>Then it would maybe just be a matter of time until they also closed down access to Spotify in Russia. But it would at least be a statement, saving the face of Daniel Ek.
Okay, so the author's idea of bravery is to pull a meaningless PR stunt that does nothing for Russians but instead saves the face of the company's CEO in the eyes of anglosphere online bloggers? For once an actual instance of behavior where the overused 'virtue signaling' phrase makes sense.
The smart move for companies is to comply with these laws to a superficial extent while silently keeping as much dissident content online as possible and staying off the radar of regulators.
> The smart move for companies is to comply with these laws to a superficial extent while silently keeping as much dissident content online as possible and staying off the radar of regulators.
I don't disagree, but I think we also have to consider that a "PR stunt" by spotify would be part of boycotts by many, many other companies.
A hypothetical Russian that still has no clue what their government is doing will be magnitudes more likely to notice spotify stopped working, apple doesn't sell new devices, Ikea is closing, than accidentally find one slighly critical bit of content. All of this happening at once is very hard to ignore, also for pessimist apolitical persons (people who don't like putin, but won't do something against him as long as they can do their own thing). That kind of person is quite common in Eastern Europe to my experience.
Ofc the Russian government could frame this as everybody else being mean to them, and instead of making Russians critical it could polarize them in that way, so this is not clear cut the best strategy as well.
Maybe it would be even better to have them ban you for trying to speak truth to power (if this is possible without putting your staff in harms way).
>A hypothetical Russian that still has no clue what their government is doing will be magnitudes more likely to notice spotify stopped working, apple doesn't sell new devices, Ikea is closing, than accidentally find one slighly critical bit of content.
Okay, then what? I guess the assumption is that once they find out, they will find an accurate/neutral representation of what's going on, and then go protest or whatever. What makes you think that'll be the case, rather than them being fed whatever anti-western propaganda the government has concocted? Has western sanctions made the people of north korea realize "what their government is doing"?
This is more of an American thing - the slow and subtle ceding of autonomy and power to corporates, with the expectations that they should behave like country states and be political. It's a very dangerous idea that Americans are being slowly brainwashed into, to repose more and more faith on corporates than their own democracy! This is the kind of thinking that lead to imperialism, with the Dutch East India Company being the poster boy of the idea as the world's richest corporate, with one of the largest private army in the world conquering and even ruling colonies.
The idea that foreign companies shouldn't submit to the laws, rule and regulations of another country is a retrograde colonial idea that reeks of both racism and greed. CEOs are not elected representatives nor seasoned politicians.
> The idea that foreign companies shouldn't submit to the laws, rule and regulations of another country is a retrograde colonial idea that reeks of both racism and greed.
More to the point, one cannot dictate the actions of another under pressure.
It's one thing to have a theoretical model of what others _should_ do when confronted with aggression.
It's quite another to stay on the theoretical course when confronted by state actors backed by guns.
Another dimension is those affected by our decisions. One might go down in a blaze of Leeroy Jenkins[1] glory if it's only oneself in the blaze.
If ones actions put others in harm's way, things tend to get far more cautious.
SUMMARY: it gets hard to be too harsh in these situations.
As much as I would like to agree with parts of your argument, I find it difficult. Maybe because I grew up in Germany and near the Iron Curtain to be more precise.
There is an alternative, as a company can either be organized around values like money, shareholder value, opportunism or values like still making money but not at all costs. Acting based on humanistic values.
This is a spectrum. And lots of grey between black and white. One could look to be one thing and behind the scenes actively act contrarian to this outside facade.
Take many examples of people or companies in oppressive regimes that use their influence to protect others.
For example out of personal interest I studied a lot of stories of people in the ranks of the NS regime (2nd World War) that did use their role to secure people being hunted by the state's ideology and others within the NS ranks. As well as many normal people.
People like from average Else up to government officials.
What I am incoherently rambling about is the fact that one can't always see the details from the outside while things unfold. These people would have been seen as part of the system. Not as actively working against it. Because if the later they would not have been able to work against the system.
On the other hand there were a lot of opportunistic people as well. That would have looked a lot like the other category of people described.
Maybe Spotify is just opportunistic. Maybe there is a hidden positive agenda. We don't yet know. So I would not try to have a definitive answer in my head.
I appreciate this point but my take on this is that corporations are running scared of social media...paranoid of normies boycottong their brands. To me this is good and is what was predicted as the next wave of progress by people like William Grieder. Citizens voting with their dollars.
Mother's boycotted GE into leaving the weapons manufacturing business in the 1980s. There is an explicit policy against any type of weapons manufacturing inside the company to this day.
I do agree with your premise that this is inappropriate since power is supposed to rest with elected representatives but I until we ban corporations from political contributions (any activity) then we will have to live with bullying corporations via social media.
No, the 'smart move' for most companies is to withdraw.
Putin gains almost everything by having his censorship and then having Russians enjoy regular products and services.
Russians still support the war and incursion, at least partly due to propaganda, and they won't miss a beat (pun intended) whatever Spotify censors.
One of the most important things we can do to 'signal' to the Russian public that 'it's bad' is to pull products and services that they know and love.
It's not hugely material from an economic perspective (though it will definitely hit), but not having Starbucks, McDs, Coke, Nike, Spotify, Apple, Netflix - which means maybe no music, entertainment, sports, football - it's important.
It's one of the only ways that every day Russians can 'feel' that they are definitely begin excluded. You want this war? No lattes, Iron Mans, your Volvo will go into disrepair and your iPhone is degraded.
For some services, like Google, which is an 'access point outside of Russia' - it's the opposite, we should do everything we can to keep Russian ability to somehow 'get past the firewall' - that is where your strategy would apply.
But for consumers services, no - we should be withdrawing.
Today Fedex, MS, Volskwagen announced withdrawal. I believe Coke, Starbucks, McD will follow suit.
I should note that it seems the companies with the most 'boots on the ground, dispersed' have the toughest time. It's easy for digital companies to stop/start, harder for those with factories (i.e. Volvo), but even harder for those with broad brand awareness, a lot of local entities and possibly local supply chains, like McDs.
But McDs, though not very important, is kind of like the 'biggest symbol' as they were the thing that was had first after the Berlin Wall came down. Getting a McDs was a signal that the country had entered modernity. It's a bit perverse (!) but it's still populist. Most people like McD fries.
> Here we may take a break to consider the fact that Russian is not only the language of one country, Russia. It is also the native language for millions of Ukrainians and Belarusians. Therefore it is far from obvious that a Russian-language podcast initiative should be based in Russia.
The fact that some people speak Russian in Ukraine/Belarus does not mean that it’s better to do it there. This is like trying to make an English-language podcast initiative in Republic of Ireland just because English is also the language spoken there. Furthermore, as far as I know Ukraine try to promote Ukrainian language more to distant further from Russia. Hence I don’t think it’s that crazy that they opt for Russia-based office rather than elsewhere, also the fact that there are more Russians meaning that they have bigger target audience.
> Here we may take a break to consider the fact that Russian is not only the language of one country, Russia. It is also the native language for millions of Ukrainians and Belarusians. Therefore it is far from obvious that a Russian-language podcast initiative should be based in Russia. For an organization serious about defending free speech, it might have made more sense to locate the office in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv: a predominantly Russian-speaking city, which in recent years has also served as a refuge for many dissidents from Russia and Belarus.
Also, earlier:
> Yet, a better alternative would have been to keep operating, while declaring openly that their media machine will be available for the dissidents in Russia
To read an article like that and and come away thinking the argument being made is "Russian is spoken in Ukraine and Belarus therefore it should be based there" is... well, unlikely tbh.
I wanted to add a bit of footnote commentary on how I understand Russian to be spoken in Ukraine.
Millions of native Ukrainians, especially in the eastern side of Ukraine, exclusively speak Russian, and in fact speak it much better than Ukrainian. [1] (Almost all Ukrainians understand Ukrainian perfectly fine, and even study it in school, but a large contingent don't speak it as their mother tongue.) It's much, much more than just "some Ukrainians", and in fact, it's part of what characteristically and culturally distinguishes some eastern and western/rural and urban regions of Ukraine. [2]
Going into anecdotal territory: This was surprising to me. I hosted a family native to Kharkiv and discussed this topic. I'd think speaking Ukrainian would be a part of one's heritage worth preserving, so it was surprising that speaking Ukrainian wasn't a fluent affair for them, and they also didn't have much interest in promoting the language. Their remarks, extremely simplified, were basically that Russian is so broadly understood that it is just efficient to use, especially because of the internet. They don't want the Ukrainian language to die, but they also don't find it as a practical "daily driver". Their children know Ukrainian from having to learn it in school (but don't really speak it), and their grand-children—who moved to the USA—don't know it at all and only speak Russian.
I'm less familiar with Belarus, but it was an almost identical sentiment about Russian and Belarusian for a Minsk-native family that hosted me.
[1] "Russian is the native language of 29.6% of Ukraine's population [...]." "According to a survey conducted in 2006-2007 by Gallup, 83% of the respondents preferred to conduct the Gallup interview in Russian." "For the preferred language of work, an equal amount chose either Ukrainian or Russian (37%) and 21% communicated bilingually. The study polled 10,071 individuals and held a 1% margin of error." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine
This happens also in catalonia (Spain) where I'm from.
Internet has made the breach greater, we might have great catalan poets from centuries ago, and a rich culture and history, but no youtuber will stream in catalan when in spanish they reach a 100x audience for example...
I'm glad I learnt it as my mother tongue though, being bilingual makes both learning other languages easier, and latin is like the wildcard of word roots for all of 'em (I can speak well English, Spanish, Catalan, and some French)
I think it can be compared to e.g. The Irish learning Gaelic. It's part of the identity for some and spoken in the west of the island by a few. The government invests in keeping the heritage alive and you see it e.g. in how names are written. But many Irish don't speak a word of Gaelic without feeling less Irish as a result.
Ukrainian is a bit like that except it's easier to learn if you already speak Russian.
There is nothing bold about halting trade with Russia right now; as far as can be told there is a great deal of social and political support for anyone making such a choice.
To be honest, companies making emotional decisions is more concerning to me. It is reasonable and to be encouraged if businesses want to be a moral-less dumb pipe. Spotify is not equipped to make geopolitical judgements about what is and isn't a just war or propaganda & can achieve nothing against the Russian military. If they just stick to following the law that is fine. If something is required of them then the military leadership can ask them to do it.
This is an extreme position, and IMO unrealistic.
The key term here is "a moral-less dumb pipe."
I'm not sure it's even realistic to expect "dumb pipes" to me morally neutral, but that doesn't matter because Spotify is not trying to be a dumb pipe.
This is about podcasting, so let's stick with that. We already have/had a dumb pipe for podcasting. RSS. Podcasting is more free than most online media specifically for this reason. It uses an open protocol instead of a corporate platform. Notice how there is no post about RSS' policy regarding this war.
Spotify is, currently, trying to obtain exclusivity over top podcasts... taking podcasts off the "dumb pipe." The goal is to eventually dominate podcasting as they do streaming music. That's the opposite of platform neutrality, dumb pipes, decentralized moral choices, etc.
If you want dumb pipes, that idea is not really compatible with corporate fiefdoms in 2022 practice.
> This is an extreme position, and IMO unrealistic.
We're watching an escalating conflict that could easily involve nuclear armed powers. Maybe we should try something extreme that doesn't involve asking Spotify to escalate the situation further? Heaven help us, now is the time to be de-escalating rather than throwing more sticks and stones at Russia that do nothing but annoy people.
How is it that you think a corporation is not capable of making geopolitical judgments? You don't think they have a PR department? You don't think they have leadership that can read the news?
> Spotify is not equipped to make geopolitical judgements about what is and isn't a just war or propaganda
how hard it is? when only one of the 2 sides bombs civilians and causes millions of people to run away (as of now 1.4M, mostly women/children/elderly, have already crossed the border while many more is still running toward the border) just for the reason of ethnical difference, and thus committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Edit in response to comment below:
>No one had ever mentioned Ukrainians being "discriminated" by Russians before the war
well, sounds like you are completely unfamiliar with history there. I'm btw a Russian, half-Ukrainian, and your lecture here on that national issue is just fully incorrect.
>This is a desperate attempt by some Ukrainians to paint a picture of Russia as being equivalent to Nazi Germany, playing the same Hitler card that Putin did to start the war.
that is just Russian propaganda, and completely unsupported by any facts.
>They are doing that to try to make the West feel morally obliged to act even if that means war spreads to the whole of Europe and potentially, turns into a nuclear war.
that again is Russian propaganda, trying to scare the West by nukes.
>Even though there is a lot of suffering happening in Ukraine
the suffering has ethnical reason and thus it is genocide
> and Russia is indeed bombing cities in the fight with the Ukrainian army
that it Russian propaganda. Russia is bombing cities without any connection to any fight. Just look at all those aftermath videos - there is no Ukrainian tanks/etc among the destroyed buildings/etc. For example, today they shot down a pilot bombing a city and interviewed him - "They told us the city was empty", and of course he lied as it was a guy well known for his Syrian civilian bombings. He didn't even try to say anything about any military targets.
On the other side there are tons of videos of Russian armor burnt in the cities. Why did they come into cities endangering the civilians?
How the hell has this suddenly become an explanation for the war (or even a thing in the first place)??? No one had ever mentioned Ukrainians being "discriminated" by Russians before the war, quite the opposite, Russian-ethnics and Ukrainians have lived peacefully in Ukraine AND Russia for generations (except for a small minority of far-right nationalists).
> committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
This is a desperate attempt by some Ukrainians to paint a picture of Russia as being equivalent to Nazi Germany, playing the same Hitler card that Putin did to start the war.
They are doing that to try to make the West feel morally obliged to act even if that means war spreads to the whole of Europe and potentially, turns into a nuclear war.
Even though there is a lot of suffering happening in Ukraine and Russia is indeed bombing cities in the fight with the Ukrainian army, it's an absolute disgrace to compare that to a genocide, and the claim Russia is trying to ethnically cleanse Ukraine should be as strongly rejected as the claim by Russia that Ukraine is governed by people with Nazi beliefs, both being ridiculous.
> Spotify had opened a representative office in Moscow. [...] Why? Seemingly just to get a bit closer to the treasuries of the region’s greatest kleptocrats.
or maybe it's easier to hire talent in Moscow (a metropolis of 17M) than Kyiv (3M), sheesh
It captured the tone of the article to me, reading in too deep to motivations of a publically traded company where there might be easily explained, boring, financial incentives. Don't know why anyone expects a corporation to take the moral high ground.
As an R. Kelly fan, this does not surprise me all. Once censorship begins it’s easier and easier to follow that well worn path. A lot of people like to mock the idea of cancel culture and pretend that it doesn’t exist - you know, the plainly disingenuous types who will say “they are a private company” out of one side of their mouth while demanding gay wedding cakes get baked out of the other. And sure there are ostensible shallow moral victories to be enjoyed by shutting your enemies up. But this impulse to control what’s said and what’s heard in the public sphere sure seems more dangerous when the stakes are higher, and increasingly it isn’t just normalized, but encouraged.
His sex crimes are unrelated to censorship or cancel culture. I agree with your non-controversial position that child abuse is abhorrent. I hope he is killed in prison. But I love his music, I still listen to it, and I'm not sorry for that.
The twitter mob against him that harassed Spotify into removing his music from their service is the literal epitome of cancel culture.
1. Take a consensus position (raping children is bad)
2. Repeat it over and over again, loudly, to make your actual point, which is that you are a good person. Not just because you don't rape children, but also because you are bravely amplifying this view that basically everyone holds
3. Make a public demand of a company that is tangentially related to the subject somehow, which if satisfied, will do exactly nothing to help or fix the problem
4. Form a mob of those interested in signalling their own virtue, who may or may not care about the motivating issue, to strong arm said company into compliance
5. Celebrate your hollow victory and briefly feel like you did something important (you did not)
Seems pretty relevant for the reasons you just stated.
Telling someone you can't like music from a child molester or that it has retroactively been deemed to not be good music is cancel card culture at its heart, the bread-and-butter most defensible part. Preventing people from procuring said music is obviously censorship.
The legality is entirely beside the point, although of note, in the case I referenced the Supreme Court found in a 7-2 decision that it was in fact legal to refuse to bake a cake for that particular gay wedding while being careful not to set a precedent. So your claim here is not universally true. Personally I would have baked the cake.
There is a contingent of the left that is happy when force and coercion are deployed so long as its done in a wider context that benefits their political aims. They argue that a baker must be forced to go against his personal values to further a particular goal that they support, but take up the exact opposite posture as soon as it suits them. For example, Twitter is a private company, of course they can ban you for saying that thing you said that doesn't conform with my political views.
At any rate, I was just trying to gesture towards a growing pack of vocal hypocrites, not re-litigate the baker decision.
This doesn’t seem any more cowardly than YouTube’s decision to ban RT. Hard to claim to be on the side of free speech when American tech companies are censoring right and left.
RT propaganda is an organic part, a psyop, of the genocidal war in Ukraine. There is nothing about free speech in refusal to support genocidal war. If anything it is a duty of any normal person (and any company consisting of such people).
Russia is known to murder dissidents. For Spotify leaders to make a stand from the safety of the US and paint a target on the backs of their Russian employees would be the cowardly option. If the employees their want to choose on their own to take a stand that's up to them, but it's not a choice that Spotify should make for them.
Do you think Putin is going to care that Spotify closed the office if they're defying his censorship laws? The (former) employees are still going to be in Russia. They're still going to be associated with Spotify and subject to arrest. This not a normal legal system where you can prove to someone in a court that you no longer worked at the company and they're going to consider the merits of your argument. Putin will want to punish someone for Spotify defying his censorship order and he'll reach out and punish whoever is available to make an example, regardless of whether they are responsible.
It is considerably worse because many people actually do not realize the extent of the censorship there, and the end result is that they are only fed falsehoods through the media.
Readit News
Okay, so the author's idea of bravery is to pull a meaningless PR stunt that does nothing for Russians but instead saves the face of the company's CEO in the eyes of anglosphere online bloggers? For once an actual instance of behavior where the overused 'virtue signaling' phrase makes sense.
The smart move for companies is to comply with these laws to a superficial extent while silently keeping as much dissident content online as possible and staying off the radar of regulators.
I don't disagree, but I think we also have to consider that a "PR stunt" by spotify would be part of boycotts by many, many other companies.
A hypothetical Russian that still has no clue what their government is doing will be magnitudes more likely to notice spotify stopped working, apple doesn't sell new devices, Ikea is closing, than accidentally find one slighly critical bit of content. All of this happening at once is very hard to ignore, also for pessimist apolitical persons (people who don't like putin, but won't do something against him as long as they can do their own thing). That kind of person is quite common in Eastern Europe to my experience.
Ofc the Russian government could frame this as everybody else being mean to them, and instead of making Russians critical it could polarize them in that way, so this is not clear cut the best strategy as well.
Maybe it would be even better to have them ban you for trying to speak truth to power (if this is possible without putting your staff in harms way).
Okay, then what? I guess the assumption is that once they find out, they will find an accurate/neutral representation of what's going on, and then go protest or whatever. What makes you think that'll be the case, rather than them being fed whatever anti-western propaganda the government has concocted? Has western sanctions made the people of north korea realize "what their government is doing"?
The idea that foreign companies shouldn't submit to the laws, rule and regulations of another country is a retrograde colonial idea that reeks of both racism and greed. CEOs are not elected representatives nor seasoned politicians.
More to the point, one cannot dictate the actions of another under pressure.
It's one thing to have a theoretical model of what others _should_ do when confronted with aggression.
It's quite another to stay on the theoretical course when confronted by state actors backed by guns.
Another dimension is those affected by our decisions. One might go down in a blaze of Leeroy Jenkins[1] glory if it's only oneself in the blaze.
If ones actions put others in harm's way, things tend to get far more cautious.
SUMMARY: it gets hard to be too harsh in these situations.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins
There is an alternative, as a company can either be organized around values like money, shareholder value, opportunism or values like still making money but not at all costs. Acting based on humanistic values.
This is a spectrum. And lots of grey between black and white. One could look to be one thing and behind the scenes actively act contrarian to this outside facade.
Take many examples of people or companies in oppressive regimes that use their influence to protect others.
For example out of personal interest I studied a lot of stories of people in the ranks of the NS regime (2nd World War) that did use their role to secure people being hunted by the state's ideology and others within the NS ranks. As well as many normal people.
People like from average Else up to government officials.
What I am incoherently rambling about is the fact that one can't always see the details from the outside while things unfold. These people would have been seen as part of the system. Not as actively working against it. Because if the later they would not have been able to work against the system.
On the other hand there were a lot of opportunistic people as well. That would have looked a lot like the other category of people described.
Maybe Spotify is just opportunistic. Maybe there is a hidden positive agenda. We don't yet know. So I would not try to have a definitive answer in my head.
Corporations are a part of the system, that's the way it is.
You want an iPhone, it's not going to be your government that makes it.
While you do have a point ... it's a bit moot when we consider that 'corporatism' is at very minimum 'one of the pillars'.
FYI I would support Swedish government requiring a more comprehensive embargo.
Mother's boycotted GE into leaving the weapons manufacturing business in the 1980s. There is an explicit policy against any type of weapons manufacturing inside the company to this day.
I do agree with your premise that this is inappropriate since power is supposed to rest with elected representatives but I until we ban corporations from political contributions (any activity) then we will have to live with bullying corporations via social media.
Putin gains almost everything by having his censorship and then having Russians enjoy regular products and services.
Russians still support the war and incursion, at least partly due to propaganda, and they won't miss a beat (pun intended) whatever Spotify censors.
One of the most important things we can do to 'signal' to the Russian public that 'it's bad' is to pull products and services that they know and love.
It's not hugely material from an economic perspective (though it will definitely hit), but not having Starbucks, McDs, Coke, Nike, Spotify, Apple, Netflix - which means maybe no music, entertainment, sports, football - it's important.
It's one of the only ways that every day Russians can 'feel' that they are definitely begin excluded. You want this war? No lattes, Iron Mans, your Volvo will go into disrepair and your iPhone is degraded.
For some services, like Google, which is an 'access point outside of Russia' - it's the opposite, we should do everything we can to keep Russian ability to somehow 'get past the firewall' - that is where your strategy would apply.
But for consumers services, no - we should be withdrawing.
Today Fedex, MS, Volskwagen announced withdrawal. I believe Coke, Starbucks, McD will follow suit.
I should note that it seems the companies with the most 'boots on the ground, dispersed' have the toughest time. It's easy for digital companies to stop/start, harder for those with factories (i.e. Volvo), but even harder for those with broad brand awareness, a lot of local entities and possibly local supply chains, like McDs.
But McDs, though not very important, is kind of like the 'biggest symbol' as they were the thing that was had first after the Berlin Wall came down. Getting a McDs was a signal that the country had entered modernity. It's a bit perverse (!) but it's still populist. Most people like McD fries.
The fact that some people speak Russian in Ukraine/Belarus does not mean that it’s better to do it there. This is like trying to make an English-language podcast initiative in Republic of Ireland just because English is also the language spoken there. Furthermore, as far as I know Ukraine try to promote Ukrainian language more to distant further from Russia. Hence I don’t think it’s that crazy that they opt for Russia-based office rather than elsewhere, also the fact that there are more Russians meaning that they have bigger target audience.
> Here we may take a break to consider the fact that Russian is not only the language of one country, Russia. It is also the native language for millions of Ukrainians and Belarusians. Therefore it is far from obvious that a Russian-language podcast initiative should be based in Russia. For an organization serious about defending free speech, it might have made more sense to locate the office in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv: a predominantly Russian-speaking city, which in recent years has also served as a refuge for many dissidents from Russia and Belarus.
Also, earlier:
> Yet, a better alternative would have been to keep operating, while declaring openly that their media machine will be available for the dissidents in Russia
To read an article like that and and come away thinking the argument being made is "Russian is spoken in Ukraine and Belarus therefore it should be based there" is... well, unlikely tbh.
Millions of native Ukrainians, especially in the eastern side of Ukraine, exclusively speak Russian, and in fact speak it much better than Ukrainian. [1] (Almost all Ukrainians understand Ukrainian perfectly fine, and even study it in school, but a large contingent don't speak it as their mother tongue.) It's much, much more than just "some Ukrainians", and in fact, it's part of what characteristically and culturally distinguishes some eastern and western/rural and urban regions of Ukraine. [2]
Going into anecdotal territory: This was surprising to me. I hosted a family native to Kharkiv and discussed this topic. I'd think speaking Ukrainian would be a part of one's heritage worth preserving, so it was surprising that speaking Ukrainian wasn't a fluent affair for them, and they also didn't have much interest in promoting the language. Their remarks, extremely simplified, were basically that Russian is so broadly understood that it is just efficient to use, especially because of the internet. They don't want the Ukrainian language to die, but they also don't find it as a practical "daily driver". Their children know Ukrainian from having to learn it in school (but don't really speak it), and their grand-children—who moved to the USA—don't know it at all and only speak Russian.
I'm less familiar with Belarus, but it was an almost identical sentiment about Russian and Belarusian for a Minsk-native family that hosted me.
[1] "Russian is the native language of 29.6% of Ukraine's population [...]." "According to a survey conducted in 2006-2007 by Gallup, 83% of the respondents preferred to conduct the Gallup interview in Russian." "For the preferred language of work, an equal amount chose either Ukrainian or Russian (37%) and 21% communicated bilingually. The study polled 10,071 individuals and held a 1% margin of error." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Uk...
Internet has made the breach greater, we might have great catalan poets from centuries ago, and a rich culture and history, but no youtuber will stream in catalan when in spanish they reach a 100x audience for example...
I'm glad I learnt it as my mother tongue though, being bilingual makes both learning other languages easier, and latin is like the wildcard of word roots for all of 'em (I can speak well English, Spanish, Catalan, and some French)
YMMV
As an example, a lot of older people do not speak fully correct Catalan, since it was prohibited during decades and they could not learn it formally.
To be honest, companies making emotional decisions is more concerning to me. It is reasonable and to be encouraged if businesses want to be a moral-less dumb pipe. Spotify is not equipped to make geopolitical judgements about what is and isn't a just war or propaganda & can achieve nothing against the Russian military. If they just stick to following the law that is fine. If something is required of them then the military leadership can ask them to do it.
I'm not sure it's even realistic to expect "dumb pipes" to me morally neutral, but that doesn't matter because Spotify is not trying to be a dumb pipe.
This is about podcasting, so let's stick with that. We already have/had a dumb pipe for podcasting. RSS. Podcasting is more free than most online media specifically for this reason. It uses an open protocol instead of a corporate platform. Notice how there is no post about RSS' policy regarding this war.
Spotify is, currently, trying to obtain exclusivity over top podcasts... taking podcasts off the "dumb pipe." The goal is to eventually dominate podcasting as they do streaming music. That's the opposite of platform neutrality, dumb pipes, decentralized moral choices, etc.
If you want dumb pipes, that idea is not really compatible with corporate fiefdoms in 2022 practice.
We're watching an escalating conflict that could easily involve nuclear armed powers. Maybe we should try something extreme that doesn't involve asking Spotify to escalate the situation further? Heaven help us, now is the time to be de-escalating rather than throwing more sticks and stones at Russia that do nothing but annoy people.
how hard it is? when only one of the 2 sides bombs civilians and causes millions of people to run away (as of now 1.4M, mostly women/children/elderly, have already crossed the border while many more is still running toward the border) just for the reason of ethnical difference, and thus committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Edit in response to comment below:
>No one had ever mentioned Ukrainians being "discriminated" by Russians before the war
well, sounds like you are completely unfamiliar with history there. I'm btw a Russian, half-Ukrainian, and your lecture here on that national issue is just fully incorrect.
>This is a desperate attempt by some Ukrainians to paint a picture of Russia as being equivalent to Nazi Germany, playing the same Hitler card that Putin did to start the war.
that is just Russian propaganda, and completely unsupported by any facts.
>They are doing that to try to make the West feel morally obliged to act even if that means war spreads to the whole of Europe and potentially, turns into a nuclear war.
that again is Russian propaganda, trying to scare the West by nukes.
>Even though there is a lot of suffering happening in Ukraine
the suffering has ethnical reason and thus it is genocide
> and Russia is indeed bombing cities in the fight with the Ukrainian army
that it Russian propaganda. Russia is bombing cities without any connection to any fight. Just look at all those aftermath videos - there is no Ukrainian tanks/etc among the destroyed buildings/etc. For example, today they shot down a pilot bombing a city and interviewed him - "They told us the city was empty", and of course he lied as it was a guy well known for his Syrian civilian bombings. He didn't even try to say anything about any military targets.
On the other side there are tons of videos of Russian armor burnt in the cities. Why did they come into cities endangering the civilians?
How the hell has this suddenly become an explanation for the war (or even a thing in the first place)??? No one had ever mentioned Ukrainians being "discriminated" by Russians before the war, quite the opposite, Russian-ethnics and Ukrainians have lived peacefully in Ukraine AND Russia for generations (except for a small minority of far-right nationalists).
> committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
This is a desperate attempt by some Ukrainians to paint a picture of Russia as being equivalent to Nazi Germany, playing the same Hitler card that Putin did to start the war.
They are doing that to try to make the West feel morally obliged to act even if that means war spreads to the whole of Europe and potentially, turns into a nuclear war.
Even though there is a lot of suffering happening in Ukraine and Russia is indeed bombing cities in the fight with the Ukrainian army, it's an absolute disgrace to compare that to a genocide, and the claim Russia is trying to ethnically cleanse Ukraine should be as strongly rejected as the claim by Russia that Ukraine is governed by people with Nazi beliefs, both being ridiculous.
Dead Comment
or maybe it's easier to hire talent in Moscow (a metropolis of 17M) than Kyiv (3M), sheesh
okay i think i just hit enough HN comments for the day already.
You mean Robert Sylvester Kelly, who was found guilty of one count of racketeering and 7 counts of violation of the Mann Act after a jury trial?
The same R Kelly that illegally married 15 year old Aaliyah in 1994?
The same R Kelly that is now facing further federal charges of child pornography and obstruction?
How is he or his cases in any way relevant to censorship or "cancel culture"?
The guy is a convicted child molester and has been a sleazy person for 25+ years.
The twitter mob against him that harassed Spotify into removing his music from their service is the literal epitome of cancel culture.
1. Take a consensus position (raping children is bad)
2. Repeat it over and over again, loudly, to make your actual point, which is that you are a good person. Not just because you don't rape children, but also because you are bravely amplifying this view that basically everyone holds
3. Make a public demand of a company that is tangentially related to the subject somehow, which if satisfied, will do exactly nothing to help or fix the problem
4. Form a mob of those interested in signalling their own virtue, who may or may not care about the motivating issue, to strong arm said company into compliance
5. Celebrate your hollow victory and briefly feel like you did something important (you did not)
Telling someone you can't like music from a child molester or that it has retroactively been deemed to not be good music is cancel card culture at its heart, the bread-and-butter most defensible part. Preventing people from procuring said music is obviously censorship.
Deleted Comment
Sexuality is a protected characteristic, and it's illegal to discriminate people based on such characteristics.
There is a contingent of the left that is happy when force and coercion are deployed so long as its done in a wider context that benefits their political aims. They argue that a baker must be forced to go against his personal values to further a particular goal that they support, but take up the exact opposite posture as soon as it suits them. For example, Twitter is a private company, of course they can ban you for saying that thing you said that doesn't conform with my political views.
At any rate, I was just trying to gesture towards a growing pack of vocal hypocrites, not re-litigate the baker decision.
Deleted Comment
Do you dispute the author's claim "On Wednesday night [March 2], Spotify announced that it is closing its Moscow office"?