# This Is Not Propaganda ### On-the-ground war serves the narrative, not the other way around War used to be about capturing territory and planting flags, but something different was at play out here. Moscow needed to create a narrative about how pro-democracy revolutions like the Maidan lead to chaos and civil war. Kiev needed to show that separatism leads to misery. What actually happened on the ground was almost irrelevant—the two governments just needed enough footage to back their respective stories. Propaganda has always accompanied war, usually as a handmaiden to the actual fighting. But the information age means that this equation has been flipped: military operations are now handmaidens to the more important information effect. It would be like a vastly scripted reality TV show if it weren’t for the very real deaths: a few months after my visit, on November 3, 2015, the Kharkiv 92nd Mechanized Brigade would be caught up in a firefight near Lobachevo. The ComBrig was wounded but survived. The borders between Russia and Ukraine, between past and present, between soldier and civilian, rumor and evidence, actor and audience had buckled, and with that the whole rational, ordered sense of perspective suddenly gave way to thinking that was magical and mystical, in which reality was unknowable and seemed to be decided somewhere up on high by divine conspiracies. ## Chapter 4 In 1978 Havel had called on people to stop repeating official language; it was the the repetition of things you didn’t believe that helped to break you. He had been jailed for subversion soon after). DURING GLASNOST, IT SEEMED THAT THE TRUTH WOULD SET EVERYBODY free. Facts seemed possessed of power, dictators seemed so afraid of facts that they suppressed them. But something has gone drastically wrong: we have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power. There is nothing new about politicians lying, but what seems novel is their acting as if they don’t care whether what they say is true or false. - When Vladimir Putin went on international television during his army’s annexation of Crimea, and asserted, with a smirk, that there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea when everyone knew there were, and then just as casually later admitted that they had been there, and even publicly awarded medals to the soldiers whom he had earlier said hadn’t been there, he wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts don’t matter. Similarly, Donald J. Trump is famous for having no discernible notion of what is true and factual. Yet this has not in any way been a barrier to his success. According to the fact-checking agency Politifact, 76 percent of his checked statements in the 2016 presidential election were rated “mostly false” or downright untrue, compared to 27 percent for his rival. He still won.5 - Why has this happened? Is technology to blame? The media? And what are the consequences in a world where the powerful are no longer afraid of facts? Does that mean one can commit crimes in full view of all? And then just shrug them off? All of the BBC, World Service and Domestic, news and entertainment, TV, radio, and “multimedia,” is squeezed into a building on Regents Street that is curved like a compressed accordion, with people sitting far too closely together because the architects forgot to factor in the right amount of desk space in their design. [...] When I talk to BBC editors and managers, the architectural disproportion seems to mirror a media one: the world has changed and the old values of the BBC, of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness leading to democracy, reasonableness, and debate, have been upended. - During the Cold War, the BBC defined “impartial” as balance between left-wing and right-wing opinions. Left and right were clearly defined political positions represented by political parties and newspapers. In the 1990s and 2000s, things got more complicated. There was no clear left or right wing anymore. Economic interests did not necessarily equal party affiliations. In the late 2010s, audiences have broken down into mini-values that they cling to and that define them. “Even as affiliation to political parties has weakened, the importance of values people identify with such as religion, the monarchy or minority rights have become stronger,” James Harding, the former director of BBC News told me. “And so, with it, perceptions of bias and how people understand impartiality have changed, well beyond traditional ideas of left and right.” - The BBC used to determine what to be impartial about by following the agendas set by political parties and, to a much lesser extent, newspapers. These were meant to be representatives of greater interests. But what happens when newspapers are no longer read and parties are so fractured that they no longer represent anything coherent? - But something more fundamental has changed, too. Impartiality and fairness always were slippery terms. Back in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government was fighting a war against the domestic BBC, accusing it of being biased for attacking Conservative politicians, of being disloyal for broadcasting Irish terrorists. There were even threats to close down the BBC: why should one have a publicly funded broadcaster if Thatcher believed in market freedom? [...] But now the attacks are aimed not only at the BBC’s impartiality but at the very idea that there is such a thing as impartiality. - Kremlin media figures insist that broadcasters such as the BBC can’t be trusted because they all have hidden agendas,7 that “objectivity is a myth that is proposed and imposed on us.”8 It’s a far cry from Radio Moscow, with its commitment to upholding scientific, Marxist truth. And you can see the difference in the content. When, in the 1980s, Radio Moscow broadcast “active measures” claiming that the CIA had invented AIDS as a weapon against Africa, the lies were carefully curated over many years. They involved scientists in East Germany who had supposedly found the evidence. An effort was made to make the elaborate lie look real. Today the Russian media and officials push similar stories, claiming that American factories were pumping out the Zika virus in East Ukraine to poison ethnic Russians, that the US is harvesting Russian DNA to create gene weapons,9 that the US is encircling Russia with secret biological warfare labs. But these claims are just thrown online or spewed out on TV shows, more to confuse than to convince, or to buttress the phobias of audiences predisposed to seeing US plots all around them. In America, impartiality and objectivity are under attack as well. - CBS is the closest the US has to the BBC in its pretensions to impartiality, and Hannity was bringing its claims to objectivity into question, demanding if its presenters ever questioned their criticism of George W. Bush, whether they spiked stories that made Obama look bad, whether they had investigated Obama’s ties to a former terrorist, his commitment to supposedly America-hating black liberation theology, or reported Obama’s economic failings (here Hannity displayed a list of statistics on the screen, too rapidly to read fully). Had CBS, he wondered, listed all the laws Hillary Clinton violated when she used a private email server as secretary of state? Exposed every one of her lies about the death of US diplomats in Benghazi? Explored how media colluded with the Clinton campaign? Questioned how much time they had given to the “conspiracy theory” that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia? - The effect of such a long list, where some of the charges are serious, others spurious, many debatable, and none explored, is to leave the mind exhausted and confused. The semantic patterns reinforce Hannity’s main message: that we live in a world where there is no epistemological certainty. - In answer to Koppel’s charges, Hannity argued that by attacking opinion shows, Koppel was actually just “giving his opinion.” Hannity described himself as honest because he admits being an advocacy journalist whereas Koppel’s façade of being impartial actually is fraudulent. All pretense at objectivity is just subjectivity. - **With the possibility of balance, impartiality, and accuracy undermined, all that remains is to be more “genuine” than the other side—more emotional, more subjective, more heroic.** Hannity’s studio displays a superhero-style shield, reminiscent of Captain America’s, with the stars and stripes and his name emblazoned on it. In the Hannity mythos, the Fox hero has to fight off the monsters of the “Alt-Left-Destroy-Trump-Media” that have declared “war on the American People.” In Hannity’s world, facts are far less important than sticking it to the enemy. And if that means showing that you don’t give a damn about their facts, all the better. - The irony is that the rejection of objectivity that the Kremlin and Fox News push plays on ideas that originally championed “liberal” causes, the Hannitys and Putins of this world officially oppose. “Objectivity is just male subjectivity,” was a slogan of the feminist movement; the student protests of 1968 celebrated feelings as an antidote to corporate and bureaucratic rationality. But now Fox and the Kremlin exploit the same ideas: If reality is malleable, why can’t they introduce their own versions too? And if feelings are emancipatory, why can’t they invoke their own? With the idea of objectivity discredited, the grounds on which one could argue against them rationally disappears. ### Disinformation on social media WITH THE REPUTATION FOR IMPARTIALITY OF A BBC OR CBS UNDERMINED, online fact-checking agencies have stepped into the fray. However, they, too, face a problem: the very environment they work in, social media, is where falsehoods spread faster than facts. It’s become something of a ritual: hauling up representatives of tech companies to lambast them for normalizing lying. - In the cloister-like courtyard of St. Stephen’s school, I met everyone from the guy in Los Angeles who monitors the accuracy of celebrity gossip to those for whom facts are matters of life and death. Fact-checkers from India, for example, told me about efforts to stop murder sprees by squads of cow vigilantes. Hindu nationalists spread surreptitious rumors on closed social media groups about Muslim butchers, falsely accusing them of slaughtering the Hindus’ holy animal. Fanatics would then descend on innocent butchers and slaughter them instead. In Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where Facebook has been used to incite ethnic cleansing, the situation was even worse. - Looking around the cloister, I could see editors from Rappler and Ukrainian, Mexican, and Western Balkan fact-checkers. When the representative from Facebook took the floor, she was pilloried for allowing blatantly untrue news stories to spread on the platform and for allowing it to be a conduit for threats against fact-checkers. - **The insurmountable problem is that for all the technology companies’ statements of concern about this problem, it’s the way their platforms are designed and how they make money that create an environment in which accuracy, fairness, and impartiality are at best secondary.** Back in 2011 Guillaume Chaslot, an engineer at Google with a PhD in artificial intelligence, discovered that the way YouTube was designed meant that it served people ever more of the same content, creating and reinforcing one point of view—and not one necessarily based on its factuality. So if you were to watch one video full of inaccurate, often downright disinforming content, the algorithm would feed you ever more. YouTube didn’t want to be the judge of what is true, but they wanted their algorithms to be the judge of what gets promoted. As a consequence, untrue content could get massively augmented. - Chaslot offered his bosses potential ways of fixing the problem. Couldn’t one offer people more diverse content? He was told this was not the focus. YouTube was primarily interested in increasing the time that people spend watching it. It struck him as a terrible way to define desire: purely by how much time someone spent staring at a screen—a far cry from the patrician public service ethos of the BBC. It’s also, Chaslot told me, easy to manipulate: if you have resources to hire huge numbers of people to watch certain videos and create tons of content on a specific subject, that would help promote those videos. Having many YouTube channels that work together was also a good way to get your content recommended. There was a reason, he argued, why the Russian state broadcaster RT had such an impressive array of YouTube channels. In his study “Emotional Dynamics in the Age of Misinformation,”11 Walter Quattrociocchi of the University of Venice analyzed fifty-four million comments over four years in various Facebook groups. He found that the longer a discussion continues in a Facebook group, the more extreme people’s comments become: “Cognitive patterns in echo chambers tend towards polarization,” he concluded. This, argues Quattrociocchi, shows up the emotional structure of social media. - **We go online looking for the emotional boost delivered by likes and retweets. Social media is a sort of mini-narcissism engine that can never be quite satisfied, leading us to take up more radical positions to get more attention. It really doesn’t matter if stories are accurate or not, let alone impartial: you’re not looking to win an argument in a public space with a neutral audience; you just want to get the most attention possible from like-minded people. “Online dynamics induce distortion,” concludes Quattrociocchi. It’s a lamentable loop. Social media drives more polarized behavior, which leads to demands for more sensationalized content, or plain lies. “Fake news” is a symptom of the way social media is designed.** ### Individualism undermines factuality - There’s something even more insidious going on here. In his Cold War essays, Igor celebrated being as individualistic as possible as a way to resist oppression. Another exiled Soviet poet, the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, who had emigrated in 1972, put it best in his commencement speech at Williams College in 1984: “The surest defense against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated.” In the Cold War “extreme individualism” was interlinked with the struggle to receive and transmit accurate information, freedom of speech associated with freedom of artistic self-expression, both opposed by regimes that censored both facts and “whimsicality.” Now social media offers limitless fields for a form of extreme individualism. Express yourself to your heart’s content! But its very nature undermines factuality. - And then there’s another twist. This self-expression is then transmuted into data: the frequency of certain words; times of postings and what that says about us; our movements and language all passed to forces that influence us with campaigns and ads we might not even be aware of. But if you were to look for your own data imprint among data brokers, in the hope of finding a reflection of your true self, you will be disappointed. Instead there are broken bits of information (something about health, something about shopping), jagged edges that can be added and stacked in different patterns according to various short-term purposes—little writhing squiggles of impulses and habits that can be impelled to vibrate for a few seconds to get me to buy something or vote for someone. - Social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, also is the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up. - That extreme individualism came with its own dangers is already there in Igor’s early stories. Rereading them, I notice how often the impressionistic, self-obsessed narrator ends up subtly undermined. At the end of the story you realize they have been so caught up in themselves that they don’t notice what is going on around them and are losing their touch with reality altogether. ### Why we're post-fact Social media technology combined with a worldview in which all information is part of war and impartiality impossible has helped to undermine the sacrosanctity of facts. But the more I thought about the issue, the more it seemed to me I was asking the wrong question. Instead of why had facts become irrelevant, why had they ever been relevant at all? And why were we seeing such similar phenomena from both of the Cold War superpowers? Facts, after all, are not always the most pleasant things—reminders, as I had discovered with my teacher Mrs. Stern, of our place and our limitations, our failures, and ultimately, our mortality. There is a sort of adolescent joy in throwing off their weight, of giving a big fuck-you to glum reality. The very pleasure of a Putin or a Trump is the release from constraint they offer. - But though facts can be unpleasant, they are useful. You need them, especially, if you are constructing something in the real world. There are no post-truth moments if you are building a bridge, for example. Facts are necessary to show what you are building, how it will work, why it won’t collapse. In politics, facts are necessary to show you are pursuing some rational idea of progress: here are our aims, here is how we prove we are achieving them, this is how they improve your lives. The need for facts is predicated on the notion of an evidence-based future. We can find many moments when that vision of the future crumpled. - The invasion of Iraq, called “Operation Enduring Freedom,” undermined the idea that political freedom was a historical inevitability. When Saddam Hussein’s statue was torn down in Baghdad in scenes reminiscent of the destruction of Lenin’s statues in Eastern Europe, the visual imagery seemed to suggest a historical equivalence, a montage of shots signifying one great story. Great Cold War dissidents, including Václav Havel, backed the war, in terms that echoed their own battles against dictatorship.12 Those who pursued the war invoked the struggle against the Soviet Union, posited it as part of one historical process: “President Reagan said that the day of Soviet tyranny was passing, that freedom had a momentum that would not be halted,” President George W. Bush announced in 2003. “Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will send forth news, from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future of every nation.”13 - But instead of freedom and prosperity, the invasion brought war and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Words and images filled with potent meaning in East Berlin ended in Baghdad. - But we still lived in a world in which there was an idea of the future, at least an economic one of ever deeper and greater globalization. Then came the financial crash of 2008. The idea that free markets could deliver freedom from want for all suddenly seemed risible; the dream that Europe’s carefully tended market was sheltered from vast economic shocks was shattered. With that the last of the old, Cold War–framed notions of a universal future fell away for many. Elsewhere, from Mexico City to Manila, it had already been dissolving gradually, like an old bar of soap coming apart in mushy flakes. - **And if there is no future that your facts are there to prove you are achieving, then what is the appeal of facts? Why would you want facts if they tell you that your children would be poorer than you? That all versions of the future were unpromising? And why should you trust the purveyors of facts, the media and academics, think tanks, statesmen? ** - **So, the politician who makes a big show of rejecting facts, who validates the pleasure of spouting nonsense, who indulges in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence, from glum reality, becomes attractive. That enough Americans could elect someone like Donald Trump with so little regard for making sense, whose many contradictory messages never add up to any stable meaning, was partly possible because enough voters felt they weren’t invested in any larger evidence-based future. Indeed, in his very incoherence lies the pleasure. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s okay. The joy of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense. And it’s no coincidence that so many of the current rulers are also nostalgists. Putin’s internet troll armies sell dreams of a restored Russian Empire and Soviet Union; Trump tweets to “Make America Great Again”; Polish and Hungarian media lament lost nationhood.** - **“The twentieth century began with Utopia and ended with nostalgia. The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for new-ness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias,” wrote the late Russian-American philologist Svetlana Boym, who saw nostalgia as a way of escaping the strictures of rationally ordered time. She contrasted two types. One, which is healthy, she called “reflective nostalgia.” This focuses on individual, often ironic stories, tries to narrate the difference between past, present, and future. The other, more harmful type she called “restorative nostalgia.” This strives to rebuild the lost homeland with “paranoiac determination,” poses as “truth and tradition,” obsesses over grand symbols and “relinquish[es] critical thinking for emotional bonding.… Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.” ** - Restorative nostalgia has taken hold from Moscow to Budapest to Washington, DC. The last thing anyone who clings to these phantom, fabricated pasts wants is facts. But if in Europe and America this tendency manifests itself in eccentric politics, elsewhere the expression is deadlier. ### Ideas and concepts to ponder - The loss of the power as facts as antidotes to untruth - Individualism undermines factuality - Why there is no more need to even try to curate evidence for untrue statements - Objectivity under attack from Trump, Kremlin - Emotion anf authenticity are the highest values when the truth is unknowable - Facts are inconvenient, especially when they tell you there is no hope for the future - Social media algorithms feeding more of the same (biased) content - Social media as a narcissism engine, promoting more extreme and sensationalist views to get affirmations from like-minded people - Social media echo chambers which drive polarization - The fractionalization of political interests and parties which could represent them - No more need to prove that communism / liberal democracy is better through evidence - Vision of freedom undermined by US Imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan - The Joy of Trump: to reject glum reality, to embrace emotion, fuck the system and spew shit. - The Restorative nostalgia for Marxist-Leninist Russia and/or Making America Great Again ### [[Syria]] #### Increased evidence has not led to more accountability At first, Mary Ana hadn’t taken the disinformation very seriously. Then she began to look further and found that it was everywhere. Search for White Helmets in YouTube and you will find that it is full of media claims that the White Helmets were actually terrorists, or that they were actors and everything they did was staged, or that they were a secret service psy-op, or that they didn’t actually exist at all. She has dedicated herself to establishing the truth about what has taken place in Syria.33 The attacks on the White Helmets, she fears, are part of a larger effort to wipe out the facts of what happened in the country. But here she encountered the great paradox of the Syrian slaughter. In all the other historical examples of crimes against humanity that Mary Ana had looked into, she found the excuse that the world wasn’t aware of what was going on. The Holocaust? We didn’t know (or pretended not to). The slaughter of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs in Srebrenica? Happened too quickly to react to. Genocide in Rwanda? Politicians claimed they hadn’t known the extent of what was happening. And now? Now everyone knows everything all the time. There’s an abundance of video and photo, 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. All sorts of black holes, great and small, seem to be opening up everywhere. “Maybe the world should be held responsible, because the world is a dangerous place,” retorted the American president in late 2018, when confronted with mounting evidence that his ally, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, had ordered the killing of a journalist inside a Saudi consulate in Turkey. The president’s phrase encapsulated an attitude that no amount of proof leads to accountability.34 And when one looks at the slaughter of civilians by all sorts of forces in the Middle East (Saudi- and US-led, Iraqi, Israeli, Iranian),35,36 the social media–powered ethnic cleansings and mob violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka,37 which one can see instigated live, online, in full view, it’s hard not to feel Mary Ana’s worst fears are coming true. And is disinformation just the excuse we use to let ourselves off the hook? “We didn’t do anything ‘because we were confused by a bot farm’”? Meanwhile, 22 TB of video recorded by the White Helmets sits in safe houses across Europe. To that one can add 60 TB of videos, tweets, and Facebook posts held by the Syrian Archive; 800,000 documents and over 3,000 witness statements collected by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability that link crimes to Syrian officials. It is as much archive as we have ever had relating to torture, mass murder, war crimes. And it sits there, waiting for facts to be given meaning. ## Chapter 5: Pop-up People ### Literary introduction One is, perhaps, not very aware in childhood that one is part of vast experiments in the culture, the mindset, the language that make politics possible. I became amphibian. I joined the other pupils in the Aula, where conversations would start in German and flow into French and then to English; or everyone would speak their own language but understand everyone else’s. I remember once looking across the Aula at an English classmate and for a moment not recognizing him because, when speaking German, he shed his camp grimaces and laughed like a Bavarian, slow and macho. So, on the one hand, national traits were more pronounced as we defined ourselves against one another in playground rituals but they were also less fixed, something you could put on and take off again. It was an existence I found quietly ecstatic. After an immigrant, bilingual, awkward childhood—knowing I wasn’t English like the majority around me but not quite sure what I was—here was a system that celebrated stepping outside and transcending one’s identity, the one thing I actually was quite good at. This was what “European” meant: not some superimposed identity, but the ability to wear identity lightly, to be able to wriggle outside of one and inside another. When sound and vision synched, she found herself in a country whose stomach had been ripped out, the intestines of its tragedies and traumas everywhere. Some of her earliest films were about the street children of St. Petersburg. There were whole colonies of them, sleeping underground alongside warm gas pipes, living in networks of dark, wet, bare-walled cellars where they mimicked normal apartment life by bringing in settees and watercolor paintings they found in dumps. Many of the children spoke an educated Russian but had run away from homes where their parents had become drunk, deranged as all sense of normality, family, sanity collapsed. All social roles were being overturned. Prostitution, previously taboo, seemed suddenly acceptable. Students would support their parents, answering ads for work as secretaries with “no complexes”—a euphemism for being prepared to sleep with the boss. Zhirinovsky meant the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where a year later Russia would be fighting a vicious war with little regard for civilian casualties and where a new type of Islamist terrorism was beginning to spread. Lina filmed up in the mountains of the Caucasus, with the Chechen separatists. They described their struggle as one of national liberation, but she also noted something new for Russia: Islamist preachers from the Gulf; women in chadors. In 2001, after university, I followed Lina’s trail: moving to Russia to eventually work in television. “Moscow,” I would write later, “seemed a city living in fast-forward, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality. Russia had seen so many worlds flick through in such rapid progression—from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich—that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable.” ### Othering THIRTY YEARS LATER, IT IS NOT ONLY RUSSIA WHERE SIGNS ARE “emptied of sense” and the world is “devoid of meaning.” The Big Tsimtsum feels relevant among the victors of the Cold War, too, in countries where professional pollsters struggle to define models for our identities, where what was previously assumed as normal has dissolved, and there is a race to form new identities out of the flux. But the essence of Hizb recruitment arguments was clear. Whatever issue a potential recruit cares about, your job is to connect it with the need for an Islamic state. ISD defines extremism as “a system of belief that posits the superiority and dominance of one ‘in-group’ over all ‘out-groups,’ propagating a dehumanising ‘othering’ mind-set that is antithetical to the universal application of Human Rights.” Sometimes they simply refer to it as “othering.” The internet has made recruitment quicker and more dexterous than when Rashad was first pulled into Hizb but the underlying techniques of envelopment are similar. Today it is ISIS that is best known for propagating the need for an Islamic state, and though Hizb has officially condemned the movement, Rashad can see how it echoes Hizb’s interlacing of feelings, concepts, language, and behavior. But there’s a problem. The types of thinking he looks to unwind, the belief in conspiracies, the “othering,” is now becoming ever more pervasive. “Extremist” is not the same as fringe; an “extremist” movement can be one of the largest in a country. One of the barometers ISD looks at for their work is the “Positive Peace Index,” which has an indicator called “The Acceptance of the Rights of Others”7 that has plummeted in many Western countries, even as movements who push a line that “posits the superiority and dominance of my in-group over all other out-groups” surge. “All politics is now about creating identity”—that was the argument a spin doctor made to me as we sat in a bar in Mexico City so shaded by dense foliage it was darker on the street than in the Curaçao-blue sky above. He explained to me that the old notions of class and ideologies were dead. When he ran a campaign, he had to take disparate, discreet interests and unite them under a new notion of “the people.” “Populism is not an ideology, it is a strategy,” he asserted, invoking two theoreticians from the University of Essex, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who had first coined the notion—though they had meant it to advance a new socialism. The nature of social media encourages “populism as a strategy.” Look at things from the point of view of the spin doctor. Social media users are organized through vastly different interests: animal rights and hospitals, guns and gardening, immigration and parenting and modern art. Some of these interests might be overtly political while others are personal. Your aim is to reach out to these different groups in different ways, tying the voting behavior you want to what they care about the most. This sort of micro-targeting, where one set of voters doesn’t necessarily know about the others, means you need some overarching identity to unite these different groups, something so broad voters can project themselves onto it—a category like “the people” or “the many.” The “populism” thus created is not a sign of the people coming together in a great groundswell of unity but a consequence of “the people” being more fractured than ever, of their barely existing as one nation. When people have little in common, you have to reimagine a new version of the people. Facts become secondary in this logic. You are not, after all, trying to win an evidence-driven debate about ideological concepts in a public sphere. Your aim is to seal in your audience behind a verbal wall. And it’s the opposite of centrism, where you have to bring everyone together under one big tent, smoothing differences. Here the different voting groups don’t even need to meet each other at all. To solidify this improvised identity one needs an enemy, the non-people. Best to keep it as abstract as possible so anyone can invent their own version of “the establishment,” “elites,” “the swamp.” The spin doctor in Mexico sadly admitted that this could get nasty. America serves as a good example. The Trump presidential campaign separately targeted free marketeers, American preservationists, and “anti-elites,”9 and that doesn’t even touch the multitude of micro-groups targeted on social media. Some social media ads didn’t even mention Donald Trump himself, avoiding showing the main man and focused instead on touchy-feely messages quite out of sync with Trump’s vitriol. But when that Brexiteer’s sweeping statement included me, I was no longer being asked to play the part of the outsider. I was in. This made me feel warm. That happiness, however, was quickly followed by dismay. The only reason I was being included was to play the puppet, the “globalist” enemy. “People like you” was being invoked only to contrast us to the “real people.” Now social media groups can provide the most accurate reflection of the issues that could motivate different groups to vote: Was it animal rights or potholes? Gay marriage or the environment? A country of twenty million, Borwick estimates, needs seventy to eighty types of targeted messages. Borwick’s job is to connect individual causes to his campaign, even if that connection might have felt somewhat tenuous at first. In the case of Brexit, Borwick said that the most successful message in getting people out to vote had been about animal rights. Vote Leave argued that the EU was cruel to animals because, for example, it supported farmers in Spain who raise bulls for bullfighting. Even within the animal rights segment, Borwick could target even more narrowly, sending more graphic ads with photos of mutilated animals to one type of voter and gentler ads with pictures of cuddly sheep to others. Animal rights supporters may actually have a very different stance on immigration—they may well be for it—than other Brexit voters, but that doesn’t matter as you are sending different, targeted ads to various groups that the others never see. And of course, Borwick had a catchphrase, “take back control,” so utterly spongy it could mean anything to anyone, with the EU being the enemy conspiring to undermine it: “I believe that a well identified enemy is probably a 20 percent kicker to your vote,” he told me, always keen to give a data point to any statement. THE BREXIT VOTE HAD BEEN ONE WAY OF RECONFIGURING IDENTITY—but it would be a mistake to think it was permanent or the only way to do so. For the next general election, the Labour party quickly came up with its own formula. Their slogan became “For the Many, not the Few.” “The Many” combined utterly different groups, from those in the north of the country who voted for Brexit, and resented well-heeled West Londoners; to well-heeled West Londoners who had voted to stay in the European Union and thought Labour would reverse the Brexit vote. Labour managed to gather enough votes to destroy the Conservative party’s majority at the election. “The people” had been reconfigured into “the Many,” the “enemies of the people” into “the Few.” We are living in a time of pop-up populism, when the meaning of “the people” is in flux, we are constantly redefining who counts as an insider or an outsider, and what it means to belong is never certain, as political identities burst and then are remade as something else. And in this game, the one who wins will be the one who can be most supple, rearranging the iron filings of disparate interests around new magnets of meaning. Since the financial crash in 2008, everything was up for grabs again. It was in the space where words, desires, meanings, and behaviors are put together and dissolved where the most important battles for power are played out similar to Hizb’s process of “culturing.” This is what defines “reality” and what becomes “normal.” Mouffe used the term “meta-politics” to denote this process, coined by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. He taps into the language of rights and freedoms—women’s rights especially—and connects them to his aims. In one stunt, female Identitarians attended a meeting in support of women’s rights in Germany, and then let off rape alarms to advertise cases of rape by Muslim migrants (of which there have been several, though the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed not by wandering migrants, but by people who know the victim well). In another stunt, Sellner put a burqa over the statue of the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. But instead of violence his language invokes freedom of speech, democracy, openness to new ideas.… “The powerlessness of our enemies is that they are still trying to describe and fight us as if we were the old right-wing fringe group parties that they faced decades before,” he said on the program I presented, while my producer and I worried that by interviewing him, we were helping to make him all the more mainstream, if such a concept even still existed. ### The future arri.ed first in Russia Instead of focusing on ideological argument, he targeted different, often conflicting, social groups and began to collect them like a Russian doll. It didn’t matter what their opinions were; he just needed to gather enough of them. “You collect them for a short period, literally for a moment, but so that they all vote together for one person. To do this, you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them.” That fairy tale couldn’t be a political ideology: the great ideas that had powered collective notions of progress were dead. The disparate groups needed to be unified around a central emotion, a feeling powerful enough to unite them yet vague enough to mean anything to anyone. In 1996, the fairy tale that Pavlovsky wrote for the campaign of the ailing, unpopular President Yeltsin played on the fear the country might collapse into civil war if he didn’t win. He cultivated the image of Yeltsin as someone so reckless and dangerous he would be prepared to plunge the country into war if he were to lose. Survival was the story; fear of losing everything, the feeling. Pavlovsky had conjured up a new notion of the majority but, as this was nothing more than an emotional trick with little political content, it fell apart soon afterwards. Work on a new one began immediately. Pavlovsky polled incessantly, and when it became clear that the candidate people most respected would be an “intelligent spy,” a James Bond, the Kremlin and its oligarchs began to search for potential successors from the former KGB. They landed on Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. For the 2000 presidential election Pavlovsky pulled together everyone who felt they had lost out during the Yeltsin years, the “left behind,” and imbued them with the sense that this was their last chance to be winners. These were disparate segments of society that in Soviet times would have been on different sides of the barricades—teachers, secret service types, academics, soldiers—whom Pavlovsky would bundle together under the idea of the “Putin majority.” 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. In that time Pavlovsky has been busy. He helped found Nashi, the youth movement that launched the distributed denial of service attacks in Estonia and harasses dissidents and journalists, and whose name, which literally means “Ours,” reduces politics to a series of pronouns: “them,” “us,” “ours,” “theirs.” “The Cold War split global civilization into two alternative forms, both of which promised people a better future,” he told me when I interviewed him from the BBC’s studios. “The Soviet Union undoubtedly lost. But then, there appeared a strange Western utopia with no alternative. This utopia was ruled over by economic technocrats who could do no wrong. Then that collapsed.” “I think that Russia was the first to go this way, and the West is now catching up in this regard. In general, the West can be considered to follow a proto-Putinism of sorts,” remarked Pavlovsky, wryly. This is the great paradox of the end of the Cold War: the future, or rather the futureless present, arrived first in Russia. We in the West are just catching up. 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. In his book of conversations with Krastev, Pavlovsky invokes his mentor, a Russian historian of the Holocaust called Mikhail Gefter, who argued already in the late Soviet era that mankind was running out of unifying, universal visions of historical development. In the 1990s, Gefter predicted that the end of the Cold War would usher in an era of “sovereign murderers.” In the absence of norms we have vacuums in which chaos agents behave according to rules they make up for themselves as they go along, who murder people and indeed whole peoples according to their own “sovereign” logic. Pavlovsky sees this as prophetic, a vision from the early 1990s that anticipates 2019. “The image of a common mankind is impossible, and no alternative has emerged. Everyone invents their own ‘normal’ humanity, their own ‘right’ history.” If there was one overarching aim to all of Pavlovsky’s “political technology,” it was to resurrect the idea of the strong state when it had all but come apart. He’d figured out back in the 1990s that though the Kremlin might be weak, he could make it seem strong domestically by spreading it everywhere in the information flows and media landscapes of people’s lives. Now Putin, Pavlovsky told Krastev, can simulate global influence by purposefully leaving the fingerprints of his hackers and information operations all over the world. “It’s all just theatre for a world audience. Theatrum mundi!”