An absolute disaster. Just look at what negative selection in government staffing leads to. There is this peculiar creature called the “internet ombudsman,” whose official role is to serve as a link between Russia’s IT industry and the president of the Russian Federation. The post is held by some obscure creep named Dmitry Marinichev. No one paid him any attention before, but yesterday he made a name for himself:
By now, the Putin state has long since unlocked the achievement badge “No official ever tells a word of truth,” so we expected to hear from the internet ombudsman only the usual outrageous nonsense: - our programmers have surpassed Google, Apple, and even McDonald’s; - the Defense Ministry’s “scientific companies” (military research units) created a product that enabled our pilots to defeat ISIS in a week; - one little old lady went into the woods, turned on GPS, and got lost, but then switched on GLONASS and ended up right at Sberbank, where she was paid an extra pension.
But lying in government is yesterday’s model; the future belongs to belligerent idiots.
There is hardly anything to say about military presence as a way of forcing your backward technologies on others—that was our recent past. The USSR did exactly that. Only the natives were not complete fools, so instead of paying cash for outdated machinery, equipment, and technology, they took it on credit. That is how Cuba, Mozambique, and various other “Venezuelas” ended up with their famous hundreds of billions in debt. As you know, those debts eventually had to be written off.
But the part about programmers? How can anyone spout such nonsense?
Compare that with what Obama says when addressing the nation (the subtitles are machine-generated, but the meaning is clear):
"If we want America to remain at the forefront of technology, we need computer science to grow in our schools and for everyone to learn programming. Don’t just buy a video game—make one".
Translated from political language into plain English: industry and services need new programmers, the U.S. does not have enough of them, and huge amounts of money are going to Indians, Chinese, and Russians doing offshore programming. So let’s train more programmers, keep more of that money at home, and reduce unemployment.
So Russia’s response, apparently, is this: let’s not produce programmers—they know English and are in demand all over the world. Let’s train stable hands and mushroom pickers instead. They won’t worship Western companies—they won’t have time, because they’ll be too busy gathering cloudberries so they don’t starve to death.
A catastrophe. Someone appointed a fool with views like these to that position, which means this is state policy.
The Kremlin is full of Russia’s real enemies; they are leading the nation toward defeat, including by imposing technological backwardness on us.
To them, “good” technology exists only when it belongs to a state company and can be stolen from. But when millions of citizens possess technology and knowledge and can support their families without depending on the state—that is harmful and dangerous in their eyes.