Adventures in the War Against Reality
A TIMES and GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR `Quietly frightening.` - Guardian `Essential reading.` - Irish Times `Consistently chilling.` - Herald `Shocking and entertaining.` - Daily Telegraph 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. `The world`s most powerful people are lying like never before, and no one understands the art of their lies like Peter Pomerantsev.` - Oliver Bullough `Through our current smog of smouldering bullshit, This is Not Propaganda shines a necessary, humane and dissident light.` - Nick Rankin `Far more than just another take on today`s chaotic information wars, this book argues that we will have to understand how propaganda seeks to shape our deepest thoughts before we can confront it.` - Anne Applebaum