On 21 August 2025, closer to midday, I arrived by taxi at my apartment building and carried three suitcases up to the seventeenth floor. I unlocked the door with my key — my brother was not at home. I left the suitcases in the hallway and decided that the very first thing I needed to do was go to the store: I was exhausted from the journey, and all I wanted was to relax with a bottle of cold beer.
I took my Russian passport — the very same one that had been lying inside a book all these years, left there once to dry. To my surprise, the document was still in good condition. I also found my Russian bank card, which I had brought with me, and went out to the “Stolitsa” supermarket across the street from my building.
There, in the shopping hall, I unexpectedly ran into my brother: he was walking with his usual shopping cart. I came up behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. He turned around, exclaimed in surprise, “Oh! You came back!” — and a smile spread across his face. We were both truly glad to see each other.
My brother headed to the checkout and then home, while I stayed behind to choose my beer. I picked up “Stella Artois,” returned to the apartment, spent some time talking with my brother, and then passed the rest of the day in a relaxed state with my bottles of chilled drink.
On Monday, I met with my friend Andrei, whom I had not seen in more than three years. It was the first true meeting in Moscow after my return. We walked through the city center, talked about life, and shared our thoughts. Andrei told me about himself, while I spoke about my ideas and plans. We also discussed how much life in Russia had changed during the three years of my absence.
As we walked through the center, we eventually reached the square by Sakharov Avenue, where the memorial to the victims of political repression — the “Wall of Sorrow” — rises. A massive bronze wall, like a shadow, composed of thousands of faces. The gazes of people, turned into eternity, stretched in all directions: deep into the metal, towards the passersby, into emptiness. There was a special silence there, as if the past itself continued to breathe.
And it was at that very place that my phone suddenly slipped from my hands and fell with a dull thud onto the stones. I picked it up; it seemed to work, so I did not pay much attention. Only later did I realize that the symbolism was far too obvious. A place where millions of severed human connections were fixed in memory reminded me of the fragility of my own tenuous link with the life “on the other side of the ocean.”
We walked on, and by evening we reached Maroseyka, where Andrei showed me his favorite place — “Zolotaya Vobla” (“The Golden Ruffe”). We sat there for several hours, talking late into the night. And in the morning, when I woke up, I discovered that my phone refused to charge.
This turned out to be a real catastrophe. The phone was not just a device — it contained all of my American banking accounts, access to Tesla, and an eSIM with my American phone number. With its failure, it felt as though my ties with another life had suddenly been cut.
The very first thing I did was carry it to a repair shop as soon as it opened. But the bitterest part was something else: in America, I had a warranty. Every month I paid fifteen dollars for Samsung Care+, and at the critical moment, when the warranty was truly needed, I could not use it in Russia — because of sanctions. The form of the service remained: the money was being charged, the contract was in effect. But the meaning of it was gone. At the very moment when the protection should have worked, it turned out to be inaccessible.
May 14, 2026 — I woke up at 2 a.m. to finish recording and editing a video about how the system is not the same as reality, exploring the two modes of consciousness — FlatMind and DeepMind. This was my usual work ritual, a moment when everything around me was silent and my thoughts were fully focused on the meaning and structure of the video.
But the normal flow of the day was abruptly interrupted by a fateful message: at 3:20 a.m., an email arrived from the DMV. My RealID had been cancelled, and I was asked to return the card. The shock was immediate. This document served as proof of payment for YouTube ads, was linked to my app Lex Humanitus, and had been one of the nodes that connected me to America.
Immediately after receiving the email, I sent them a reply explaining that I was in Russia and could not return the document, because international mail between Russia and the U.S. was currently not functioning.
Until that moment, no one had asked me to undergo re-verification, but now using the RealID as an official document had become pointless. It was one of those elements that still tied me to America, and its loss hit me hard. My mood plummeted, but the work demanded completion — the video was finished and uploaded to YouTube.
To regain a sense of control and lift my spirits, I decided to go for a run for the first time in many years. At 6:31 a.m., I turned on Strava and immediately realized that without a VPN, the app wouldn’t work. This small but tangible setback amplified the feeling of the space around me closing in — as if the world itself was shrinking along with the impossibility of simply starting to move.
Still, I ran. I covered about 800 meters in 4 minutes and 10 seconds. I couldn’t run far, but the very act of moving, the fresh morning air, and the physical activity slightly lifted my mood.
On the morning of May 14, 2026, around 11 a.m., I went to the local territorial office of Rospotrebnadzor to submit another complaint against Pedant.ru. The reason was that a clause in their public offer agreement — a clause that Rospotrebnadzor had already officially recognized as unlawful and violating consumer rights — was still published on the company’s website as of May 14, 2026.
By that point, this was no longer just a personal dispute over a damaged phone. The situation had grown beyond a private conflict between me and a repair service. The issue concerned a public offer addressed to an undefined number of consumers. In other words, it was about a legal formulation that continued to remain publicly visible and continued to create the impression that the customer himself was obligated to prove poor service quality through an independent expert examination conducted at the customer’s own expense and in the presence of the service provider.
What disturbed me most was the fact that Rospotrebnadzor had already given an official assessment of these conditions. In their response dated March 5, 2026, they explicitly stated that such clauses were unacceptable and violated consumer rights. Moreover, the authority had already notified the business owner about the initiation of administrative proceedings under Part 2 of Article 14.8 of the Russian Code of Administrative Offenses.
And yet the clause remained on the website.
That was the central point. If a regulatory authority has already determined that a condition is unlawful, but the company continues to keep it in a public offer agreement, then this no longer looks like an accidental mistake, an unclear legal wording, or a technical oversight. It begins to look like the deliberate preservation of a mechanism designed to work against the consumer.
I prepared a formal complaint asking Rospotrebnadzor to verify that the clause was still being publicly displayed, to assess the fact that terms already recognized as violating consumer rights continued to be used, and to take appropriate enforcement measures if grounds existed.
For me, the visit to Rospotrebnadzor was not just an ordinary bureaucratic errand. After the blow I received earlier that morning with the RealID cancellation, after the feeling that one of my remaining links to America had been severed, this became an attempt to regain a sense of grounding through action. Not through abstract emotions, but through a concrete document, a concrete complaint, a concrete attempt to force a system to answer for its own words.
There was something symbolic in it. Earlier that morning, one system — represented by the DMV — had stripped away one of my documents. A few hours later, I was walking into another system — a Russian regulatory authority — in order to point out how a corporate structure continued to pressure people through legal wording.
The day had begun with the loss of an anchor, but gradually it was turning into a day of fixation and resistance. I could not restore the RealID. I could not instantly rebuild my connection to America. But I could do something else: refuse to let an already recognized violation disappear into silence. I could continue the line where the system itself becomes the object of scrutiny rather than remaining something standing unquestioned above the individual.
