This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

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.

Big words that once seemed swollen with meaning, words that previous generations were ready to sacrifice themselves for – ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ – have been so thoroughly left behind by life that they seem like empty husks in my hands, the last warmth and light draining out of them, or like computer files to which we have forgotten the password and can’t access any more.

The physical and political maps delineating continents, countries and oceans, the maps I grew up with, can be less important than the new maps of information flows.

But when such language is used consistently by men of real power to degrade those who are weaker, this humour grows into something menacing: it lays the linguistic path to humiliating victims in other ways as well, to a space where all norms disappear.

But now? You couldn’t see the enemy. You couldn’t tell who you were really up against. They were anonymous, everywhere and nowhere. How could you fight an online mob? You couldn’t even tell how many of them were real.

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.

Laughtivism, explains Srdja, fulfils a double role. The first is psychological: laughter removes the aura of impenetrability around an authoritarian leader.

It also forces the regime into what Srdja calls a dilemma situation: if well-armed security services arrest activists for a jape, it can alienate parts of the population.

Democracy’s ultimate defenders are the citizens, aware and trained in how to keep their elected representatives accountable.

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.

More importantly, 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’.

‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘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.’

‘That’s what I mean when I say the Internet is a great battle between love, interconnectedness on the one side, and fear, hate, disjointedness on the other,’ he explains.

Today bots, trolls and cyborgs could create the simulation of a climate of opinion, of support or hate, which was more insidious, more all-enveloping than the old broadcast media. And this simulation would then become reinforced as people modified their behaviour to fall in line with what they thought was reality. In their analysis of the role of bots, researchers at the University of Oxford called this process ‘manufacturing consensus’.

It is not the case that one online account changes someone’s mind; it’s that en masse they create an ersatz normality.

In the age of mass communication, media becomes the indicator by which people decide what the dominant public opinion is.

The chance to change or mold public opinion is reserved to those who are not afraid of being isolated.’

‘A new generation of bots and trolls are pushing us further and further into a world of pure simulation.’

‘What is the lowest common denominator among your institutions? Which are the ones you can gather a coalition to protect? Is it the courts? The media?’ he asks.

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).

By evoking the Kremlin’s language of information war, does one end up strengthening it?

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’.

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.

Every time you post or tweet, or just repost or retweet, you become a little propaganda machine.

Faced with wildly conflicting versions of reality, people selected the one that suited them.

The most potent manoeuvre in the information war was to jettison the idea of ‘information war’ altogether and show what real war led to.

But the information age means that this equation has been flipped: military operations are now handmaidens to the more important information effect.

With the possibility of balance, objectivity, impartiality undermined, all that remains is to be more ‘genuine’ than the other side: more emotional, more subjective, more heroic.

‘Fake news’ is a symptom of the way social media is designed.

And it’s no coincidence that so many of the new breed of political actors are also nostalgists. Putin’s Internet troll armies sell dreams of a restored Russian Empire and Soviet Union; Trump tweets he will ‘Make America Great Again’; Turkish and Hungarian media dream of restoring phantoms of ancient greatness.

‘The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia.

Now everyone knows everything all the time. There’s an abundance of video, photo and eyewitness testimony, scientific analysis, SMSs, JPEGs, terabytes of data showing war crimes, communicated virtually in real time, all streamed on social media for everyone to see. And yet the reaction has been inversely proportional to the sheer mass of evidence.

It is as much archive as we have ever had relating to torture, mass murder and war crimes. And it sits there, waiting for facts to be given meaning.

‘In religious terms we would call it sectarianism,’ says Rashad, ‘identity masquerading as ideology.’

country of twenty million, Borwick estimates, needs seventy to eighty types of targeted messages.

In the case of the vote to leave the EU, Borwick confessed that the most successful message in getting people out to vote had been about animal rights.

We are living through a period of pop-up populism, where each social and political movement redefines ‘the many’ and ‘the people’, where we are always reconsidering who counts as an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’, where what it means to belong is never certain, where bubbles of identity burst, crack and are then reformed as something else.

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

As the likes of Borwick and others would discover decades later, in an age where all the old guiding ideologies have gone, where there is no coherent competition about political ideas for the future, the aim becomes to lasso disparate groups together around a new notion of ‘the people’, bound around an amorphous but powerful emotion which everyone can interpret in their own way, and then sealed with enemies who will threaten to undermine that feeling.

‘We are trying to make sure that voters receive messages on the issues and policies they care most about … that can only be good for democracy,’ Nix told the Committee, utterly unrepentant about any of his actions.

In this environment, people are able to accept and give credence to information that reinforces their views, no matter how distorted or inaccurate. This has a polarising effect and reduces the common ground on which reasoned debate, based on objective facts, can take place … the very fabric of our democracy is threatened.

Rather than an alternative, China seemed to provide another variant of what I had encountered in the US and Russia, peddling a nostalgia for a greatness before the ‘century of humiliations’, much like Putin promised to ‘bring Russia off its knees’ and Trump to ‘Make America Great Again’. The Chinese government even invoked colour revolutions as a threat.

Barbarism is the absence of memory.’