Enjoyed the excellent photos and reporting.<p>As far as "Life without fast internet":<p>"Residents adjusted. They created an intracity computer network that, among other things, allowed locals to download pirated movies and TV shows without connecting to the wider web. Going on vacation, several said, meant sitting in a hotel room, updating smartphone apps and taking in the bounties of the online world, even if the beach beckoned."
This is just really confusing to me. I had no idea that propaganda was so resurgent in Russia. I thought openness to modern/popular media would have knocked down a lot of misinformation about "the west".<p>I think of Russians as being active participants on the Internet; I would have thought that this would keep a bit of a lid on single-point-of-view propaganda. (Obviously there's plenty of misinformation on the internet, but it's not all from a single political view)<p>Why is Russia pushing so hard to spread Internet access in such a situation?
Just last week I stumbled upon this gallery of photos of Norilsk<p><a href="http://www.bbc.com/culture/gallery/20190321-norilsk-the-city-where-the-sun-doesnt-rise" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.com/culture/gallery/20190321-norilsk-the-city...</a><p><i>Taken over seven months in 2012 to 2013 as part of her Days of Night/Nights of Day project, Russian photographer Elena Chernyshova’s images reveal what it’s like to live in one of the world’s most isolated cities. In Norilsk, winter lasts nine months – and during the polar night the sun doesn’t rise for two months.</i><p>One of the roads in the city is on Google Street View<p><a href="https://goo.gl/maps/LrzbFMFLuUvY7sdJ8" rel="nofollow">https://goo.gl/maps/LrzbFMFLuUvY7sdJ8</a><p>edit: And all the way along the street, you see 4 people in Google-coloured red/green/yellow/blue snowsuits. haha <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/Z1dFVZBF9fHV1enk7" rel="nofollow">https://goo.gl/maps/Z1dFVZBF9fHV1enk7</a>
I have to wonder if the view of the West they are now getting from "YouTube personalities", Facebook and Instagram is much more accurate than they get from Putin. Different, certainly.