This Is Not Propaganda

PREFACE: TELEGRAM!

FORTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE MY PARENTS WERE PURSUED BY THE KGB over the simple right to read, write, and listen to what they chose and say what they wanted. Today, the world they hoped for, where censorship would fall like the Berlin Wall, can seem much closer: we live in what some academics call an era of “information abundance.” But the assumptions that underlay the struggles for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century—between citizens armed with truth and information, and regimes with their censors and secret police—have been turned upside down. 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.

Forty years after my father’s interrogations by the KGB, I find myself following the palest of imprints of my parents’ journey, though with none of their courage, risk-taking, or certainty. As I write this—and given the economic turbulence this might not be the case when you read it—I’m working on a program in an institute at a London university that looks at the newer breeds of influence campaigns, what might casually be referred to as “propaganda”: a term so fraught and fractured in its interpretation—defined by some as deception, and by others as the neutral activity of propagation—that I avoid using it.

I should add that I’m not an academic and this is not in an academic work (although I quote some academics extensively). I am a lapsed television producer, and though I continue to write articles and sometimes present radio programs, I now often find myself looking at my own media world askance, at what it’s wrought and how it can be fixed. I meet Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, trolls, and elves, “behavioral change” salesmen and Infowar charlatans, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and bot herders. Then I bring all I have learned back to the squat, hexagonal, concrete tower where my office has its temporary home, take all the lessons I’ve learned and shape them into sensible “Conclusions and Recommendations” for neatly formatted PDF reports and PowerPoint presentations, which diagnose and then propose remedies to the flood of disinformation and deception, “fake news,” “information war,” and the “war on information.”

Remedies to heal what, however? The neat little bullet points of the reports I work on assume that there really is a coherent system they can amend, that a few technical recommendations to new information technologies can fix everything. Yet the problems go far deeper. When I present my findings to the representatives of the waning Liberal Democratic Order, the one formed in no little part out of the conflicts of the Cold War, I am struck by how lost-looking they seem. Politicians no longer know what their parties represent; bureaucrats no longer know where power is located; billionaires’ foundations advocate for an “open society” they can no longer quite define.

Big Words that once seemed swollen with meaning—democracy and freedom, “the people,” Europe, and the West—have been so thoroughly left behind by life that they seem like empty husks, the last warmth and light draining out of them, or like computer files I have forgotten the password to and cannot access. The very language we use to describe ourselves—“left” and “right,” “liberal” and “conservative”—has been rendered almost meaningless. And it’s not just conflicts or elections that are affected. I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social media, reposting conspiracies from sources I have never heard of, some sort of internet undercurrent pulling whole families apart, as if we never really knew each other, as if the algorithms know more about us than we do, as if we are becoming subsets of our own data, which is rearranging our relations and identities with its own logic, or in the cause of someone else’s interests we can’t even see. 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. I 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.” I catch myself thinking, “I feel that everything that I thought solid is now unsteady, liquid.”

This book explores the wreckage, searches for sparks of sense that can be salvaged from it, rising from the dank corners of the internet where trolls torture their victims, passing through the tussles over the stories that make sense of our societies, and ultimately trying to understand how we define ourselves.

Chapter One takes us from the Philippines to the Gulf of Finland, where we will learn how to break people with new information instruments, in ways subtler than the old ones used by the KGB.

Chapter Two moves from the Western Balkans to Latin America and the European Union, where we will learn how to break resistance movements with new information tactics, in ways subtler than in the twentieth century.

Chapter Three explores how one country can destroy another almost without touching it, blurring the contrast between war and peace, “domestic” and “international”—and how the most dangerous element may be the idea of “information war” itself.

Chapter Four explores how the demand for a factual politics relies on a certain idea of progress and the future, and how the collapse of that idea made mass murder and abuse more possible.

In Chapter Five, I argue that in this flux, politics becomes a struggle over the construction of identity. Everyone from religious extremists to the populists who want to create new versions of “the people”—even in Britain, a country where identity always seemed so fixed—now wants to use the new information system to redefine you.

In Chapter Six, I look for the future—in China and in Chernivtsi.

Throughout the book, I travel, sometimes, but not only, through space. 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. These network maps are generated by data scientists. They call the process “surfacing.” You take a key word, a message, a narrative, and cast it into the ever-expanding pool of the world’s data. The data scientist then “surfaces” the people, media outlets, social media accounts, bots, trolls, and cyborgs pushing or interacting with those key words, narratives, and messages.

These network maps, which look like fields of pin-mold or telescope photographs of distant galaxies, show how outdated our geographic definitions have become, revealing unexpected constellations where anyone from anywhere can influence everyone everywhere. A “rooted cosmopolitan” sitting at home in Scotland guides activists away from police during protests in the Middle East. ISIS supporters disguise campaigns for the Islamic state as iPhone ads.

Russia, with its social media squadrons, haunts these maps. Not because it is the force that can still move earth and heaven as it could in the Cold War, but because the Kremlin’s rulers are particularly adept at gaming elements of this new age, or at the very least are good at getting everyone to talk about how good they are, which could be the most important trick of all. As I will explain, this is not entirely accidental: precisely because they had lost the Cold War, Russian spin doctors and media manipulators managed to adapt to the new world quicker than anyone in the entity once known as the “West.” Between 2001 and 2010, I lived in Moscow, where I saw close up the same tactics of control and the same pathologies in public opinion that have since sprouted everywhere.

But as this book travels through information flows, across networks and countries, it also looks back in time, to the story of my parents, to the Cold War. This is not a family memoir as such; I am concerned only with how my family’s story intersects with my subject. This is in part to see how the ideals of the past have fallen apart in the present, and what, if anything, can still be gleaned from them. When all is swirling, I find myself instinctively looking back, searching for a connection to the past to find a way to think about the future.

But as I researched and wrote these sections of family history, I was struck by something else—the extent to which our private thoughts, creative impulses, and senses of self are shaped by information forces greater than ourselves. If there is one thing I’ve been impressed with while browsing the shelves of the library of my university, it is that one has to look beyond just news and politics to also consider poetry, schools, and the language of bureaucracy and leisure to understand the formation of attitudes. This process is sometimes more evident in my family, because the dramas and ruptures of our lives make it easier to see where those information forces, like vast weather systems, begin and end.