Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

He stopped doing his homework, stopped going out with his friends, and spent all his time staring at that screen... He started saying things—" She choked up a bit, "something about socialism."

He said capitalism is unfair! He said that the government allowing the market to arbitrarily adjust prices is a legitimate form of exploitation of citizens—and he's only fourteen! Where did he learn these heretical ideas?”

By the end, the mother was sobbing uncontrollably in front of the BBC reporter's microphone.

"Our motherland... (choking back tears) will become... (choking back tears) what will it be like..."

Later, a BBC reporter learned that her son had learned it from a large number of Soviet games that came with the PS1 and downloaded from the internet.

For example, in the World War II shooting game that comes pre-installed on the game console, the Soviet Red Army is the hero and the Nazis are the enemy. Every time a level loads or ends, a piece of historical knowledge pops up, some about weapons and others about the sacrifices of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War.

This is relatively mild; other games circulating on the international internet are "some games found by the British Home Office among a large number of private projects," such as the strategy game *Hearts of Iron I*, a collaboration between a Soviet and Swedish studio. In this game, players can travel to Europe during World War I, taking on the role of a nation in a simulation management game, and gain a profound understanding of why grain speculators during the Russian Civil War should have been executed...

Newspapers were filled with stories of victims every day. Parents—perhaps genuine parents, perhaps not all—recounted how their children had been ruined by Soviet games, how innocent, capitalist Boy Scouts had been corrupted into Young Pioneers by the evil red empire!

"Reject addictive games" has become a slogan in British secondary schools. Posters are displayed in school corridors, and teachers frequently warn students in class not to use "foreign electronic devices of unknown origin."

During this period, British society was very repressed under the leadership of a hawkish, pro-American cabinet. The government was extremely hostile to anything associated with "socialism" or "communism." Many people say that if Prime Minister Chamberlain had treated Hitler with the same attitude that Big Brother Heseltine has towards communism, World War II would never have broken out, and Nazi Germany would have been crushed by Britain and France in the very first step of annexing Austria!

In the lower classes and middle class, many young people are more enthusiastic about getting their hands on things that are banned by the government. The upper-class conservative party and the lower-class people are gradually becoming divided, and conflicts occur from time to time.

This social period also had a great influence on author J.K. Rowling. Since she began writing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" in 1991, her books have constantly contained opposition to and satire of the British government's actions. When the book was about to be released in 1996, it was immediately banned by the sensitive Home Office, and J.K. Rowling was listed as a "dangerous left-wing writer" and almost went to jail.

With no other option, she had to entrust her agent in Austria to upload the manuscript to the internet (she was worried she'd be imprisoned before she could finish her story) and publish it first in the Warsaw Pact Group and neutral countries. As for how to distribute it in the UK...

Rowling later admitted that she drew inspiration from the Soviet game Crisis in the Kremlin: The Cold War, and created an alternate timeline in the book in which Gorbachev led the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991 and NATO achieved a complete victory.

Strangely enough, this special British baby edition of Harry Potter actually passed the Home Office's review and was allowed to be published in the UK!

People of the British Empire, have confidence!

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

In May 1994, the Channel Tunnel officially opened to traffic.

The Channel Tunnel runs from Folkestone in England to Calais in France, and the train journey through the 50-kilometer underwater tunnel takes only 35 minutes.

This tunnel was originally built to facilitate trade and travel between Britain and France, and it took more than five years to complete, starting in 1989. However, the first business it engaged in after opening was smuggling.

Smugglers buy large quantities of PS1s from neutral countries such as Austria, Switzerland, and Finland. PS1s are legally sold in stores in these neutral countries, and then they ship the PS1s to France—although France is nominally within NATO's internet control framework, its law enforcement is a joke compared to that of the UK, and PS1s can circulate semi-openly in France.

Smugglers then brought them into Britain via the Channel Tunnel.

British customs naturally considered this and set up checkpoints at the tunnel exits, so smugglers would not bring the complete PS1 into the UK but would disassemble it.

The PS1 console? Throw it away, the casing doesn't matter!

PS1 controller? Throw it away, you can buy a compatible one in the UK electronics market!

The core of the PS1? Throw it away—no, no, no, we can't throw it away. We have to keep the circuit board containing the graphics processing chip and put it into a regular personal computer case.

To enhance compatibility, the Soviet Union equipped the PS1 motherboard with as many interfaces as a personal computer, including video interfaces, audio interfaces, and general-purpose interfaces—all crammed onto the motherboard.

Moreover, the size of mainstream computer chips in the world is roughly the same. As long as the serial number sprayed on the chip casing is wiped off, unless the British customs has the ability to use a microscope to examine the transistor structure of the chip bit by bit and find out that it is the core of PS1, the group of quacks at the customs will have no way of finding out.

Britain's subsequent choice was to increase taxes, raising the tax on advanced computers by 112%, which further spurred smugglers to devise ways to smuggle chips and motherboards into the country by hiding them in children's electronic toys for profit.

In the UK's underground market, many black shops specializing in assembly have emerged. They take smuggled PS1 core circuit boards and reassemble them with power supplies, controllers, and display interfaces until it becomes a complete PS1.

A PS1 can cost three to five times more on the UK black market than it does at the normal retail price in Austria, yet there are still plenty of people willing to buy it.

Subsequent investigations revealed that it was precisely because the British government imposed heavy taxes on computers that people rushed to buy the PS1 as their first computer.

When designing the PS1, the Soviet Union included numerous expansion ports in its hardware. The PS1 had an optical drive cable interface, a floppy drive interface, a hard drive interface, a cartridge slot, and several universal serial interfaces.

This means that the PS1 is not just a gaming machine—it can be connected to a mechanical hard drive to become a storage device, can be connected to a floppy drive to read files of various formats, and can be equipped with additional functional modules through the cartridge slot.

Its Linux-like system, based on the Soviet-modified DEMOS, performs well in terms of software and hardware compatibility, allowing users to install various software on it.

In mid-May, a master hacker successfully modified the PS1's system, connecting it to the internet. No one knows who it was; it could be a Soviet geek, a Finnish programmer, or a self-taught genius who had spent too much time on the Witzel forum.

In short, the British can now connect their PS1 to the internet via a modem through the Universal Serial Bus interface, allowing them to use the PS1 controller to move the cursor on the screen, click links, and browse web pages.

The controls were indeed terrible – moving the cursor one row at a time with the arrow keys was a bit counterintuitive. But for those who couldn't afford a proper personal computer or who found it inconvenient to use a personal computer to access the internet in a controlled environment like the UK, the PS1 was a window to the freedom of the internet.

Later, the Soviet Union took notice of this phenomenon and released a system patch that allowed a standard keyboard to be connected to the PS1 via a simple adapter.

From then on, people could type on the PS1 using a keyboard.

In 1994, many citizens of Western countries, especially teenagers, first came into contact with the Internet through a Soviet game console.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

In May 1994, the Soviet Union launched its search engine, Sputnik, on the Internet.

It shares the same name as the Soviet Union's first artificial satellite, which shocked the world in 1957. The Soviet Union considered this the Soyuz's "Sputnik moment" in cyberspace.

The Sputnik search engine was advanced for its time: you could enter a keyword into the search box and within seconds it would find the most relevant results from the World Wide Web pages it had indexed and display them in order of ranking.

Similar tools are also under development in the West, such as web directories and rudimentary search systems being developed in several university labs. Sputnik, however, was the first officially released search engine with a complete index and ranking algorithm, open to users worldwide.

It is open source.

Sputnik's code was published on the internet. Anyone could download its source code and deploy a search engine on their own server.

Why did the Soviet Union open-source its search engine?

The Soviet Union wanted Sputnik running on servers worldwide, deploying its software ecosystem on computers in other countries to achieve network superiority. Furthermore, this search engine cleverly exploited loopholes in NATO's internet censorship, directly connecting to free VPN proxies established by the Soviet Union in neutral countries, allowing NATO citizens to bypass internet restrictions for free.

Of course, free access meant more users, slower internet speeds, and also meant that the Soviet Union could obtain information about NATO internet users through its agents.

The Soviet Union's internet ideological infiltration primarily involved using VPNs and neutral countries as intermediaries. However, this infiltration depended on the premise that citizens of NATO countries, after bypassing internet restrictions, could easily access the content the Soviet Union wanted them to see.

If the information on the Warsaw Pact Internet is disorganized and there's no way to find a way in, then people who come over by circumventing the Great Firewall will just take a quick look and leave.

Search engines are the infrastructure of information warfare, just as a heavy-duty bridge must be built before a tank can drive across.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had a significant advantage in search engine servers. The National Economic Automation System had been doing this for many years, requiring real-time retrieval of massive amounts of structured data—the technology is essentially the same as that of a search engine, the only difference being that the data source changed from reports to web pages.

The Soviet engineering team had readily available distributed indexing technology and large computer clusters to store and process data. Historically, Brian Pinkerton, the creator of the first search engine, only had one server at the University of Washington, and his search engine was so popular that it couldn't even function properly during the day.

Before the launch of this search engine, most web pages were plain text. The satellite search engine allowed web pages to display both text and images. This was not difficult to achieve; economic automation systems themselves required graphical user interfaces to display economic data (line charts, pie charts, map annotations). The technological leap for Soviet software engineers in migrating this graphical rendering capability from "displaying factory output curves" to "displaying images on web pages" was not significant.

In June 1994, VPN experienced its second wave of users.

More and more people are starting to use VPNs to bypass censorship, and most of them are not spies or political activists. They are curious people who want to see what is being discussed on Soviet forums, programmers who want to download satellite search engines, teenagers who want to play good stuff from Soviet game servers on their PS1s, and ordinary people who want to see what's so scary about the websites blocked in their own countries.

And... adults who want to see some good stuff.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

The Moscow Kremlin, November 1994.

A discussion is being held in the Politburo.

How can we further incentivize internet users in NATO countries to bypass internet censorship and use VPNs to access the Warsaw Pact's internet?

The discussion had been going on for over an hour. A representative from the KGB's 16th Directorate reported on the current situation: through the promotion of satellite search engines and the PS1's internet access capabilities, the penetration rate of the Warsaw Pact internet among Western users was steadily increasing. However, the growth rate was slowing—those most easily attracted, such as tech geeks, political activists, and curious young people, were already using VPNs.

To further expand penetration, it is necessary to attract ordinary users with "general curiosity".

“Gaming is one path. The PS1's game servers were located in Hungary, and Western players had to use VPNs to play online. This has already attracted a group of teenage users, but the audience for games has a ceiling—mainly teenagers and young adults.”

"We need content that can appeal to a wider audience."

Not just young people—it's everyone, especially overworked, working adults! What kind of content could make a 37-year-old British man go to the trouble of setting up a VPN and bypassing the Great Firewall to access our internet?

The group looked at each other, and the discussion fell into a brief silence.

Then Director Nian suddenly spoke up, and his first words almost sent Ligachev to his death.

"How about we put some risqué content online? After all, most people use color monitors now, and satellite browsers support image display. This should be more appealing to sexually repressed bachelors who are under societal pressure."

"Comrade Foreign Minister... uh... Article 228 of the Soviet Criminal Code explicitly prohibits the production, dissemination, and advertising of pornography, with violators subject to a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and confiscation of pornographic materials and production tools."

Our most pressing priorities are to advance information technology reforms, develop light industry and the service sector to improve people's well-being, address ethnic issues, and respond to international competition... We...we have absolutely no political motivation to waste time on something as trivial as the legalization of pornography.

General Secretary!

Ligachev, as the Second Secretary in charge of ideology and the appointment and removal of party and government cadres, couldn't stand it any longer. He was originally from the reformist faction and leaned towards the conservative side. He was the one who started the alcohol ban and Slava cleaned up the mess for him.

Ligachev looked at Slava expectantly, hoping the General Secretary would say something.

The Sinister trend is like a raging flood, and it will inevitably harm the youth of the Union! This is a double-edged sword, as the number of internet users in the Soviet Union is greater than that in NATO.

“Uh… Comrade Ligachev, what you said does make sense, and I agree with your idea in principle,” Slava said, trying to smooth things over.

The sentence following an agreement in principle is usually a transition.

"But I think this can be done behind the scenes. Our Soviet Communist Party will definitely publicly deny this kind of thing. We can just support normal animation and comics on the Internet. Who says cultural appeal has to rely on the lower body? You have to be strong yourself. A person can't spend most of their time on the Internet satisfying the most basic physiological needs, right?"

After satisfying the most basic physiological needs, one will inevitably pursue higher forms of art, wouldn't you say, Comrade Ligachev? —" Slava raised his eyebrows at Ligachev.

"...Yes, Comrade Ivanov." Ligachev sighed and accepted the compromise.

“As for this gray area… I think we can do it in the member countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) that are relatively far from moving towards a market economy—like Hungary,” Slava said.

Historically, Hungary immediately relaxed its pornography laws after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. With its relaxed economic policies, advanced technological infrastructure, and cheap labor, it quickly became an ideal place for the expansion of the international pornography industry.

The Czech Republic followed a similar trajectory. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, pornography proliferated rapidly and was officially legalized in 1993. With the help of the skilled workers trained by the state-owned Barandorf Film Studio during the Cultural Revolution and the low production costs, the Czech Republic quickly became the center of pornography production in Europe.

Even the Soviet Union at the time suffered from this problem. In fact, in May 1990, Gorbachev even established the "Committee on Emergency Measures to Protect Public Morality" to deal with the anxiety caused by the proliferation of pornography.

As long as the economy declines, the sex industry will inevitably proliferate!

"Yes, it's a gray industry. What we should do is strengthen the age classification system and advocate and promote healthy lifestyles for teenagers, and do a good job in physiological health education. These niche hobbies will naturally not spread on a large scale."

The classic broken windows theory suggests that the first option presented is one that is difficult for most people to accept, and then a more moderate option is offered as a compromise.

“If a society is developing healthily, with a booming economy, extremely low unemployment, a support system for the elderly and children, and people who do not have to struggle for survival and have plenty of time to go out and develop their interests, then we have no need to worry about erotic content harming our youth—just like our previous view on the future of religion.”

Never underestimate human creativity when it comes to pornography—long before the internet could display images, humans were already creatively putting erotic content on computers.

The earliest version was from Bell Labs in the mid-1960s, where people used dot matrix of ASCII characters, various straight lines and curves to spell out nude images on a black and white monitor. Bell Labs researchers also used circuit symbols to print out images of nude women on a teletype machine and spelled out the shape of a human male penis using ASCII characters.

The classic theory of fertility worship is...

Keep in mind that at that time, human computer languages ​​had only just evolved from binary code to assembly language.

As the 1980s and 1990s progressed, with the popularization of personal computers in the consumer market and the advent of the Internet, graphic pornography began to spread through anonymous servers.

Back then, computers couldn't display images online. There were no image browsers or the internet. How were people supposed to do that?

It's very simple, just decode it locally, right?

In the early 80s, those sexually repressed genius researchers developed a corresponding program where users on local area networks would first encode scanned pornographic images into ASCII text segments and upload them. Recipients would then download the images, decode them locally, and print them out.

If humanity could allocate half of its lustful intelligence to its intellectual intelligence, we could at least land on Mars before the millennium!

It turns out that in 1995, a prominent study claimed that 83% of the images on Usenet were pornographic. By August 1996, five of the ten most popular newsgroups on Usenet contained adult content, with alt.sex receiving 500,000 daily visitors.

Around the mid-to-late 1990s, with the bursting of Japan's economic bubble, a large number of people lost their jobs, and the whole society fell into a three-decade-long economic slump. Coupled with the repressive culture of Japanese society, this made Japan the largest exporter of the erotic industry in the 90s. A large number of Japanese comics were uploaded to the Internet, which further promoted the development of the Internet.

Coincidentally, in the years prior, the Soviet Union had acquired a large number of Japanese industrial chains. The influx of real industries into the Soviet Union was inevitably accompanied by the entry of a large number of Japanese laborers and Japanese culture.

By 1994, Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East had become the second largest economic center in East Asia after Hong Kong, with a large volume of goods and trade radiating throughout the region daily. Tokyo was previously another economic center, but Japan's economic miracle had been reaped by the combined forces of the US and the USSR, leaving Japan with little to do with.

Since entering the Soviet Union after the bursting of the bubble economy in 1992, Japanese anime culture has undergone a new fusion with the Soviet Union's powerful animation industry.

The core institution of Soviet animation was the Union Animation Film Studio, founded in Moscow in 1936, which at its peak was the largest animation studio in Europe. It was a state-funded cultural institution, which distinguished Soviet animation from American and Japanese animation—it didn't need to sell tickets, sell merchandise, or worry about viewership ratings.

The only two pressures for creators are getting the art approved and avoiding ideological problems; they don't need to worry about making money.

The advantages of this system are obvious: creators can conduct a large number of experiments that would never survive the early stages to see the final results in a fiercely competitive commercial market.

Soviet animation was far more diverse in its techniques than its American and Japanese counterparts at the time—traditional cel animation, paper cutting, stop-motion puppetry, sand painting, glass painting, pinscreen animation, and direct drawing on film were all techniques that had been cultivated by many for a long time.

However, unlike Japan, the Soviet animation industry was characterized by its strong emphasis on literary adaptations. Pushkin's and Krylov's fables, Slavic folk tales, and classic world fairy tales... a large number of excellent Soviet animated films were adaptations of literature, and the quality of these adaptations was very high because the screenwriters and directors themselves had solid literary skills.

P.S.: I recommend searching for "Please Calibrate the Clock" on Bilibili. This 1963 Soviet animation is quite interesting, except for the highly artistic opening music.

This is a different path from Japanese animation, which largely adapts manga (hence the name "anime"), and American animation, which largely creates original IPs.

Now, not only in the Soviet Union, but also in many Eastern European countries, Soviet animations with some Japanese characteristics have begun to circulate on the Internet. NATO countries have poor infrastructure and slow Internet speeds, but the Soviet Union has been developing its information technology for more than seven years and its Internet speed is fast enough to play online games. Some government agencies can even watch cartoons online.

This provides a core attraction for the vast majority of NATO people to appreciate art (in all senses) on the Warsaw Pact internet.

At the end of the meeting, the leader also said: "SeSe and JianZheng are twins."

If we want to encourage internet users in NATO countries to take initiative and overcome obstacles to access the Warsaw Pact internet, the best and relatively harmless way is definitely not through games—games are primarily aimed at teenagers and children.

We must help neutral countries build their internet infrastructure, attract foreigners to view our products, and allow Soviet cultural industries to reach the world through the internet!

Just as Nazi Germany hoped to help the Soviet Union build railways in Eastern Europe to facilitate its invasion, the Soviet Union also had its own purposes in helping neutral European countries build network infrastructure.

In June 1994, Hungary passed a vague set of regulations governing adult content. The Hungarian Communist Party, of course, did not call it legalization, as that would be unacceptable in the face of the Warsaw Pact, but instead gave it the name of a "special cultural product licensing system".

Soon, a large number of NATO internet users began to flock to the Hungarian internet. Austria and Switzerland, two neutral countries, made a fortune from VPN fees and naturally had no objections. They also connected many fiber optic cables with Hungary along the border to increase internet speed.