What kind of better future is possible and how do we get there?
Supernova is a Russian-language media outlet about collective and personal futures of society and technology. Together with our collaborators, readers, experts and SOYUZ community members, we are looking for collective answers for these questions and report on a this process through our texts, social media content and community events.
Supernova is an anti-war media in exile. We stand against the war our country waged on Ukraine, we support and grieve for people of Ukraine. The future should be better, than this, and we must take actions for the future that is right.
We are based remotely all over the world from VLC, Spain to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Founder of SN, Anna Ignatenko, has 13 years of experience in journalism and worked for the biggest independent media outlets in Russia in executive positions before founding Supernova in 2020. Other team members are anonymous for the security reasons. Please contact us for any inquiry at anna@supernova.is
SN manifesto
We are sure that the decisions of each of us still change the future, even if sometimes it seems otherwise.
These decisions exist in the area of personal future — and together with our authors we explore approaches to creating an image of our goals and methods of achieving them. And at the same time, the future is not closed in the individual, it is distributed among all of us, participating in different communities, belonging to different groups. In order to change big things, we need big systems — and big dreams. In order for decisions that affect personal and collective futures to be informed, we collect context, seriously explore bleeding edge topics and with interest understand what is only just glimmering with the reflections of the future.
We look to the future for inspiration and interest in tomorrow; after the brutal initiation of war, we are learning to dream about something good again. We try to be gentle with the material, themes, readers, the world we describe. Gentle, but attentive and critical of our own and others' illusions.
We talk about hopes that today we have to look for in the bins. About technologies that define our world, but about which we really know little and which we are even less interested in seriously. About freedoms - inside, as the absence of limiting beliefs about the future, and outside, about freedom of action, association, expression, freedom in the digital environment.
We believe that to achieve a better future, we need to acknowledge the catastrophe happening in the present. But we are not engaged in news journalism and therefore do not publish news notes and death tolls: for this, we advise reading our colleagues from other independent Russian media: True Story, Meduza, Verstka, Novaya Vklab, and many others. We will write about methods of bypassing the blocking of these publications, about censorship technologies, about people who devote their time to the digital struggle. The authors of Supernova dreamed of creating a Russian Wired for many years, but they could not imagine that it would be made in exile, and half of it would consist of materials about the fight against censorship, Internet shutdowns and propaganda.
We write and talk about technology and the Internet because it is a layer of our reality, and the present, like the future (and the past too), is no longer imaginable without the network, but still has not been widely understood in its context. The Internet, which we knew as a space of freedom and connection, is changing today under the influence of surveillance capitalism, big data, "gentrification", global social media systems and big tech; and also under the threat of fragmentation, "splinternetization", especially in Russia. We are sure that good, deep texts about this are needed in Russian.
The media constantly talk about the disasters of today and yesterday, this is important and necessary work. But they do not talk to us about imagination, about the possible. Within the framework of the old idea of the world, politicians should give us an image of the future, that broad frame within which we can see our future selves. But the image of the future formed by modern Russian politics does not satisfy this request, so we invite you to try to imagine with us: what could be the best future of our society, country and planet, human rights, science and faith.
To support this imagination, we are making Supernova. We will risk saying that we will seriously try to reinvent the relationship between the media and readers: the media about the future should not be a ghost of the media of the past. “That's the way it is” is never an argument in any of our elections, in editorial policy, in the choice of platforms and services, strategies. We act in such a way to be — to become — those who can come to a better future. We all still do not know what the new world should be like — because you and I need to invent it.
The world today, it would seem, is built by physicists, economists, generals and futurologists, but it also depends on the decisions of those who sincerely dream, plan to fulfill their dreams and are ready to act. If we find the strength in ourselves for hope and action, it will be as we want.
The readers, authors and allies of Supernova are those who are touched by the future: by the wind of change, hope in the center of the heart, a memory, a plan for tomorrow, a ticket to a concert next year, Martian seas, a world without war.
We want a free Russia to be possible. For our country to not be a threat, but a place where we, our family, our friends could live safely and without internal censorship. Without exceptions. We do not recognize violence as a method, and we do not support the war that our country is waging in Ukraine, and the aggression against “dissenters” inside the country.