Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.

The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.

Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors, destroy the lives of ordinary people, or—following in the footsteps of their predecessors—even send hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their deaths.

This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.

Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.

Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic. Nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors. Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.

One in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings is owned anonymously, just to take one relevant example. Perhaps not all these mystery owners are money launderers, but if they were, we would never know. At least thirteen people with proven or alleged links to the Russian mafia are known to have owned or done business in condos in Trump-branded properties.

Between 1980 and 2002, new kinds of states emerged, not just tax havens, but “bridging jurisdictions,” as a National Endowment for Democracy study calls them. These are hybrid states that are a legitimate part of the international financial system, that trade normally with the democratic world, that are sometimes part of democratic military alliances, but that are also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned.

With every new breakthrough, with every AI advance, China gets closer to its version of the holy grail: a system that can eliminate not just the words “democracy” and “Tiananmen” from the internet but the thinking that leads people to become democracy activists or attend public protests in real life.

Other countries could follow suit. “Safe city technology,” surveillance, and AI systems have been sold by the Chinese tech behemoth Huawei to Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Serbia, South Africa, and Turkey.

Democracies, especially hybrid democracies, are also perfectly capable of deploying their own surveillance technology, using it against critics and political opponents as well as genuine criminals or terrorists. Pegasus mobile phone spyware, created by the Israeli company NSO, has been used to track journalists, activists, and political opponents in Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, India, Bahrain, and Greece, among others.

As more countries adopt these systems, the ethical and moral objections will fade. China exports these technologies for commercial reasons, possibly for espionage, but also because their spread justifies their use at home: if there are fewer objections to mass surveillance outside China, then there is less danger that criticism will be heard inside China.

The more China can “bring other countries’ models of governance into line with China’s own,” argues Steven Feldstein, an expert in digital technology, “the less those countries pose a threat to Chinese hegemony.”

Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.

Chinese media mocked the laxity of the American response to the pandemic with an animated film that ended with the Statue of Liberty on an intravenous drip. Later, China’s Global Times wrote that Chinese people were calling the January 6 insurrection “karma” and “retribution”: “Seeing such scenarios, many Chinese will naturally recall that Nancy Pelosi once praised the violence of Hong Kong protesters as a ‘beautiful sight to behold.’ ” (Pelosi, of course, had praised peaceful demonstrations, not violence.)

A study of Russian television from 2014 to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three main Russian channels, all state controlled, an average of eighteen times a day. Some of the stories were obviously invented (European governments are stealing children from straight families and giving them to gay couples!), but even true stories were cherry-picked to support the idea that daily life in Europe is frightening and chaotic, that Europeans are weak and immoral, and that the European Union is either dictatorial and interventionist or, alternatively, about to fall apart. The goal is clear: to prevent Russians from identifying with Europe, as Russians once did.

In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed in part by elements of sharia law and has arrested and killed gay men in the name of Islamic purity. The Russian state harasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestants.

Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.

Antidemocratic rhetoric has gone global.

autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics. They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself.

the Chinese work extremely hard—tellingly hard—to insert such language into UN documents. If mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and sovereignty prevail, then there is no role for human rights advocates, international commissions of inquiry, or any public criticism of Chinese policy in Tibet, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang at all. The UN’s already limited ability to investigate UN member states will be curtailed further.

A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia. That world is the one we are living in right now.

Technologies built in Silicon Valley and public relations tactics invented on Madison Avenue long ago meshed with dictatorial behavior to create coordinated online harassment campaigns that are widely used not just by amateur online activists, and not just in “cancellation” campaigns or online pile-ons, but by democratically elected governments and leaders around the world. Indeed, they are often a flashing signal of democratic decline.

Our old models never acknowledged the truth that many people desire disinformation. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.