Excerpts: “In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anyone’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivations is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove plot, so that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic the renowned Russian media analyst Vasily Gatove calls ‘white jamming'” (p. 49).

“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 favored concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for censorship” (p. 85).

“Suddenly, the Russia I had known seemed all around me: a radical relativism that implies truth is unknowable, the future dissolving into nasty nostalgia, conspiracy replacing ideology, facts equated to fibs, conversation collapsing into mutual accusations that every argument is just information warfare, and the sense that everything under one’s feet is constantly moving, inherently unstable, liquid” (p. 171).

“As Thomas Borwick and others would discover decades later, in an age in which all the old ideologies have vanished and there is no competition over coherent political ideas, the aim becomes to lasso together disparate groups around a new notion of the people, an amorphous but powerful emotion that each can interpret in their own way, and then seal it by conjuring up phantom enemies who threaten to undermine it” (p. 174-175).

“Maybe there’s a simple cultural logic at work here. If our own ideological coherence was based partly on opposition to the Soviet Union’s, when it collapsed, we inevitably would follow” (p. 176).

“This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge” (p. 183).

Pomerantsev, Peter (2019). This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality. New York: Public Affairs.