More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 29 - June 1, 2022
We had three hundred years of the Church and fifty years of Hollywood,’ Filipinos joke).
No one who worked at the farm described themselves as trolls. Instead, they talked about their work in the passive voice (‘a piece was written’, ‘a comment was made’). Most treated the farm as if it was just another job, doing the minimum required and then clocking off.
The farm was working in rhythm with the whole government disinformation complex. No one had time to read the articles, but they knew exactly what to post. The trolls were told to spread confusion
Certainly, thought Lyudmilla, the US would punish the troll farm. She’d always noted how authors at the IRA would write screeds about how awful the West was through their troll personas, while dreaming of American holidays on their real-life walls.
Freedom House was created in 1941 as a tool with which to fight totalitarian regimes. It advocated for Soviet dissidents in the Cold War. Now it increasingly focuses on abuses of freedom inside the US (not for the first time: in the 1950s Freedom House also fought publicly against the anti-Communist witch-hunts of US Senator Joseph McCarthy).
Laughtivism, explains Srdja, fulfils a double role. The first is psychological: laughter removes the aura of impenetrability around an authoritarian leader.
Milošević’s media pumped out a version of the world in which Serbia was simultaneously on a 700-year-old mission to save Europe while also a benighted victim of the imperial West. Meanwhile, patriotic gangsters beat up opposition ‘traitors’ in the dark alleys of Belgrade and partied to a local mix of frenetically upbeat techno and folk music.
To their enemies these organisations are just a front for American imperialism and meddling. To their friends they are one of the few decent things American foreign policy produces, funding pro-democracy groups in places like the Middle East or Central Asia
For me there are only two types of society: places where governments are afraid of the people, which we call “democracies”; and places where people are afraid of their autocratic governments. I don’t care which dictator I’m empowering people to be free of.’
However, if a newspaper or television station wants to win government advertising or receive government funding, or if its owners want to win government contracts, then it ought to toe the government line.5 It’s similar to media in Erdoğan’s Turkey or Orbán’s Hungary: market-orientated in form, authoritarian in content.
While regimes have become adept at disrupting and dismaying protesters, the real art is to co-opt the tactics of Srdja Popović for authoritarian aims, to reverse-engineer ‘how to bring down a dictator’ in order to strengthen one – and thus to parody protest movements until they lose their power.
Repression in Ukraine focused on exterminating any signs of independent Ukrainian culture outsidethe cultural crèche of state-sanctioned Soviet ‘Ukrainianness’. But Igor wrote in Russian, the language of the coloniser.
Secret service agents turned academics assert the Soviet Empire collapsed not because of its poor economic policies, human rights abuses, lies, but because of ‘information viruses’ planted by Western security services through Trojan-horse ideas such as freedom of speech and economic reform (Operation Perestroika).1 Alleged secret agents in the Soviet Establishment who posed as so-called modernisers, allied with a Washington DC-dictated fifth column of anti-Soviet dissidents, oversaw the dissemination of these ‘viruses’. For a long time such theories were not in the Russian mainstream. But as
...more
Information, in this world view, precedes essence. First you have an information warfare aim, then you create an ideology to fit it. Whether the ideology is right or wrong is irrelevant; it just needs to serve a tactical function. Instead of clashing ideas leading to a cold war, here information war necessitates the creation of ideologies.
The long-term implications go deeper. If all information is seen as part of a war, out go any dreams of a global information space where ideas flow freely, bolstering deliberative democracy. Instead, the best future one can hope for is an ‘information peace’, in which each side respects the other’s ‘information sovereignty’: a favoured concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for enforcing censorship.
In Eastern Europe ‘hybrid war’ state research centres have sprung up, where ‘hybrid’ seems to be a diplomatic way of not saying ‘Russian’.
If there was one aim to the Kremlin storytelling, it was this: to show that the desire for ‘freedom’, that hangover of Cold War logic, didn’t lead to peace and prosperity but to war and devastation (a message meant, first and foremost, for its own people so they didn’t become overenthusiastic about the idea). To make this narrative real meant ensuring Ukraine could never achieve peace. The country had to bleed.
Social media technology, combined with a world view in which all information is part of war and impartiality is impossible, has helped to undermine the sacrosanctity of facts.
When Russia joined, Assad controlled only 20 per cent of his own country.
In 1953 Radio Liberty was added to broadcast into the USSR itself. Unlike the BBC, where British editors controlled all output, here the exiles had more control. The first iteration of the ‘experiment’ ended in disaster in 1956,when, during the Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation, broadcasters on Radio Free Hungary made incendiary speeches and gave protesters tactical advice, implying American military assistance was on its way. However, the US government didn’t provide any, and Hungarian dissidents felt lethally betrayed.
Despite the best efforts of Soviet signal jamming, some 5–10 per cent of Soviet adults wiggled and waved their antennas to tune in to Radio Liberty between 1972 and 1988,
Suddenly the Russia I had known seemed to be all around me: a radical relativism which implies truth is unknowable, the future dissolving into nasty nostalgias, conspiracy replacing ideology, facts equating to fibs, conversation collapsing into mutual accusations that every argument is information warfare …
They had originally described themselves as being concerned with ‘fake news’, but then found the meaning of those words was morphing to denote any content that someone didn’t like.
If one could instil these principles, then much of the framework of information war would fall away. The way to judge information would not be whether it came from ‘over there’ or ‘over here’, but whether the way it is offered allows you to engage with it on equal terms, rather than being belittled by some force that takes away your understanding of how you are being acted on.
Researchers at Harvard University have established that these troll farms allow some criticism, but immediately censor any hints at protest. ‘The Chinese people are individually free but collectively in chains,’ concludes one study.
American analysis of China could fall into another cliché, imagining some sort of innately freedom-loving Internet user silenced by an oppressive state, ready to jump into the arms of an American-style democracy the moment they could escape censorship.
Instead, the divide lay in what Wu calls the ‘China as a superpower ideology’: a militarist, territorially obsessed nationalism intent on dominating others and which saw China as surrounded by enemies weaving conspiracies against her, which harped on the humiliations China suffered at the hands of European colonial powers in the nineteenth century, humiliations that the party claimed it could relieve by restoring past greatness. There were people who embraced this position, and others who didn’t.
