Pavel Durov and the Kafka Paranoia

Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state Apparat.

— Bertolt Brecht

In a scene straight from a Franz Kafka novel, Pavel Durov, the enigmatic founder of Telegram, was arrested in France upon landing at Le Bourget airport near Paris. As he disembarked from his private jet, he was apprehended by French authorities who had been lying in wait, armed with a warrant accusing him of enabling criminal activities through his messaging platform. The charges, as surreal as they are severe, include complicity in drug trafficking, pedocriminal offenses, and money laundering — all stemming from Telegram’s alleged lack of moderation. His arrest is not just a personal catastrophe but a stark reminder of the absurdity that awaits those who challenge the invisible but omnipresent hand of power in a world that claims to protect freedom while methodically dismantling it.

What becomes of Telegram in the wake of Durov’s arrest? The question stirs an unease that quickly metastasizes into countless speculative whispers, each more uncertain than the last. One rumor, already slithering through the digital corridors, insists that Durov’s team is prepared for this eventuality, that a clandestine protocol exists, poised to be enacted at the stroke of midnight. But as with all rumors, it thrives on the lack of verifiable sources. The truth, shrouded in ambiguity, is as elusive as the man himself. Whether Telegram will persist, and in what distorted form, lingers as a troubling enigma, a question suspended in the void where certainty should be.

In the modern West, freedom of speech is paraded as a sacred principle, a shining emblem of democracy that supposedly contrasts sharply with the “despotic regimes” of Russia and China. Yet, beneath this polished facade lies a reality as suffocating and absurd as any Kafkaesque nightmare — a place where dissidents are relentlessly pursued, their voices smothered, their liberties extinguished. The stories of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and now Durov serve as eerie reminders that the West’s devotion to free expression is a hollow claim, a charade masking a darker truth.

Durov possesses citizenship in four nations — Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, France, and the UAE. His multiplicity of identities reflects his desperate attempt to evade the ever-tightening grip of state power, to remain an untethered soul in a world where true autonomy is all but a fleeting dream. Yet, the revelation that Durov has forsaken his Russian citizenship, coupled with his recent detention in France, underscores the futility of such efforts. No matter how many borders you cross, how many nationalities you assume, the iron claw of censorship will inevitably track you down if you refuse to bow to the liberal authority of the West. People who value authentic freedom should not “flee” to the West but run far away from it.

The notion of a free press, so often celebrated in the West, reveals itself as a bitter farce. We are served the comforting fiction that the media operates without chains, that journalists pursue truth without fear of retribution. Yet, Durov’s ordeal, echoing that of Assange, uncovers the frailty and deception behind this fake “freedom.” When Durov left Russia, it was not in search of greater liberties but because he refused to submit to the demands to censor VK, the widely used Russian social network, resisting the pressures to hand over user data to the authorities.

Kafka, the master of bureaucratic despair, would find in Durov’s fate an unsettling familiarity. It is a destiny that harkens back to the plight of Josef K. in The Trial, condemned not for any specific crime but for the insidious and omnipresent suspicion that invades every aspect of existence. In a world where even the smallest lapse triggers the gravest suspicions, how can freedom be anything more than a bitter illusion? Are we not all, in some way, trapped within a vast, faceless bureaucracy, where every action is scrutinized, every intention questioned, and every individual reduced to a carbon copy of himself?

The terror that seeps through this world is not just the fear of punishment. It is something deeper, more pervasive — a terror that immobilizes the soul. It is the dread of uttering an unspeakable word, of harboring an unthinkable thought, of challenging the all-seeing gaze that watches from every corner. This terror, as Kafka intuited, is an anticipation of retribution as well as a profound and paralyzing anxiety — a yearning for something beyond the grasp of those who wield power, yet also a fear of everything that power touches. In the West, this dread is cloaked in the rhetoric of “freedom,” wrapped in the comforting lie that we are free to speak, free to think, free to resist.

However, the entanglement of powerful media conglomerates with other elite forces exposes this grotesque clown show. Once a media empire grows large enough, it ceases to view itself as a watchdog over power; instead, it becomes entangled within the web of influence it was meant to scrutinize. No longer an adversary, it becomes a collaborator, complicit in the perpetuation of the structures it once claimed to challenge. This silent betrayal, this unspoken collusion, ensures that dissent remains carefully controlled, neatly contained, and, ultimately, obliterated.

The West’s most glaring hypocrisy lies in its faith in the moralizing mission of multinational corporations like Google, whose creed, “Don’t be evil,” has devolved into a banal catchphrase. The architects of Google sincerely believe they are molding the world for the better, yet their so-called open-mindedness extends only to views that align with the liberal-imperialist undercurrent of American policy. Any perspective that challenges this narrative is rendered invisible, dismissed as irrelevant or dangerous. This is the dull terror of their mission — the quiet horror of a world where dissenting voices are not forcibly silenced but simply ignored into oblivion.

No society that has erected a system of mass surveillance has avoided its abuse, and the West is no different. It has become commonplace to assume that the government monitors our every move, while it is deemed paranoid to believe otherwise. This normalization of surveillance is the final testament to how deeply entrenched these mechanisms of control have become. We exist in a reality where privacy is an anachronism, where every gesture is recorded, every word cataloged, every murmur of dissent logged for future judgment. The surveillance state is no longer a distant dystopia; it is the world we inhabit, the nightmare we cannot awaken from.

In this world, the transformation of the individual is inevitable and exceptionally Kafkaesque. As Oge Noct awoke from restless dreams, he found himself inexplicably altered into a monstrous insect. This metamorphosis is a physical aberration and a symbol of the dehumanization inflicted by a system that grinds down the soul. Whether Assange, Snowden, or Durov, the pattern is the same: those who dare to defy the system are not lionized but degraded, their humanity eroded by the relentless machinery of control that declares itself a champion of freedom while perpetuating an unyielding tyranny.

This is the true face of the modern West — a Kafkaesque downward spiral in which the promise of freedom is little more than a cruel joke, and those who seek it are condemned to live in perpetual fear.

It is like a river, is it not? A river that breaks its banks, spilling over into fields, losing its depth as it stretches further, until all that is left is a filthy, stagnant pool. That is what happens to revolutions. They begin with force, with purpose, but as they spread, they thin out, they lose their substance. And when the fervor finally evaporates, what is left behind? Nothing but the muck of bureaucracy, thick and choking, creeping into every corner of life. The old shackles that held us were at least visible, tangible, but these new ones — they are made of paper, of forms and stamps and signatures, endless and suffocating. And yet, we wear them just the same, without even realizing how tightly they bind us.

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