This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

We now have more information than ever before—but it hasn’t brought only the benefits we expected. More information was supposed to mean more freedom to stand up to the powerful. But it also has given the powerful new ways to crush and silence dissent. More information was supposed to mean a more informed debate, but we seem less capable of deliberation than ever. More information was supposed to mean mutual understanding across borders, but it has also made possible new and more subtle forms of conflict and subversion. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, fake news, deep fakes, brainwashing, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump.

The very language we use to describe ourselves—“left” and “right,” “liberal” and “conservative”—has been rendered almost meaningless.

The grand vessels of old media—books, television, newspapers, and radio—that had contained and controlled identity and meaning, who we were and how we talked with one another, how we explained the world to our children, talked about our past, defined war and peace, news and opinion, satire and seriousness, right and left, right and wrong, true, false, real, unreal—these vessels have cracked and burst, breaking up the old architecture of what relates to whom, who speaks to whom and how, magnifying, shrinking, distorting all proportions, sending us in disorientating spirals where words lose shared meanings.

hear the same phrases in Odessa, Manila, Mexico City, New Jersey: “There’s so much information, disinformation, so much of everything I don’t know what’s true anymore.” Often, I hear the phrase, “I feel the world is moving beneath my feet.”