The Principle of Non-Degradation: How to Live Online in Contemporary Russia

To access the internet, you have to access the internet.

Over the past several months, I have found myself in an increasingly normalized and familiar position: attempting to use the internet while physically located inside the Russian Federation.

What might once have sounded like a trivial inconvenience has gradually revealed itself as something far more structural. Access is no longer simply a matter of connectivity. It is a matter of structure, jurisdiction, and — perhaps most critically — of constraint.

A growing number of major platforms, media environments, and informational resources are now inaccessible. Not intermittently, not accidentally, but systematically. The list expands with quiet regularity. Entire domains disappear behind invisible walls. Services degrade. Applications falter. Connections that once felt seamless now require negotiation, workaround, or resignation.

This is not merely censorship in the conventional sense. It is infrastructural erosion.

Filtering mechanisms at the level of network traffic — deep packet inspection, throttling, selective interference — produce effects that extend far beyond their intended targets. In attempting to control the flow of information, the system begins to undermine its own coherence. The network ceases to be neutral. It becomes unstable, unreliable, structurally compromised.

For someone whose work depends on publishing and maintaining independent digital infrastructure, this is not an abstract condition. It is an operational one.

Over the course of these months, I attempted to adapt. Different configurations were tested. Local hosting, routing adjustments, various technical workarounds. Each of them functioned — to a point. And each of them, inevitably, implied compromise. Not a dramatic one, perhaps, but cumulative. A gradual adjustment to a system that was itself degrading.

At a certain point, the logic became unavoidable.

The most stable solution is not to adapt downward, but to step outside.

My projects are now hosted beyond the Russian Federation — on infrastructure that remains part of the global network: supported by resilient CDN systems, modern security protocols, and an environment where connectivity is treated as a given, not as a conditional privilege.

This decision is not ideological in the usual sense. It is structural.

I operate on a simple principle: non-degradation.

If the surrounding environment deteriorates, the response is not to follow it downward. It is to preserve the conditions under which meaningful work remains possible. To adapt to a degraded system is, in effect, to accept that degradation as normal.

I do not accept it.

This leads to a conclusion that may sound simple, but under present conditions requires explicit articulation:

If you need access to the internet… you need access to the internet.

Not to a restricted national version of it. Not to a filtered approximation. Not to a network in which absence is normalized and access is conditional.

To the internet.

There is no substitute for it inside a system that actively blocks external resources. One cannot access what has been structurally removed. One cannot rely on pathways that are intentionally disrupted.

My resources exist on the internet.

If you want to access them, the condition is no longer implicit. It is explicit: you must establish a connection that is not confined within a controlled network environment. This is no longer an optional technical choice. It is a baseline requirement.

What is commonly referred to as the “internal” network increasingly diverges from the internet itself. It exists, but it is no longer a viable medium for full participation in global information exchange.

This is a direct consequence of censorship.

And it produces a reality that is, at once, simple and absolute:

The internet is not where you are.

It is where you are able to reach.

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This work is produced as part of Denis Karagodin’s independent research and writing.

Its continuation is sustained over time through personal effort and, in part, through public support.

Further information: karagodin.com/donate