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To Unreality and Beyond

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To Unreality and Beyond Journal of Design and Science • Issue 6: Unreal To Unreality—and Beyond Peter Pomerantsev Published on: Oct 23, 2019 DOI: 10.21428/7808da6b.274f05e6 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) Journal of Design and Science • Issue 6: Unreal To Unreality—and Beyond In this essay, author and Russia watcher Peter Pomerantsev argues that the “propaganda of unreality” is not a new phenomenon—it’s been part of the political landscape and process for decades. What’s new is that the principles of resistance to manipulation we’ve employed successfully in the past don’t actually work against today’s style of unreality, which he refers to as “the futureless now.” But there is hope, Peter explains, and novel approaches we can take to address the propaganda of unreality and reinvigorate the democratic information space as we move further into the 21st century. —Ethan Zuckerman The Presidential Candidate wears a flamboyant suit and he says things so outrageous, so detached from any factuality, that the audience is enthralled. The way he pushes through the usual dull discourse of electoral politics into a space where all is both uncertain and exciting! “Did he really say that?” they think, as they wait, agog, for his next taboo-breaking bombshell. And he, in turn, can sense almost physically when their attention is most taut —and so he pulls them first one way, then another. His speeches edge toward stream of consciousness, where you can never tell whether he means it or not, whether he is joking or deadly serious. He promises to make this humbled superpower great again; that the country’s neighbors will pay for his policies; that there is a vast global conspiracy holding back the country’s currency; that “our” soldiers will be washing their boots clean in distant oceans; that, if elected, he will get rid of unemployment in a few months; that everyone will have new cars and televisions; that he will empower vigilante gangs to clean up the lawless zones on the country’s borders… This is not the USA in 2016, or Duterte’s Philippines, or Bolsonaros’ Brazil, or Salvini’s Italy. This is Russia, 1993, and the Candidate in question is Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Zhirinovsky leads the “Liberal Democratic Party,” a party that made a mockery of those words, as it was neither liberal nor democratic but imperialist, redistributive, and anti-Western. When Donald Trump triumphed in the 2016 election, I and other Russians and Russia watchers I know found ourselves experiencing more than a touch of déjà vu. So much of the rhetoric and narrative tactics suddenly emerging in America (as well as in the Philippines, Europe, Latin America, and Turkey) I had already seen brewing in Russia in previous decades. The deliberate fuck-off to factual discourse; the wild relativity that claims all facts are subjective or indeed impossible to ever know; the nebulous nostalgia; the replacement of ideology with seemingly infinite layers of conspiracy theories, where you never have the sense that you can reach any reliable version of reality; the flooding of the information space with so much bullshit you can’t tell truth from fiction — it was all hauntingly familiar. As I argue in my new book, it is no coincidence that the future — or rather the futureless present — arrived first in Russia. This approach to exerting mass influence is one that controls people 2 Journal of Design and Science • Issue 6: Unreal To Unreality—and Beyond not through insisting on a single truth they should adhere to but that says, instead, that truth is unknowable; it’s an approach that doesn’t insist on an alternative reality but on a morass of competing unrealities; that is born out of the end of the collapse of ideological competition and universalist narratives of a rational future in the aftermath of the Cold War; that is a process felt more keenly in Russia but now engulfing the thing once known as the West. In the words of one of Putin’s early spin doctors, Gleb Pavlovsky: “The Cold War split global civilization into two alternative forms, both of which promised people a better future. 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.” I offer here an outline of the main constituent elements of this “propaganda of unreality” and a brief look at why old principles of resistance to manipulation don’t work against it. Finally, I explore approaches to dealing with it and reinvigorating the democratic information space for the 21st century. The Great Fuck-Off to Facts During the end of the Cold War, as censorship collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, it seemed as though the truth—having long been suppressed by dictators in their fear of it—would set everybody free. But the paradigm shifted, with cataclysmic results. We now have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power. There is nothing new in politicians lying, but showing that they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not now seems both novel and central to their performances. When Vladimir Putin appeared on international television during his army’s annexation of Crimea and stated, with a smirk, that there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea (while everyone knew there were), and later, just as casually, admitted that they had been there all along, he wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts simply don’t matter. Similarly, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, is famous for having no discernible notion of what truth or facts are, yet this has not in any way been a barrier to his success. Presented with situations where it would be simpler to tell the truth — “I misspoke when I said the hurricane might hit Alabama” — he alters a weather map with a Sharpie marker and dares anyone to call him out. You can see this difference in the approach to lying, and to the language of factuality, in how disinformation campaigns have changed since the Cold War. Back before the fall of communism the USSR’s international propaganda arm, Radio Moscow, claimed that it was broadcasting the “scientific” truth of Communism to the world. Radio Moscow’s lies tried very hard to look like facts. When, in the 3 Journal of Design and Science • Issue 6: Unreal To Unreality—and Beyond 1980s, Radio Moscow broadcast dezinformatsiya claiming that the CIA had invented AIDS as a weapon against Africa, the lies were carefully maintained and curated over many years. The lies featured scientists in East Germany who had supposedly found the evidence, overcoming obstacles to reveal the suppressed truth. When Ronald Reagan challenged the Soviet campaign in meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader was dutifully insulted and appalled: How dare Reagan claim the USSR was lying! Today Putin and Trump revel in their lies. And Russian propaganda, unlike its Soviet precursor, doesn’t give a hoot if its dezinformatsiya is called out. Today the Russian media and government officials push similar stories to Operation Infektion: 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 biogenetic weapons;1 that the US is encircling Russia with secret biological warfare labs. But these claims are just thrown online or spewed out on TV shows, with little effort to make them look real. Instead of claiming that Russia represents “scientific truth,” Kremlin propaganda heads argue that such enlightenment values are a con.2 In the words of Dmitry Kiselev, head of Sputnik News and one of the Kremlin’s top TV attack dogs, “objectivity is a myth that is proposed and imposed on us.”3 With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder the Russians don’t make dezinformatsiya like they used to. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised by this great fuck-off to facts. After all, facts are not always the most pleasant things: they can be reminders 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 great “up yours!” to glum reality. The very pleasure of having a Putin or a Trump in the big chair is a release from the constraints that high office imposes. But while facts can be unpleasant, they are undeniably useful. You especially need them 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, and 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 will improve your lives. The need for facts is predicated on the notion of an evidence-based future. In the Cold War, both sides engaged in what had begun as a debate about which supposedly rational system — democratic capitalism or communism — would deliver a rosier future. The only way to prove you were moving toward achieving this future was to provide evidence.
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