If you saw the piece I did yesterday on Konstantin Rykov and you have any interest in Donald Trump, prostitutes and pee tapes, you might want to take a look at this:
Dosug (досуг, translated as Leisure) is a Russian online brothel centered in Moscow but with operations all around Europe. It can be found on both the anonymous dark net as well as the normal internet, where the website is always trying to stay two steps ahead of Russia’s notoriously vigorous cyber censors.
At over a decade old, Dosug serves as Russia’s biggest catalog of sex workers. Its existence means buying anything from a massage to sex is nearly as easy as ordering up a taxi on your phone. Dosug’s map of nearby available prostitutes looks an awful lot like Uber‘s map of available drivers.
Okay, so there’s an Uber for prostitutes in Moscow. Who created this thing?
Dosug was created by Konstantin Rykov, a 37-year-old Russian internet entrepreneur and politician who, until 2011, served as a legislative deputy in President Vladimir Putin‘s United Russia party and worked in the Duma Committee on Science and High Technologies.
What are the chances?
Starting in the 1990s, Rykov built a kingdom of popular websites beginning with fuck.ru, an obscenity-laced website that flaunted Russia’s rules while he operated under the psuedonym Jason Foris. He expanded into website design, advertising networks, book publishing, television, and eventually hundreds of other internet projects, according to his own count.
Among other news websites, Rykov runs Взгляд (Sight), referred to around the Western world as a mouthpiece of Putin’s Kremlin. He dubbed Russia’s annexation of Crimea as the “Russian Spring.”
Yeah, Russia is weird. You can simultaneously be Putin’s best friend and key online propagandist and yet have to take your prostitution ring to the dark net to avoid having it shut down by the government.
This is the same guy who got in touch with Trump on election night in 2012, a year before the supposed pee tapes were made during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. He’s the same guy who says he worked with Trump tirelessly for “four years and two days” to “get to everyone in the brain and grab all possible means of mass perception of reality” so Trump could be elected president.
By the way, it looks like someone tried to figure out how many women are available on Dosung in Moscow who will pee on command (rather than allow someone to pee on them) and came up with the number one hundred and eighty six. So, no shortage, in other words.
It also looks like others have been on this trail long before me, tying Konstantin Rykov and Artem Klyushin together as Twitter buddies for example, and then quite obviously noting disturbing connections between Klyushin, Trump, and the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
I’m sure this is all just fake news, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.
