Grave new world of info wars revealed
The brave life and tragic fate of Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio speaks to the initial promise of our information revolution and highlights the horrors of its perversion.
This dedicated Mexican doctor used Twitter to provide a life-saving civic service, warning her fellow citizens of gang-related violence in her home city of Reynosa. Tweeting anonymously under the account of Felina@Miut3, she encouraged residents to share live updates of shootings and flag which districts to avoid.
But in 2014 a drug gang kidnapped her and two other doctors from a hospital to treat a wounded criminal. On seizing her phone they discovered her Twitter identity and shot her dead. One of the last tweets from her account revealed Felina’s real name and warned her followers: “Don’t make the same mistake as I did, you won’t get anything out of this.”
The final tweet was a photo of the doctor lying on the floor with her face blown off.
Our latest communication revolution, which promised to democratise information by giving voice to the voiceless, has been hijacked and manipulated to serve the interests of the powerful and to drown out dissent. We are still stumbling about trying to understand the effect on our politics, societies and lives.
Peter Pomerantsev, an author and television-producer-turned academic, has been among the most acute explorers of this new terrain.
His first book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, was an eye-boggling account of how Vladimir Putin’s regime “weaponised” information in post-Soviet Russia, providing the blueprint for so much that followed elsewhere.
Pomerantsev spent nine years in Moscow, mostly working for Russian television and observing the creation of a 21st-century propaganda machine from the inside.
His latest book, This Is Not
Propaganda, which mixes memoir, reportage and analysis, is not as original or powerful as his first. Few books could be. But it is a fascinating examination of how the “war against reality” has turned societies “liquid”, drawing on examples from the Philippines to the US to Mexico to Ukraine.
It tells a dispiriting tale of how the forces of darkness have captured a communication revolution designed to bring light and snuffed out champions of free speech, such as Fuentes.
The impetus for the book came from Pomerantsev’s realisation that though he had left Russia in 2010, Russia had somehow followed him.
Having dismissed the country as a “sideshow, a curio pickled in its own agonies”, he began to notice how many of its pathologies were popping up elsewhere.
“Suddenly the Russia I had known appeared to be all about me: a radical relativism which implies truth is unknowable, the future dissolving into nasty nostalgias, conspiracy replacing ideology, facts equating to fibs, conversation collapsing into mutual accusations that every argument is just information warfare … and just this sense that everything under one’s feet is constantly moving, inherently unstable, liquid.”
In this era of pop-up populism, as Pomerantsev calls it, “the one who wins will be the one who can be most supple, rearranging the iron filings of disparate interests about new magnets of meaning”.
His book offers few solutions but at least enables us to see what is happening more clearly. Its very publication is a sign that the war for reality is not yet lost. /©