This Is Not Propaganda. December 18, 2020


This book is a good introduction on current-day information warfare and how it affects pretty much everything, from governments to our daily lives. It’s a bit Russia-centric, not just because Russia plays a large role in the information wars, but also because Peter Pomerantsev sprinkles the book with stories of his family (and in particular his father) under the Soviet Union. He also meets with several people all over the globe who have anecdotes of their own battles.

I thoroughly enjoyed the stories and the anecdotes but even as a non-expert, I can’t say I’ve gained much insight. Pomerantsev’s analyses never go much beyond what his subjects tell him. More in-depth research would’ve of course made the book much longer, but I think the superficial treatment weakens the arguments somewhat. The section on Cambridge Analytica is particularly bad: he essentially reproduces the company’s claims on their algorithms and methods, but there’s not a lot of real evidence of their effectiveness.

From reading this, my own interpretation is that there’s so much psyops these days that looking for more information will only make it harder for you to believe in anything, and this leads you into complete cynicism or misplaced rage.

Some bits I enjoyed: the concept of “manufacturing consensus”, done by using bots or trolls to create discourse online that make you change your beliefs on what the mainstream opinion is; the idea of winning in politics by getting your opponent to use your language (which I had seen before in Metaphors We Live By); propaganda as the centerpiece of conflict (military operations nowadays play second fiddle to the information war, rather than the other way around); the way the right wing has coopted leftist social movements' rejection of objectivity and created a reality that favors them.