This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

Perhaps the most important global trend of the last few years has been the rise --and transformation-- of information warfare. In the digital age, real military engagement matters less than how it is broadcast. The result is a constant deluge of lies, shock humor, absurdity, and fear-mongering--a circus atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth.

This is Not Propaganda is a Thomas Pynchon-like journey behind the enemy lines of the endless, multinational information war. In his signature style --by turns analytical, poetic, lurid, and funny-- disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev explores the contours of this new global order. He learns information tactics from protesters in Serbia, narco-warlords in Mexico, Fox News hosts in America, and the KGB officers who forced his own family into exile.

As he takes in these surreal yet important lessons, Pomerantsev ultimately looks to the future, envisioning what a better form of democracy might look like. This is a necessary book for navigating our new reality.

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.