This is Not Propaganda

When information is a weapon, everyone is at war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump. We've lost not only our sense of peace and democracy - but our sense of what those words even mean. As Peter Pomerantsev seeks to make sense of the disinformation age, he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, 'behavioural change' salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and much more. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, he finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia - but the answers he finds there are surprising. Part reportage, part intellectual adventure, This is Not Propaganda is a Pynchon-like exploration of how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves in a time where truth has been turned topsy-turvy.

Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, studying 21st century information manipulation and how to fix it. An author and TV producer, he is a widely-cited expert on disinformation and media, and writes for publications including Granta, The Atlantic, Financial Times, and many others. His first book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. It has been translated into over a dozen languages.