Applebaum and Doctorow – Two Important Observers, Thinkers, and Writers

Recommended people to follow, as they see society in a new and critical light

Photo by Hugues de BUYER-MIMEURE on Unsplash

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum wrote “Gulag: A History” back in 2003, after the archives of the now defunct Soviet Union had been opened to researchers – and revealed some of the monstrosities that had been going on during Soviet times.¹

I was a student of Russian and history at the time, and noticed how her book was received with reluctance by the “real” historians, because she wasn’t such one – she was a journalist, and journalistic works are not generally recognized by scientists.

The topic was, of course, the Gulag prison camps in which many people had been held in prison during the times – and many had died. Tough camps, made famous also by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn through his books “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, and by other writers and historians, such as Bent Jensen with, among other works, his book “Gulag and Oblivion”.

Just like the other two, Applebaum is very critical to the Russian society, and not just because of its past with Gulag’s and all, but also because of its continuation into modern Russia with suppression of freedom and a general disrespect for human lives.

Since then, the award-winning journalist has continued writing, and she now has a back catalogue of several books, of which most are about Russia. She also writes articles, both on Substack at “Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum” and at The Atlantic, and she always demonstrates both a careful treatment of the topic, an insight into human nature, and a daring approach to a topic that easily causes rejection and criticism. Her own website links to many of her articles.

With her humanist point of view, she is of course skeptical to the new US administration, and she has been paying special attention to the somewhat strange behavior of D. Trump and his advisors toward Russia and Ukraine, in the apparent attempt to end the Ukrainian war. She has pointed out how several of the involved seem to have economic interests that may be the driving force behind the politics and the decisions made. A thought, I would find obvious to other news media to pay attention to and investigate further, which just doesn’t happen – another reason for listening extra carefully to Anne Applebaum, as you won’t get this perspective and the details supporting it from anyone else.

One of her most recent books is “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World”, about how autocrat governments around the world seem to cooperate in their attacks on democracy and democracies, making their combined impact much larger than otherwise expectable from the limited influence of each of these countries individually.

Anne Applebaum is full of insights and thoughts about the world, and I sometimes wonder why she isn’t cited more, and why I don’t see more references on social media or in the news to her thoughts, articles and books.

But from me, in any case, a recommendation to check out some of her writings and to follow her wherever she writes. Unless you prefer this kind of insight to be silenced, you’ll probably find it rewarding.

Cory Doctorow

I’m not sure if I actually knew about Cory Doctorow before I followed a link to one of his articles, that had been reprinted in Wired: “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok”.

What was special about that article was that it explained some of what needed an explanation – something that I had felt, along with many others – that things somehow got worse all the time with online services. There was something fishy going on.

Normally, you would expect a popular service to hold on to what made it popular, but it often felt like exactly the most popular elements of social media were abandoned, to be replaced with something less interesting. At the same time, it was apparently impossible to copy the successes of the most famous people on the different social media platforms. It was like if they had seen some opportunities that just weren’t there for the rest of us.

And Doctorow explained what it was that happened here. A saddening truth, to be honest, but reveling, and suddenly, when reading the article, many other aspects of the modern world began making sense.

It was a revolutionary article. Cory Doctorow is very productive, and he has written several more articles about the topic, and, most recently, supplemented with a whole book about it – called “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It”. He regularly posts on his websites “Cory Doctorow’s Craphound.com” and “Pluralistic”, where the latter also offers a newsletter subscription.

Doctorow is a spokesman for the reduction of many of the ties we meet in modern life, based on such as immaterial rights and the restrictions maintained by big companies on how the rest of us can live our lives. He is one of the few public figures, I know of, who both finds it attractive to live in the USA and be a socialist. Not that he is appraising the USA for making life easy for the working class, but there are several other aspects of life also being interesting, so, somehow he has ended up calling the USA his home, after being born in Canada and having lived in the UK for a while.

He has written quite many book of different kinds, including several science fiction novels, but the above-mentioned book has a very urgent appeal, and even though life is bigger than the term he coined, “enshittification”, and the actual situation on social media, the book describes much more than the immediate – I find it quite important that more of us pay attention to the development that is going on in business life, making some of the most important companies to many of us becoming increasingly hostile toward us.

Most of all, his voice is needed in a time when we are all close to losing the last bits of free choice in life.

1. Later, the archives were closed again, and since that time, the Russian government has tried to speak up the past to a more positive level – now also considering Stalin to be a hero of the past, rather than the mass-murderer depicted in the many research and journalistic works of the beginning 2000s.

This is a logical development, as no nation and nation-building can survive a total rejection of the past – Russia was already denouncing the “kings’ time”, meaning the imperial Russia, which had been done solidly during the communist time, convincing everybody that it was good there was a revolution to get rid of the Zars and the nobles, with their inhuman treatment of ordinary people – and if they should denounce their own part of history as well, during communist time, there would be nothing left that could positively define them as a nation.