Does anyone remember Vladislav Surkov, "managed democracy," "non-linear war"?
Sure, you must, he emerged into view in the West with the Ukraine war of 2014, with the disinformation and the little green men. He was an aesthete and "political technologist," a PR guy and a reality TV fan, able in his position as Putin's chief counselor to conjure up an entire induced political spectrum where multiple truths and decoy dissidence became tools in a strategic calculus of "democratic" (or demotic, or demonic) power.
Anyway, I sure remember him, because his transgressive postmodern cynicism frankly struck fear in my heart, and if memory serves it was a weirdly energizing affect for a whole lot of other people at the time. As Peter Pomerantsev wrote in Politico way back in 2014:
"If in the 20th century the Kremlin could only lobby through Soviet sympathizers on the left, it now uses a contradictory kaleidoscope of messages to build alliances with quite different groups. European right-nationalists such as Hungary’s Jobbik or France’s Front National are seduced by the anti-EU message; the far-left are brought in by tales of fighting U.S. hegemony; U.S. religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s stance against homosexuality. The result is an array of voices, all working away at Western audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support" (1).
Does any of this sound familiar? Maybe to the tenth power?
Some people say non-linear or hybrid warfare was a Russian response to US information-war tactics in the era of the "color revolutions" (2). But then the Russian twist became crude American reality in Trump's 2016 campaign. It was the Saint Petersburg troll factories, it was Facebook and the new media system, it was because Trump himself was a real-estate mogul, a conduit for Russian capital flight and a reality TV guy at heart. Surkov's name was never mentioned in the (pathetically faked) Steele Dossier, but as the Democrats tried to save the day with their trials and their Congressional morality plays, the post-truth pathology globalized.
That was then, this is now.
The amazing power of Surkovian social management was just on display: Despite the advance of hundreds of thousands of troops with all requisite equipment, most Ukrainians and Zelensky himself could not believe that war would be unleashed.
But the sudden obsolescence of the whole doctrine was also just on display: Because here was Putin reverting to a pure imperial power discourse, blood, soil and boots on the ground. Feint, contradiction and duplicity have evaporated. Conventional interstate warfare is back. Is this why Surkov was finally pulled from his post by Putin's order in 2020? Or???
In the run-up to this war both the US and Britain tried something entirely new for them, surely influenced by their knowledge of Surkov and associated military doctrines. What did they do? Instead of strategically managing the truth, they basically made their intelligence public as it came in. And the intelligence was spot on. What a weird feeling: trustable intelligence. Compare what happened before the Iraq War. It's nowhere near the same circumstances, but still, positive.
Through its entanglement with anti-vaxx groups, but also because of the political management of medical information during the pandemic, post-truth has become a full-on social pathology. Putin has abandoned it because he won that battle, he spread the disease for which authoritarianism and naked power are the supposed cure. Information might be the oil of the 21st century, but the truth, how to produce it and how to share it, how not to fall prey to its myriad spurious avatars, that's the personal and political question of our time.
Truth is a culture, but an almost dead one. I think it could be the basis of a new avant-garde.
Sources
(1)
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/05/how-putin-is-reinventing-warfare/(2)
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/195099/rp_121.pdf