Back in 2012, Vayno published an article in a Russian academic journal, and in the past few days hundreds if not thousands of Russians have struggled to deduce meaning from its twenty-nine pages. The article is called “The Capitalization of the Future”; the pages that follow do little to shed light on the meaning of the title or, really, much else. The text seems to propose a new term for the time-space continuum. The term is “protocol.” Vayno’s first job in Putin’s administration, between 2002 and 2007, happens to have been in the protocol service. One suspects that this was where he got one of the ideas for this article, expressed in a complicated table called “A Model Protocol for Shaping the Time-Space Relationship.” The table, which resembles a maze, contains a number of dead ends and a few circular paths that proceed from “Concept of the World” through “Thought and Expectations” to “The Future.” (“Knowledge” and “Uncertainty” appear to be optional.) The article also contains a dense description of a device called the Nooscope, which Vayno has apparently patented. The Nooscope, which “consists of a network of space scanners,” scopes out the noosphere. Or, as the article puts it, “The nooscope’s sensor network gives clear readings of co-occurrences in time and space, beginning with latest-generation bank cards and ending with smartest.” [...]
Though fewer than a hundred and forty pages, the book appears to offer nothing less than a recipe for global domination. Written as a theory of everything, the book covers all of history and all of human nature, which makes it difficult to summarize. The basic idea, though, seems to be absolute triumph through the use of tactics from sambo—Soviet martial arts—in everything, especially in economics. That is, if one assumes that there is a basic idea in the book. The text spans centuries of history and leaps across disciplines. This, for example, is how the book analyzes the Russian Army’s battle against Napoleon, in 1812: “If you are at Point A and you need to strike at Point B, then you will be forced to make a one-two strike, from A to B by way of Zero. That is too long a strike. But if you place yourself at Point Zero, then your strike will be short and merciless.” Sambo happens to be the sport in which the young Putin excelled before he took up judo and excelled in that. The sambo principle that Vayno seems to like is striking when the opponent least expects it. [...]
Why, then, does Putin need to reshuffle his men at all, and why does his doing so unfailingly attract attention? As with more and more aspects of contemporary Russia, the best explanation was offered more than half a century ago by Hannah Arendt, when she defined the true role of Stalin’s party purges: they were “an instrument of permanent instability.” The state of permanent instability, in turn, was the ultimate instrument of control, which sapped the energies and attention of all. The best way to insure being able to strike when it is least expected is to scramble all expectations. Perhaps that’s why Vayno’s “Protocol” turns the time-space continuum into a maze. Then again, maybe that’s what the nooscope is for.
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