This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

I am surrounded by dead words. Or, to be more precise, the association of words and images, stories and meanings that I inherited have lost their power. The sight of a statue of a dictator being pulled down is still important to those people who lived under him, but I don’t instantly connect to a story of ever greater freedom anymore. Millions of people out on the streets of a city à la 1989 don’t immediately signify a happy future. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that social media’s favorite genre is memes: pictures that can be defaced by people with new phrases that change the meaning of the image, symptoms of a time when sense is ceaselessly unstable. So that one might take a picture of a pipe and write beneath it: “This is not a pipe.”