liescience.org ("Pseudoscience. Official Site") was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod project "Pseudoscience", which its authors declared to be not an online resource but a scientific discipline in its own right. As the home page reported, the discipline was founded in Nizhny Novgorod on 11 October 2004 by Sergey Dresvyannikov with the participation of A. P. Akchurin and Pyotr Kuznetsov[1]. The first snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated 9 December 2004[1]; by 2015 the address was already occupied by unrelated content, and in our census the domain is listed as non-existent.

What was on the site

The home page was headed "Pseudoscience. Official Site", and beneath the heading ran the line "LIESCIENCE : FOLK'S SCIENCE"[1]. Next came a definition of the subject: a discipline originating in computer science and control theory — the authors noted separately that at one time both had themselves been declared "pseudosciences" — and drawing on the results of statistics, psychology, metaphysics and Marxism[1]. The project described its task as collecting and systematizing the working methods of deception, lying, manipulation and propaganda, and as transferring knowledge of the methodology of lying from the "hermetic" sphere into the possession of broad layers of society; "Pseudoscience" called itself "the applied part of control theory" and laid claim to the role of the leading theoretical basis of the post-information society[1]. The same page announced that the team of developers intended to open a dedicated Institute in the near future, and expressed gratitude to the Presidential Plenipotentiary Envoy to the Volga Federal District S. V. Kiriyenko and to the President of the Russian Federation V. V. Putin[1].

The lower part of the page was occupied by theses: "The lie is material", "The lie is the bright future of all mankind", "Pseudoscience outlines the future of the material part of the world" — concerning the so-called Deep Pseudoscience, the metaphysical part of the doctrine, which derived from information theory the thermal and informational death of the material part of the universe, and hence the inevitable triumph of unreliable information — and "In the beginning was the word, and that word was unreliable information"[1]. The first thesis mentioned the Soviet Union and S. Kara-Murza's definition of "Soviet Civilization", the second the formula "Ignorance is strength" from G. Orwell's novel "1984"[1]. The text of the home page preserved in our copy breaks off at the fourth thesis, so nothing can be said about the very bottom of the page; there is neither an address nor a telephone number in the surviving part.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The project's visibility is measurable: liescience.org took part in the website competition timed to Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day on 16 December 2004, under number 216 in the "Best Author's Site" category[2]. According to the published final table, the site received 4 votes by e-mail and 2 by SMS and took 24th place out of the 37 entrants in the category[2]. For scale: the e-mail table was headed by "Nizhny Novgorod Extreme on the Internet" with 156 votes, and the most SMS were gathered by the fan site of the Start hockey club — 143[2], while the organizers declared the winner of the category to be the site of the quintet "Chyorny Pyos" (Black Dog) with 114 e-mails and 9 SMS[2][3]. Supporters, then, were to be found for the project, but the count ran to single votes.

The site is absent from the snapshots of the Counter.nn.ru rating at our disposal: it entered our cross-section of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet precisely through the lists of Internet Day 2004, and not through the counter's readings (on how the sample is constructed, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). The domain was taken in the international .org zone, without any tie to Nizhny Novgorod or Russian subdomains — its local origin is indicated by the text of the home page itself, which names Nizhny Novgorod directly[1], and by its participation in the city competition[2].

How it ended

We have no snapshots of the home page between 2004 and 2015. By 1 August 2015 an entirely different site stood at the address liescience.org — a Japanese page about dietary supplements against dry skin, with sections on "causes of dryness", "moisturizing", "skin care" and "drinking regimen", a block of "recommended links" to third-party pages with reviews of supplements, aojiru green juice and low-carbohydrate bread, and a 2015 copyright notice in the footer[4]. In that same August snapshot, a link to a rating of supplements "for knee pain" had also been inserted into the section on the causes of dryness; in later snapshots it is no longer there[4][5].

The same text, with a changing composition and order of the links in the footer, stood on the domain on 14 December 2015[5], on 10 January[6] and on 7 May 2016[7] — the last snapshot in our selection, although the census notes archive captures at this address up to 30 May 2017. Not a trace of the Nizhny Novgorod project remained in them: by that time the address was being used for content in no way connected with "Pseudoscience". The domain liescience.org is listed in our census as non-existent; what remains of the project is the web archive pages and a line in the 2004 voting table.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day winners, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, August 2015 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, December 2015 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, January 2016 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Home page, May 2016 (archive)