - these are barely color. The OS is winXP with IE 6 and a chinese browser installed as well. The whole thing is run by a boy of about 20 who seems to speak chinese, korean, kazakh and russian with the few clients that are present.

Two women are using a computer next to me. The older one is sitting with a notebook in her lap and staring at the screen as the younger one navigates. Turns out they are getting ready for a korean-kazakh wedding and are looking for an interpreter. They are trying to search the Internet but failing to find relevant postings on the sites they search. Eventually they call up the boy and ask his advice. He is unhelpfully just as confused. I notice they search commercial classifieds and use Google.kz for the job. I ask why they aren't searching ct.kz or posting for responses there and it turns out they had never heard about it and the notion of 'posting' is foreign, intimidating to both. We just need to find a person for this, one of them explains... you know... you can find people on the Internet, she confides.

On the course of about 40 minutes in the cafe nobody else enters and the boy along with two girlfriends sit and watch blurry tv in the corner. The place is dark and dank, the old computer monitors are buzzing, the pair near me are the only other customers and after a while, they give up what seems to be at this point a fruitless search. I finish pretending to do interesting things on the Internet and get up to leave as well. Everyone in the place smiles knowingly at me and says goodbye. Obviously, I don't fit in to this small space, but it doesn't matter - my money is just as good as anyone else's.

Aging, living and the technological age

I spent some time visiting old friends of the family, my grandmother's friends, people who get extremely upset if I do not call the moment I land regardless of my purposes being here. Many of these people are between 50 and 90 years old and I happen to know a number of them where taking time to visit is a requirement. Oddly enough even in these, largely reminiscent conversations technology emerges as a curious actor. Everyone, including my grandmother's 87-year-old friends, owns cell phones. They all know about the Internet and marvel at the technology. Curiously, for these grandmothers and grandfathers, the internet is where you find people if you somehow lost contact with them some other way... I have heard several stories of being found and expressions of the fascination of such technological access to people...

The cell phone of course is the most important of these technological inventions, where the ability to be connected fits a huge need beacuse the times are more dangerous and connection to friends and family has become (or is seen as) that much more important. The internet is present even when not directly used, the secondary and third order effects imminently visible even in informal conversations over tea with friends of my grandmother who had never seen a computer but know about this new thing and at times even experience the echo of its effects. For example, one 85-year-old's brother found their address and then initiated contact - the original search conducted through internet. To many of these people, the internet seems unreachable financially but imminently usable and important regardless.

Slightly younger people (50s and 60s) of course use the internet, beginning with email and then discovering informational sites and odnoklassniki... the prices and access of course are limited... but the potential is there... riussian resources are availble and in some limited way the reach is expanded. the news are everywhere though and information in confusing. In the end it is a matter of whom you trust to get information and here, it is mostly about people who are nearby... the Internet is a source... but it is important as a novelty, as a way to find things out, but confirmation always comes from those near by because the local expertise is far more palpably present. For the older generation, the Internet is a wonder, a way to connect, to reconnect with people who have left... people who were and still are important as memories and as ties that still mean something. The older people get here, it seems, the more they turn back to their initial ties from 'back then' when things were simpler, when age and health were more manageable and when life was at least more straightforward. In the confusion of changes, the older generation is trying to hold on to the past through the technologies of the present.

First interviews, contradictions & agreements

I did several more or less formal interviews. I found out that the most important names in Kazakh IT development seem to range from mentions of the association of information and communication of Kazakhstan (which is oddly pretty much a ministry in Astana and has an interesting history of being disbanded and then put back together at various times in the last few years) to award.kz, to the association of IT companies of Kazakhstan to Kazakh language bloggers. There was a lot of discussion of wanting to create resources and put them out there, so that the kids that are just now growing up and realizing the potential of the Internet would be able to find the things they need for the future with just a click of a mouse.

Language was a particularly thorny issue - as an additional (though by no means primary) source of state identity and an important aspect of ethnic identity as well. The phrase - language is a very painful and thorny question was uttered a number of times. I found out that many Kazakh youth in the big cities do blog and many blog in kazakh as an expression of their political position and national identity (some are more radical than others, but "this is the nature of the internet"). The notion of many was somewhat limited and I will find out what that "many" means at the local Kazakh BarCamp in a couple of weeks. On the one hand, there was much hopeful rhetoric about the value of the Internet and the potential that the technology might hold if it were to be combined with peace corps volunteer efforts and the right amount of charity in the right places... On the other hand, there was a lot of depressing cynicism.

I also learned about LJ and the role it plays (or doesn't play, depending on whom you ask) in Kazakh political and everyday discussions by virtue of it being officially blocked from Kazakhstan. This does not stop LJ from being one of the most popular sites accessed from Kazakhstan at least according to Yandex.ru statistics. As far as I understand at this point, blogging here is a complex process of both self-expression and a conscious attempt to influence the country in some way. Some of the blogs do matter and as commentary on blogs (LJ and others) sometimes filters into national media and sometimes they even attribute the quotes to some of the bloggers themselves by name. It seems that LJ was attractive because there was already an intellectual community there, a conversation many thought was worth joining and listening to... The intellectual part... that at times got really tricky in conversations that I have had so far. In an interesting way, the value of intellect and what it meant to be intelligent vs. what "education" meant for some became important underlying reasons for blogging and reading internet-based conversations.

In Kazakhstan, too much education is simply bought, where it does not make sense to go do a phd, if 99 of every 100 dissertations are simply purchased. There is no longer a cachet to the traditional, institutionally sanctioned markers of intellect and particular academic interest. Could it be that the markers for some are now in the blogs he read and in the comments people posted. These stories and comments became important for reminding that intellect is present and available in Kazakhstan.

I asked about politics and blocking content although the technical elite seems to disregard blocking as an actual barrier - those that want to read will find a way and the rest really simply just don't want to read - I am having a hard time buying that. Besides, blocking here is tricky, where some things are blocked only partially and only by some providers so it is hard to actually fight the blocking because it is hard to argue that it is a real policy. As far as I can tell, even if there are about 6000 or so bloggers in the country that are primarily divided by language plus demographics. The russian-language blogosphere in Kazakhstan are mainly middle class to upper middle class men and women older than 30, sick of the consumerist drive of the everyday and wanting to at least talk if not actually change things. The middle-classness of it was evident in the kinds of topics discussed and the kinds of topics ignored. Yes there were horrible floods in the south of Kazakhstan this year and the government did nothing, it showed up on the blog of one of the other prominent bloggers and only 5 or so people commented... half-heartedly.

The kazakh-language bloggers are primarily female, in their early to mid-20s and they write primarily about rediscovery and discussions of particular aspects of kazakh culture like poetry and arts, the young men of the same age are fewer in blogging and they primarily talk about  IT issues, a little bit of religion and a little bit of everyday discussions. There are a couple of fairly intense political commentaries written in Kazakh, but neither of these bloggers live in the two largest cities and their readership seems somewhat small.

The issue of language is incredibly thorny and divisive. The russian language bloggers as well as primarily russian language speakers seem to discard any discussion of kazakh-language discussions.  Often I get a scoff at the notion - nobody cares about kazakh, he said, nobody cares to read in it, the books and newspapers in kazakh are struggling and not being bought. There is no conversation worth listening to in kazakh in the blogosphere. Let the nationalists try to make an issue of the language, we all know it's not working.

The interview content ranges and at times becomes entirely contradictory to prior interviews. There are two issues, however, where everyone things to agree with unexpected clarity. Kaznet, everyone emphatically said... kaznet is empty, there is nothing there except for torrents, some government websites and classifieds. There is ct.kz and a couple of weaker forums elsewhere and there are several portals that are opening up as new businesses heavily venture capitalized right now, but the business models are weak. In each case I pressed for why, why was kaznet empty and why was it that I got the sense that many think it would remain so... They answered in very similar terms - the reason is fear. Fear of being heard beyond the customary private kitchen where important issues were always discussed and governments criticised. Fear of saying something good and having it stolen... fear essentially of saying something that someone else might turn into money. Yes Kazakh wikipedia is growing, but slowly... and there are few other such resources. People do not say anything because they are afraid both the right and the wrong people will hear... and who knows what the wrong people might do... I asked why some are not scared then... Because someone has to start it and in the end, blogging and talking and putting things out there... it is no more dangerous than crossing a busy street here in Almaty (where drivers accelerate when they see a person walking across... just for sport)... besides, putting things out there is more important than getting a pittance for small ideas... although they have some idea of who the Internet audience reads, there is little knowledge of the details...

Day 2 - orienting in space...

Kazakhstan is equal parts amusement and confusion. Amusement at the perpetual recognition that everything here is still the same - as I, along with a bunch of other foreigners, get scammed at the consular office in the airport in the process of getting a visa... The Kazakh visa has a shifting price - officially $60, it swiftly turns into $80 and then just as swiftly into eur 70 when it turns out some of us do not have the greenery. At 5am it is difficult to argue and all I can do is laugh and try to help a hapless german that doesn't quite understand why the woman behind the counter is shoving his money back in his face. They have a predilection here for banknotes that are new and unsullied with no regard for notions of 'legal tender'. It's illogical and the scams are obvious when instead of $80 the same german is told to pay eur 70, but all of us, there in that terminally slow line, do not argue - the power lies with the consular office and they can run their small time scam as long as they let us have the visa and enter the country. So we watch with a tinge of amusement, as the consular office workers leaf through binders with papers that may indicate our permission to enter the country and then fill out the stickers that go into our passports, painstakingly by hand.

Having gotten scammed even before I technically step onto the motherland soil, I feel that I have been properly greeted already, nostalgia swiftly giving way to recognition of the odd way of living here that I have little desire to experience fully... pretty much ever. Yet there is so much going on here.. deep under the skin of the city and its inhabitants that span the gamut of types, races and social classes. I stare at the little social moments that happen around me at a wifi cafe that is frequented by young socially advanced and mobile adults as well as the handful of foreigners that visit this place... and I feel utterly overwhelmed... How am I to really get to an understanding of what is gonig on here... technologically, socially, culturally... in a way that is useful for understanding that bigger picture of human relating I so want to build up?

This time, in comparison to a year ago, there seem to be somewhat more foreigners about, certainly far more iphones in the hands of teens and business people. The pace of life is still the same relaxed "at some point within the next hour or two we might meet" kind of attitude. In the center of town, there are many impeccably dressed people, a lot of labels and many women on impossibly tall spiky heels strutting along somewhat unkempt pavement. The frenetic pace of change that was evident between 08 and 09 has slowed, with the same cafe's and bars still in evidence, the same internet businesses persevering and little movement in competition-challenged areas of telecommunication. I am told, offhand, that the governing party has established a company that is taking over large sectors of the building and real estate development industry through the use of legalisms and force which might indicate a particular logic and vision of the future of the current governing body. I need to figure out what that might mean for technology, telecoms, surveillance and the development of public access even as I realize how quickly these conditions are likely to shift.

What I notice more then anything though is that it is gorgeous and sunny, warm and quiet. This is Denmark talking though... I am thoroughly enjoying the sun as I wait for my first contact to arrive at the cafe... in a very Kazakh way sometime in the next hour.