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More information was supposed to mean more freedom to stand up to the powerful, but it’s also given them 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 mass persuasion run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, deep fakes, fake
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censorship through noise.
The very form of social media scrambles time, place, proportion: terror attacks sit next to cat videos; the latest jokes surface next to old family photos. And the result is a sort of flattening, as if past and present are losing their relative perspective.
they may be ‘non-violent’, but that doesn’t mean they are for the faint-hearted.
Regimes have the upper hand when it comes to physical force; what they can’t deal with are massive, peaceful crowds out on the streets.
if you give people more power over how their lives are run, democracy will be the better for it. Democracy’s ultimate defenders are the citizens, aware and trained in how to keep their elected representatives accountable.
the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it.
And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy.
conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’.
‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.’
The chance to change or mold public opinion is reserved to those who are not afraid of being isolated.’
The NATO alliance is predicated on a single phrase, contained in Article 5 of the treaty, which holds that a military attack on one member is an attack on all. For all the invocations of the idea of ‘the West’, its practical, geopolitical expression is Article 5 – a sentence, a promise. But what if that sentence was rendered meaningless? Russia could not risk a military war with NATO, but what if its attack was non-military and non-attributable?
Defining the argument means winning it.
‘When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame … when you are arguing against the other side, do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame – and it won’t be the frame you want.’8
the Russian approach smudges the borders between war and peace, resulting in a state of permanent conflict that is neither fully on nor fully off.
non-stop diet of Soviet movies and social media campaigns that reframe the present as an endless Second World War against eternally returning fascists.
We have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power.
he wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts don’t matter.
‘The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for newness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias,’
Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.’13
To seal this improvised identity one needs an enemy: ‘the non-people’. Best to keep it too as abstract as possible so anyone can invent their own version of what it means: ‘the Establishment’ will do, or ‘elites’, ‘the swamp’.
