posted on 20 Jan 2020

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

In reviewing Pomerantsev’s earlier book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, I said I would certainly be reading his newer book. Well, I have now tried to, twice, and it is something of a disappointment. Frustratingly, just like his earlier book, it is important and crammed with significant insights into the current ‘information wars’ – how and why they are happening, who is engaged in them, and their wider social impact. The problem is not that the book lacks interest – far from it. The problem is that – like many books made up of previously published material – some of it isn’t very well integrated and reading it sequentially reveals it to be a bit of ragbag.

Pomerantsev’s central thesis is that the old oppressive regimes and dictatorships – one might almost call them the dictatorships of the old media – operated on tried and tested totalitarian methods in which everything, even thought, was controlled and in which every infraction carried terrifying consequences. In the new information age, however, the age of super-abundance of information, these old methods no longer work, and in Putin’s Russia, in China, in some of the former Soviet states and in places such as the Philippines, these old models have been turned entirely on their heads. When information can no longer be controlled, those who hold power exert control by creating disinformation – and the more this creates doubt and confusion, the more conflicting narratives it sows, and the more it offers ‘plausible deniability’, the better. Pomerantsev describes this as a new “propaganda of unreality”.

He plunges us into a world of influence operations run amok, “where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality”. In an atmosphere intended to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, Pomerantsev says, we are not only losing our grip on peace and democracy, we are sometimes in doubt about the very meaning of these words.

He examines those on both sides of the information wars – “Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, ‘behavioral change’ salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops”; young activists mobilising against state oppression in places as disparate as Venezuela, Belgrade and Manila; Putin’s troll factories; ethnic cleansing and genocide ferociously fuelled by social media in Myanmar.

One hundred and sixty years ago, writing in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels were struggling to describe the new social relations brought about by capitalism. In what has become a famous quotation they said: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…”

Truth, facts, propaganda, political ideology and even language itself are now similarly malleable, are melting into air, and what we know and what we think we know about ourselves and our leaders and the societies we live in is clouded by doubt, obscured by lies and misinformation. The old internet gurus thought that data would set us free. In some respects it has – free to consume, free to shop. But in other respects data has become a new set of shackles waiting to be struck off.

Make no mistake. There is much to think about in Pomerantsev’s book, and no part of it is without consequence and gravity. But like many books assembled from previously published essays there is evident repetition and – to me, at least – a lack of a secure overall narrative from section to section. This fragmentary feel is further increased by the inclusion of sometimes quite long passages reflecting on his own family’s experiences under Stalinism. Not only do these feel somewhat ‘shoehorned’ in, they are also all in italicised print, which makes them hard to read. There is a truly important book about our present circumstances struggling to get out of this slightly slapdash volume: I wish it were better and I wish it were more readable. I’ll try again at some point.

 

Alun Severn

January 2020