The Inner Net

The online space of the Eastern Commonwealth (let’s call it that for short) is cut off from the rest of the world similarly to the real-life Chinese Firewall. It blocks access to the grand majority of Outer Net services, with most social media having its own Inner Net alternatives. The blockade can be bypassed with VPN and deep web protocols, but they don’t go unnoticed.

The Inner Net uses deep packet inspection to detect and slow down users that run VPN or Tor-like protocols. That said, it usually overlooks short sessions. So you will be fine as long as you aren’t regularly running them from the same IP and don’t use too much data. 

For example, you can: 

use VPN to quickly search something up on the Outer Web;

scroll through a foreign news site for 10 minutes;

download an image or a text document. 

You cannot: 

use VPN to watch a movie and expect it to go unnoticed; 

download a music album;

download a game.

TURN THAT OFF!!!

But what about stalkers? If you’ve read this post, you know that stalkers rely on deep web platforms for essential business information. How do they do it? The answer is pluggable transports, which mimic innocent traffic during longer and more data-heavy sessions. 

Since download links to such transports are cleared from the Inner Web, the software is distributed via offline peer-to-peer networks or flash drives. They are also very costly.

Social Media

The biggest social network in the country is НаСвязи – NaSviazi or NS / Nasik / Nasvai (as in насвай - naswar) for short. It’s an all-encompassing platform for instant messaging, image and video sharing, communities, browser games, and music.

Yura’s NS profile. Note the censorship of a forbidden movie title.

Each user account is tied to their personal ID, so one person cannot create multiple NS profiles. Users can change their screen names, but doing so requires approval from website administrators. A request to change your real name to an alias will be declined.

But not all platforms are this strict on personal tracking. Blogging websites are generally very lenient when it comes to customisation, making them popular among teenagers and adults alike.

Example page from the Boiler blogging platform. Very similar to Tumblr, but less niche.

Anonymous imageboards exist as well. Of course, they’re monitored just as closely as any other social media and users can be easily tracked down. Aside from avoiding criticisms of the Party, it’s exactly the same as real-world 2ch.

Online Culture

The Inner Net’s culture isn’t too different from the post-soviet online space in real life. Post-ironic memes are just as prevalent, but have emerged and rose to prominence a couple years earlier. Anti-humour, absurdism, and abstract humour are popular in general, partially because they’re immune to censorship.

 “FARTED”

Political discussion is a lot less robust even on platforms that are meant to be anonymous. The government has full access to everyone’s message history and private data, mainly monitoring particular keywords. 

This has led to people using slang, euphemisms, or just censoring the words themselves with numbers and symbols in order to discuss certain topics. This is still a risky practice, however, since common workaround spellings and slang eventually get added to the system. As a result, these codewords fall out of use on the internet, but sometimes stick in real life lexicon.

Some examples include: 

Космонавты (“cosmonauts”) - riot police, armoured police force;

Свадьба (“wedding”) - death penalty, execution;

Тушить капусту (“stewing cabbage”) - earning money illegally, particularly on the black market;

Сбор (“assembly”) - mass arrest;

Венок (“wreath”) - fabricated criminal case.

Example of slang use.

Politics aside, popular online trends include:

Lootposting. This refers to showing off supposed artefacts found outside the Zone. 90% of the time these are forgeries or misidentified regular objects. Cases of real artefact discovery often result in hospitalisation or confiscation.

Anomaly diving. An extreme kind of movement where vloggers sneak into temporarily restricted anomalous areas and film various phenomena up close. If it doesn’t result in death, it results in fines – luckily, such videos tend to make enough money to cover the expenses.

Forest challenge. A briefly popular challenge where the person spends 24 hours in the deeper parts of the Anomalous Forest. Died down after a teenager’s body was discovered melted into a tree.

Books and Film

Much like the internet, heavy censorship is imposed on literature and film. A designated government committee controls which overseas movies and books can be legally accessed and evaluates local productions and writings in the same way.

Though, it bears mentioning that certain film companies make separate region-specific versions of their films to increase the likelihood of passing the censors, similar to how some Western movie productions are recut to better cater to China.

Stalker movies struggle with accuracy.

As a result of its many restrictions, the local film industry lags behind its foreign counterparts in terms of technical development and budget. Though, it does have a strong identity of its own. 

While a lot of real world post-soviet countries started copying the look and feel of American movies specifically around 2000-2010s, the film industry of the Eastern Commonwealth has maintained a vibe that’s more comparable to USSR and 90s-era cinema. 

On average, it tends to have more subdued editing and slower pacing. The most popular genres among the masses are crime dramas, anomaly dramas, and romance. There are directors who try to emulate foreign films, namely action flicks, but the lack of resources makes it difficult to achieve the same level of polish.

Plenty of trash to choose from.

Television is not much different from what it’s like in real life. No criticism of the ruling party allowed, but raunchy daytime shows are a-okay. A significant chunk of programming is local bootlegs of popular overseas sitcoms.

Of course, people still find ways to watch forbidden productions. Spread through the deep web and flash drives, they’re not as inaccessible as one might think. A good chunk of teenagers have seen at least one illegal film by the time they leave high school.

Banned movie night.

The situation with books is similar, with most banned literature being distributed in digital formats. Since it’s not nearly as data-heavy as video content, it can be easily downloaded with a VPN – as long as you’re not downloading entire libraries, that is. Still, that restricted accessibility also means a lot of books remain untranslated, which further limits their reach.

On a side note, anime, manga, and light novels are almost never censored and have been very popular across the Commonwealth since the early 2000s. They’re not exactly mainstream, since anime fans are still seen as nerdy by the general public. But it’s a big subculture.

Gaming

The gaming scene is similar to real life, being very PC-centric. MOBAs and FPS multiplayers are massively popular, with a lot of overseas titles being available (though, the ability to connect to servers outside your region is locked).

DEFEAT!

There are plenty of titles that are inspired by stalker operations, artefact hunting, mutant hunting, and other Zone-related hobbies. These games always run the risk of being banned for promoting illicit activities and/or discrediting the police and military. But they’re popular nonetheless, often being distributed physically.

There are a lot of experimental projects. Since local developers often find it difficult to compete with high-budget gaming studios (unless they receive government backing, which is usually reserved for propaganda-adjacent projects), they’re more driven to explore unconventional ideas and gameplay loops. This has resulted in a janky, but intriguing indie scene.

Notoriously difficult survival sim.

Bootlegs of popular banned titles are also fairly common. In some cases it’s thanks to local developers seeing an opportunity to fill a niche and just ripping off an existing game while making it politically correct. In other cases it’s the government itself sponsoring the development of alternatives to popular foreign titles.

Author’s note

It’s always interesting to think about how culture develops in closed off regions. But nothing is fully closed off in the modern world – and knowing the dubious reliability of government-run systems across (at least) Russia and Belarus, it’s hard to imagine they’d be able to cut off the flow of outside information completely.