Peter Pomerantsev's first book , Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible (2015), made him a star in the branch of journalistic / social debate / history that tries to understand what kind of world order we were after the Cold War. How does it work and and why does it not at all benefit the things we thought when the wall fell?
In the sequel This Is Not Propaganda, Pomerantsev - who a little coke describes himself as a sacked TV producer - is a sort of cinematic earthquake journey between the information war hotspots.
The world order Pomerantsev describes is similar to democracy and freedom of speech in laughter, although it is not at all funny.
What makes it possible for the people and the opposites to express their criticism - when power holders can easily drown their voices in a flood of fake accounts and bottoms of insanely contradictory antibodies. Or from the other side: is it reasonable that freedom of speech means the right of the resourceful to create synthetic opinions, fictional popular movements?
Through the book, Pomerantsev lets his parents' lives function as a resonant bottom. They were Soviet citizens, dissidents and Jews who had to choose between emigration and prison camps. Peter grew up in London where his parents worked on writing, reading, doing journalism, radio shows and films: things that the hardship of dissident life had focused on.
Their lives, he writes, revolved around reading and disseminating forbidden literature. Trenches in shoe boxes, smuggled prison poems.
What does his life - our lives, our time - revolve around? He travels to Beijing for one final interview and in this undemocratic, unmanaged, oversized country he passes large billboards with the party's message: Democracy! Freedom! Justice! Equality!
Peter Pomerantsev, as I said , writes in a tradition. Timothy Snyder, in The Road to Freedom, has analyzed the success of authoritarian politics after the Cold War. Martin Moore, in Hacked Democracy, has investigated how the internet opposes democracy instead of promoting it.
Pomerantsev adds - with quick, easy, journalistic approach - an anxious existential dimension to a existence where reality and truth and political thinking are affected by catastrophic course falls.
If we are not going anywhere better , not building anything or striving for something - can not join any of the overarching ideologies that, say what you want, propelled the 20th century through immense difficulties, constantly forward - what should human life then serve? to?