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For the past few days the Russian Internet has been shaken by one of the first instances of bloggers  collectively rebelling against a corporation, proactively using the blogosphere to cause a major disruption in its physical operations and forcing a potential inquiry into the company's activities by Russian authorities.

Here's a short summary of the events ((I should also say that there is very little about this story available in English, the only brief report I managed to find in English is here). On Friday, Oct 12,  a LiveJournal blogger nicknamed Brockhurst wrote about his elderly mother who, on hearing a health-related program on the radio, rang his son and asked to borrow money for some super expensive but supposedly very effective medication (Gravikol21).

After he did some research about the medication, it turned out to have no magic (or even medical) powers at all;  it is simple gelatin mixed with fruit flavor (the real cost of such "medication" would be just a few bucks, while Farmit, the company in question, was selling it, mostly to elders, at more than $1000). The original post contained the contact details of the company and encouraged readers of the blog to call in, complain, and also to get in touch with the respective regulatory body to file a complaint.

Brockhurst's post triggered a torrent of comments (more than 3000 in the first few days), most of which were very critical of the company's ethics and the media's eagerness to run such advertising. Subsequent research by LiveJournal bloggers revealed that Gravikol21 was heavily promoted in "infomercials" that run on many popular radio stations, including the most popular oppositional radio station in Russia "Echo Moskvy". It only took a few hours for bloggers to start publicizing even more names and numbers: of Farmit's management and sales personnel, of "Echo Moskvy" advertising department, of lawyers who can take on the case.

Fast forward 5 days and the Gravikol21 story is heavily discussed in the mainstream media, by members of parliament, and some of the best lawyers in the country (the story eventually got prime-time coverage on RTR, a major Russian state TV channel; here is a link to the YouTube video). How did that happen and what platforms have the bloggers utilized to get such prominence?

First, as is already to be expected, there is LiveJournal, the platform of choice for many socially and politically active bloggers in Russia; LiveJournal  was the central platform for compiling, archiving, and sorting out all data related to the case. It also served as a primary notification system that followed and promptly distributed news about all new developments in the case.

It's important to note that various communities that appeared on LiveJournal and a few other social networking sites are the result of spontaneous emergence and uncoordinated actions by bloggers rather than carefully planned strategies. This spontaneous emergence of a virtual movement of  "concerned citizens" facilitated by social networks may hold the key to fostering greater social and political change in Russia.

These newly formed online communities were also instrumental in producing and then distributing instructions on how Farmit's operations can be destabilized. One could easily access a whole menu of options of how to help the campaign within seconds-- many of those steps were even prioritized, so one could make a decision as to how much damage they want to inflict and how needed is each action (see more below on specific actions taken).

Second, there are web-sites of mainstream media that have run stories about the affair and have added additional legitimacy to the LiveJournal campaign (all links and references to the campaign from the MSM were carefully added and stored on various LiveJournal resources). The most visible community that was formed to document the developments of the affair bears the name "Farma Fake" and has united several hundred bloggers in just the first few days.

Third, phone communication were used to wreck damage on Farmit (one blogger estimates that more than 21,000,000 --- that's right, 21 million calls -- were placed in the 5-6 days since the bloggers took on the case. The strategy here was manifold. Primarily, the objective was to place enough calls to keep the call center too occupied to deal with genuine orders that may be coming from defrauded seniors. However, there were some covert intentions as well like putting psychological pressure on the company and its staff (needless to say, many of those who called in felt obliged to express their negative feelings and curse in the good Russian tradition).

It's interesting to note how the LiveJournal community has arrived at such a high number of calls. They did so by publicizing the phone number of Farmit's call center in the context of regular ads non-related to pharmaceuticals that may be of high interest to regular non-blogging folks. This explains the appearance of ads about very affordable and fully furnished flats in the center of Moscow that can be rented at the Farmit's number; or about a TV show that is offering free lunches for its audience; or about all sorts of services -- including sexual ones-- that were also offered at the same number (this post is a real "call to arms" with detailed instructions on this).

The ads were distributed both offline and online, most of them ending up on special advertising portals that draw a very specific niche audience. Undoubtedly, such a strategy paid off; many people who didn't even know that Farmit existed were exhausting the company's call-center capacities by placing random inquiries about unrelated subjects (FYI: some LiveJournal bloggers have estimated that an ad about a cheap flat in Moscow can generate about 500-600 calls per day).

This was asymmetric warfare in full display – but the crucial difference now is that even the insurgency is distributed and that most of the parties involved in the attack are not fully aware of the exact collective impact of their actions. Is it premature to talk about human bots hijacked by the good intentions of the digital Robin Hoods?

To be fair to bloggers, they were not entirely anti-tech in their phone attacks; some set their modems to the auto-dial mode and those kept ringing the call center and welcoming its personnel to the standard modem noise!

Most of those who called in on purpose and not because they were misinformed could be generally split into three big camps: those who hanged up or went silent after getting connected, those who tried to appeal to the decency of the Farmit staff by either cursing them or trying to reasonable explain the problem, and those who placed orders for "Gravikol 21". This third group  wrecked most havoc on the Farmit operations, possibly halting them at some point. By placing orders to non-existing locations or by canceling the orders after the couriers have arrived, the callers managed to distract Farmit from fulfilling the genuine orders. Even if it's just one per cent of those who called in placed an order, this means that 210,000 orders had to be fulfilled within just 2-3 days, a task that sounds nearly impossible even for a big pharma company. Obviously, the ensuring effect on the moral of the couriers should not be underestimated.

Curiously, what happened  is very reminiscent of the principles of cyber warfare applied to real life. Stretching operations of a company to a maximum by placing fake order requests sounds very similar to what happens in cyberspace when a server gets overloaded with too many requests. It's one of the few examples of how the philosophy of a DoS attack has successfully spilled into real life and nearly halted the logistics of a real company, not a server.

However, the bloggers didn't confine their activism to cyberspace or destruction only. Many of them quickly composed and printed out leaflets that explained the nature of the fraud and why Farmavit and its products should be avoided by all costs. This campaign targeted senior citizens, most of whom are not Internet users. Bloggers splitted the physical distribution of such leaflets and quickly started dropping them in postal boxes in their neighborhoods. Curiously enough, they decided to provide a link and some a short explanation to various LiveJournal communities, to make sure that the public at large learns more about the potential of alternative media.

In addition, many bloggers placed inquiries to various state insitutions about the legality of Farmit's activities as well as those of the radio companies that are advertising Farmit's products. And although the Internet served as a hyper-mobilization place that allowed bloggers to learn about the official numbers to call and the templates of the forms to fill in, it was still what they decide to do with in real-life that has the potential to make the biggest influence on the case.

However, the key aspect to the Farmit affair is that it has revealed how networked the Russian virtual public space is. In Russia today, LJ is not just a blogging platform, it's also a salon that's not to be missed by anybody aspiring for a public career. As more and more influential people join the ranks of bloggers, they get much more accessible to regular folk and all sorts of collaborations happen.

It was not THAT important what bloggers were writing; it was much more important who was reading it. Blogging on LiveJournal has acquired such a big status in Russia that this virtual space attracts lawyers, politicians, journalists, NGO people, businessmen and many other non-blogging professions (many of them, for the sake of additional publicity, but this doesn't anyhow make their involvement less meaningful).

The nodes and connections that LiveJournal has created and facilitated in Russia are unmatched. Here's a good example of a society with weak civil society institutions taking full advantage of the democratization/deliberation opportunities offered by the Web. As collaboration and debate are stifled elsewhere, the blogosphere has turned into both a salon and a workshop.

Here are only a few examples of how the networked component has helped the case to acquire higher prominence.  Evgeny Roizman-- who is also a member of the Duma--keeps quite a popular LiveJournal, which he turned into a platform of better communication with the voters, seeking out stories and examples of all sorts of irregularities and injustices that happen. Very early into the Farmit case, Roizman promised to fill in an official investigation with the prosecutor's office, which guarantees that the case will get more attention from the state authorities. The same situation is with lawyers -- the most prominent ones are also present on LiveJournal and they were asked to comment on the legality of the case in comments to their posts.

Perhaps, an even greater illustration of how the networked public space amplifies the deeds of cyberactivists is the unexpected coverage that the story has gotten in the mainstream media. It's common knowledge that many journalists in Russia regularly use LiveJournal as a shopping place for new story ideas and it's increasingly common to see ideas floating from blogs to MSM and not just from MSM to blogs. However, a new emerging trend among the Russian MSM is to cover stories that receive big attention from the blogosphere (so, the Farmit campaign is widely covered not only because it's a controversial case, but also because so many bloggers have written and care about it). That's a never-losing strategy, as the more you write about popular blog posts, the more traffic you see coming back to your site.

But what's also clear is that the networked aspect-- although never explicitly stated--is implicitly understood and manipulated by all parties. It's obvious that the mainstream  media would not pick up a story until there is a N number of comments attached to it or an X number of conversations that were triggered by a particular blog post. This makes it very easy for bloggers to raise the stories they deeply care about to the front of the MSM attention. All they need to do is to leave a comment on the original post (the most popular Russian blog search engines, Blogs Yandex, tracks most commented posts in the blogosphere and even has a frequently updated TOP 5).  This strategy becomes even more effective if one reposts the original post on their own blog and then asks the readers to do the same and go comment on the original post at the original blog. This networked publicity that the original post eventually receives propels it into the top charts at blog search portals, which almost automatically guarantees attention from MSM and non-blogging public. When was it more easier to raise an issue you deeply care about to the level of universal attention?

The relationship between blogs and the mainstream media in the Farmit case has one more dimension to it. It's a very sad indication of how bad things are with Russian media that the only truly oppositional (and, arguably, the most professional) radio station in the country was caught airing deceptive advertising. While it's likely that "Echo Moskvy" didn't break any specific Russian law, it should be really unnerving for the radio bosses to see bloggers finding faults with the super professionals. Perhaps, it's also a sign of poor business models of most Russian media if they are forced to earn money by airing advertising that is openly deceptive. Paradoxically, it's the new media camp that is addressing these issues-- can the LiveJournal bloggers help improve the media climate in Russia? It was particularly welcoming to see bloggers demanding each other to substantiate their posts with links to sources and refusing to accept unsubstantiated claims without links to the sources, in fear of disinformation.

Perhaps, the best illustration of how the bloggers are trying to break the stereotype that "whatever happens in LiveJournal, stays in LiveJournal" is their concentrated attempt to get a question about Gravikol-21 included in the Q&A session with President Putin that is taking place on October 18th. It's not the first time that the LiveJournal crowd is trying to have Putin answer a question everybody has voted on (previous attempts have included downright humorous and weird questions that didn't make it to the list). However, even if the Gravikol21 question doesn't make the list this time either, bloggers may be lucky to have the president's office pay closer attention to the case because of the bloggers' universal fixation on the issue.

It's particularly funny that those who resist becoming parts of this networked space are going to lose more than gain. This is probably what must have recently occurred to Alexey Venediktov, the top figure at "Echo Moskvy", whose apparently fake LiveJournal blog started getting hundreds of angry and humorous comments about the radio station's role in the affair. It seems that Venediktov would be much to get himself a real blog and openly speak about the issue and the station's role in it rather than leaving it to his impersonators who are doing it very well so far. You'd better be prepared and talk back rather than wait till somebody starts doing it on your behalf.

There is a certain myth about apathy that has poisoned any social and political engagement of the Russian youth. The Farmit affair has again proved that these young people are quite engaged; they just show their engagement differently and in ways that are hard to capture through traditional measurement methodology. Yet, just by looking at the solidarity that this younger generation exhibits with the generation of their parents and grand-parents, one can feel relatively safe that LiveJournal has not killed their humanity; instead, it may have amplified it and made the suffering of others more transparent, more immediate, and more neary, if you will, even though this "nearby" may be entirely virtual, not real.

It would also be incorrect to treat the consequences -- whatever they are -- of the Farmit case in isolation. One should only watch the "Farma Fake" community on LiveJournal to realize that the public inquiry into fake pharmaceuticals is not going to be limited to Gravikol21. There are well over a dozen of other suspicious products that have been listed by the members of that LiveJournal community and that list keeps growing. This is a very creative use of crowdsourcing: members of the community also help in finding, scanning, and documenting various other ads for such products that may have appeared in free metro newspapers, for example. The community has gotten such a momentum and public attention that one can be sure that matters would not stop here; it's quite likely that the growing ranks of populists in the Russian government will actually do something about the frauds.

It's also hard to miss a host of social problems that were unveiled and deliberated upon thanks to the thousands of comments that appeared on LiveJournal in relation to the case.  The destitute state of seniors in Russia, the commercialization of the medical industry and most hospitals, the lack of state funding that pushes hospitals towards this, the overly aggressive marketing and the viral sales that accompany it, the lack of proper media controls on deceptive advertising -- this only a very brief list of issues that engaged Russian bloggers for many hours of thinking and arguing. It's hard to remember a time when a program on Russian TV or an article in a Russian newspaper did the same; most of them today are just dull parodies of the discussions that are happening online.

And anybody concerned with the ethics of the anti-Farmit campaign should not worry. Those who were most active in suggesting creative ideas for wrecking most damage on the company took extraordinary steps to prevent potential third-parties from being hurt in the case (there was some quite active discussion and investigation into whether the call center belongs to the company or not, whether it handles other issues, whether the couriers are paid regardless of where they need to travel and for how long, etc).

The anti-Farmit campaign was anything but the mob rule. Paradoxically, the bloggers were quite well-versed in the legality of what they were doing, were often referring to specific sections of the criminal code, and generally upheld the rule of law wherever they could. This can't be really said about the Farmit folks; so, to teach them some law, some bloggers chose a particularly creative way of resistance: they were tirelessly faxing of several pages of the Russian criminal code to Farmit's fax number. It's hard to argue that whoever took part in this campaign has become less informed about their own rights and responsibilities; if anything, it has only creased bloggers' awareness about the legal universe around them.

***

Here is some amazing art work produced by the Russian bloggers -- courtesy of LJ user Delicateline) :

The poster reads "No, I am not buying from fraudsters".

This one says "Say No to Gravikol" -- the poster encourages people to place phone calls to the Farmit office.