I picked this book after hearing about it in one podcast. Or was it on Twitter ? Anyway. I was looking at what is happening in China vis a vis Hong Kong and the technics used by the French far right to recruit new members or spam public discourse and was looking into learning more.

And damn, this book is good. It’s not a manuel in doing propaganda nor fighting propaganda but a mix between interviews with PR people or trolls, personal experience, family memoir (the author’s family fled the USSR), political analysis and so on.

And this is where I realise I am not good at explaining why I liked a book.

Imagine going from faceless trolls working in a Russian troll farm in part 1 to a desperate teen in Aleppo doing its best to put the reality of the war in the face of the world only to achieve virality but no action. And from this point to rehab, getting people out of this soft fact vicious circle.

From faceless to extremely personal. From the USSR to 2019.

From tense and graphic descriptions to poetic paragraphs. From hope to despair to hope for salvation.

All this intertwined with a family memoir. The author’s grandfather went from being on the receiving end of USSR censorship system to working for the BBC Foreign bureau. Does this count as propaganda ? Or does the fairness requirement protects them from this suspicion ?

The main idea is that the over-segmentation of “the people” (by interest, etc) first diluted the role of big ideology and increased the influence of the most basic instincts (as the most common denominator between these groups). Then, it made it easier to pit each group against each other by playing on small differences.

Blow by blow

Hard to do a blow by blow comment of the book as I basically read it from cover to cover in a day. I’ll share the main themes as well as some of the excerpts I highlighted along the way.

Cities of trolls

How to build a presidential campaign in the Philippines (Dutertre) and how what was first an online experiment turned against those who started it.

What it’s like in a russian troll farm

But instead of an outcry, she found that many people, including fellow activists, just shrugged at the revelations.

She had left the confines of the farm-only to find she was enveloped by it everywhere.

This was censorship through noise.

Democracy at sea

This chapter is focusing on Russia and Mexico.

I discovered Srdja Popovic, well known for his Blueprint for Revolution book (and seminars). Looks like a must read and I have added it to my list.

Regimes have the upper hand when it comes to physical force; what they can’t dal with are massive, peaceful crowds out on the streets.

Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it.

And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess, it’s all the fault of the conspiracy.

‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.’

Russia could not risk a military war with NATO, but what if its attack was non-military and non-attributable?

The most amazing information blitzkrieg in history

How the Russian invasion of Crimea happened, both on the ground and on the media side. Very moving stories. Some of the best / most frightening quotes in the book.

A quote taken because I have seen how China feeds the Japanese-soldier-as-the-eternal-ennemy in all its broadcasts everytime there’s a national holiday or whatever:

Officials argued the street name changes and statue demolitions were a necessary part of the information war with the Kremlin, with its non-stop diet of Soviet movies and social media campaigns that reframe the present as an endless Second World War against eternally returning fascists.

‘There are lots of people here who can’t show what they think openly. They go online instead, and it’s important for them not to be lonely.’

The students’ friends and relatives just chose the story of the fire that better fitted their world view.

Faced with wildly conflicting versions of reality, people selected the one that suited them.

The most potent manoeuvre in the information war was to jettison the idea of ‘information war’ altogether and show what real war let to.

Journalists who had travelled the region had warned me about this phenomenon: people would rearrange the evidence to fit the world view they saw on television, however little sense it made.

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 led 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.

Soft facts

How do you see the role of the BBC during the cold war? What are fact checkers. Need to check Mantzarli’s Code (ie. the fact checkers’ code of conduct)

‘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.’

But now the attacks are not just on the BBC’s impartiality, but on the very idea that impartiality and objectivity can exist at all.

With the possibility of balance, objectivity, impartiality undermined, all that remains is to be more ‘genuine’ than the other side: more emotional, more subjective, more heroic.

But if the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts?

The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for newness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias

And now? Now everyone knows everything all the time. There’s an abundance of video, photo and 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.

And it sits there, waiting for facts to be given meaning.

Pop-up people

An interesting view on European Schools and how they went from a creuset to mix local people and children coming from all over Europe to a close community.

The European Schools had become closed off from the Europed they’d once hoped to transform. It felt like a metaphor for so much of the EU project, as it struggled to articulate why it was a vision for all its citizens.

The future starts here

First mention of Cambridge Analytica and surveillance in China. Might be too fresh for in depth analysis in the same vein as what was done in the other chapters.