Non-Human Actors and Identity Performance Online

In 2014, Bruno Latour began his keynote speech at the Digital Humanities Conference in Lausanne by describing several fallacies typical of the discourse in the digital domain.[1] He started with the cloud effect fallacy, a tendency to construct the digital as a non-substantial, ephemeral field, whereas in reality, it has a strong material component. As an example, he stated the vast electricity consumption of Google’s data centers: according to the reports of the New York Times, they continually consume as much electricity as a city with 200,000 households. [2]
The discussion around two anti-terrorist laws that were recently passed in Russia became a further illustration of this fallacy. Named after their creator Irina Yarovaya, the so-called “Yarovaya package” featured, among other things, a change in the law “On Communication,” which made it obligatory for mobile operators to store on Russian territory information on the exchange of messages and calls between users for three years, and the contents of the exchanges for a period up to six months beginning in July 2018.