Behind The Spine: Episode 18 Transcript

War: How social media is reshaping conflict with David Patrikarakos

Hi. I’m Mark Heywood, and this is Behind the Spine, a podcast which deconstructs genre and narrative and finds learning opportunities for writers in the most unlikely of places.

“Every time there’s a new evolution in information technologies, there’s a period of great disruption. That’s what’s happening right now.”

We’ve seen the battle-ready war of words traded over Twitter between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. We’ve seen terror organisations spreading their ideals through hate manifestos posted on social media. In the past, wars were waged on the battlefield, but now with the interconnectedness of the world, we have the reach to disarm, incite, and assault our enemies from afar with words alone. After all, words build narrative, the story we want to share with the world about who we are, why we’re here, and what we intend to accomplish.

Of course, narrative has always been a part of war. Would people really step up to lose their lives if they didn’t believe in what they were fighting for, if they hadn’t been convinced that they truly were fighting a threat, an enemy? But ‘Your Country Needs You’ posters are no longer necessary, or effective for that matter, in the modern era. All you need to spread the word social media. And so, our guest today is the journalist David Patrikarakos, author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.

Chapter 1: The Changing Face of War

In the modern age, war is just as much about a clash of narratives as it is about a more conventional battle between armed forces. Our last episode with Professor Vincent Brown explains how history has been rewritten over the years to clear away unsavoury narratives, but that ability is swiftly disappearing in the modern era. Social media has democratised the power of storytelling and given our stories permanence, a way to revisit them over and over again. These days, nobody, no matter how powerful, can escape persecution. So as we’re able to tell previously untold stories, as we were able to change the hearts and minds of those in conflict with a single tweet, David says that in war, narrative has become more important than ever.

David: In the final analysis, when you get to the battlefields, bullets and tanks, they count. If you’re dead, you’re dead. But what I’m saying is the type of wars that are fought, because of the type of system we live in, very often… look, what matters more in Israel-Hamas? The physical outcome is predetermined. Hamas has no chance of military defeat in Israel. None. Israel is never going to go and wipe out Hamas. It’s not going to happen. What remains to be actually contested, to be actually genuinely contested? The narrative battle. That’s how Israel can lose and that’s how Hamas can win. So yes, most of our wars are fought like that.

When I say ours, look at Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers were militarily wiped out by the government. It still happens, but the general tendency is toward the latter. Absolutely. You look at it because, as big a state as you can get, Russia, look what it did in Ukraine. Absolutely eschewed conventional warfare. It could have easily rolled into Kiev had it so desired, but that is just not permissible nowadays, so you have to fight in different ways. Unless you want to be Assad, and who wants to be Assad?

Mark: One of the things you talk about is the notion that if the commander of an army from millennia ago were to stand on a modern battlefield, it wouldn’t look too unfamiliar in terms of what was being contested. What would it be familiar is we’ve almost lost this nation versus nation approach to warfare, and it’s nation versus some kind of ideal or some kind of cause. We’re seeing that more and more, aren’t we?

David: Yes, absolutely. State on state warfare is very rare, even when it happens. So theoretically, Iraq versus the coalition, or America versus Iraq was state on state, but it actually wasn’t. Remember, the coalition versus Iraq lasted a week. It was that an insurgency that we were fighting for the next however many years. It’s like the greatest threat in recent times has not been a nation state army. It’s been ISIS, which is basically a franchise now. You can’t kill it, because the more you kill it in Iraq and Syria, the more it appears on the streets of Paris and Brussels.

Mark: What are we seeing then in terms of the use of social media? You have a number of individuals that you use as your case studies, and quite a number of them are children, actually, or younger people. We’re hearing stories through their voices, and through their either blogs or Twitter accounts, that we’ve not heard before. Has that redefined the way we understand the narrative of warfare?

David: I think so. I say it in the beginning of the book. One of the most striking things about my book is that it’s a book about war, it’s based around eight characters, and pretty much none of them are soldiers. The Israelis are soldiers, but they’re information soldiers. No one in that book carries a gun who’s a main character. Half of them are women, which war has traditionally been, not exclusively, but overwhelmingly a male pursuit. Half are women, and most of them are civilians. Farah is a literal child when it happens, when the war takes place. This just shows how war is changing when some of its biggest participants and players are these sort of demographics.

Yes, look at the youth, yes. Someone like Farah Baker is a digital native. She grew up with the internet, whereas you or I did not. Absolutely it allows voices like hers to be heard that never would have been heard. Because if you look at an Israeli incursion into Palestinian territories in the late ’90s, you’re going to get reports on CNN and BBC and that’s it, unless you physically go there and speak to Palestinians. Or you’re reliant on Western journalists transmitting their reported speech back to you in the form of bite-sized quotes in some text, an 800-word text. You’re never going to hear those voices. So yes, an absolute sea change.

Mark: It reminded me, and this may seem odd, it reminded me, just when you talk about Farah and how she was a child when this all started. There are shades of things like the Diary of Anne Frank in all this, which is a much more analogue version of what you’re talking about, but that account was universally rejected by pretty much every major publishing house when it first came out. It has gone on to become the famous book and has been remade many times on film and television that we know today. Is this an extension of things like that, of children documenting what is happening to them as it’s happening?

David: Yes. Look, I mean, people said, I said in the book that people called her the Anne Frank of Gaza. The notable thing about Farah is like when Foreign Policy, the magazine, puts up their 100 people of the year, they don’t put her in the activists column, they put her in the chroniclers column. They called her a chronicler, not an activist, which is to say a storyteller. She tells a story. The difference is, is that, unlike Anne Frank, is the Farah had some, and I’m going to come back to this, some ability to affect things in real time. Anne Frank’s diary wasn’t being read and published every night.

The thing with all of this is that there is a temptation to say, “Oh, it’s all changed. Nothing is the same. Nothing is as it was.” This is the sort of cyber-utopian thing that you give a man or woman access to the internet and it will set them free and they will throw off the chains of the oppressors and all this stuff. It’s all nonsense. In the final analysis, the tools that are used by the oppressed will more generally come to be used by the oppressor, and they’ll do it better because they’ve just got far, far greater resources and far, far greater manpower. But Farah Baker, what did she do? Did she change Israel’s military calculations? Of course she didn’t. What she did though was she sort of mobilised this huge outpouring of, or helped to mobilise, or became a focal point of this great groundswell of indignation, which translates into political power. It ultimately does affect military calculations. Now, Operation Protective Edge was 51 days. That’s the longest war in Israel’s history. I’ve spoken to IDF officers and they say, “Look, we probably couldn’t fight a 51-day war again.” And it’s because of stuff like this, it’s not because of any military considerations. Any practical, hard power military consideration that can fight for a hundred days against Hamas makes a difference.

Mark: You talked about your experiences in Ukraine, just going back to Putin, and how you were staggered by what you were hearing on the ground versus what was being reported on the mainstream news outlets. There was a major disconnect wasn’t there, between the narrative on the ground and what we, people like me, were hearing back here in London?

David: I mean, I think that’s probably true always, but I mean, at every level, even to the degree that the BBC would call me and say, “So, we hear there’s no electricity or running water in Donetsk.” And I’ll be like, “Well, I’m sitting in a cafe, drinking cappuccino, so I don’t think that’s correct.” So that sort of stuff. Yes. And it’s just the social media tools. As we were making our way from one fraught occupied city to the next, I didn’t listen to the BBC to find out where we’re safe from separatists or not. I just checked Twitter. It became almost like a sat nav for terrorists. Avoid the checkpoints, avoid this and that, because you can aggregate the wisdom of crowds on it.

So yes. I mean, look, things have changed. In 2010, I was in the Congo and I was embedding with the UN peacekeepers against Lord’s Resistance Army. And it’s just like a war, a conflict in a different century. I know one is Africa, one is Europe, but nonetheless, they’re two entirely different conflicts, even though you could arguably say both of them are armies facing off against militia groups. It is absolutely like a different century level. They’re only four years apart.

Mark: What’s interesting — I mean, it’s all interesting — but one of the things that fascinates me, is the difference between the use of social media for the spread of information, versus the spread of disinformation or incorrect information, or propaganda, for the want of a better term. The use of propaganda in conflict, that’s not new, is it? What’s new here, is the medium that we’re using in terms of the spreading the information, in terms of social media, that’s new, but the use of propaganda and conflict isn’t is it?

David: No, no. I mean look, propaganda is as old as war itself. Propaganda is as old as human civilization. Like you said, Thucydides and the Peloponnesian war, he bemoans essentially people will believe in crap, because they’re too lazy to seek out the truth. I mean, he basically says it in almost those words, they can’t be bothered to search for the truth. This is ancient, but the point is, what is the public sphere? Back in the day, the public’s fear was the accretion of magazines and newspapers and little journals, then TV and radio.

Now, public sphere is that to a degree, but it’s basically the major social media platforms of the day. And these are curated by algorithms that are designed not through an accretion of public ideas, but in Silicon Valley dorm rooms basically. And what happens is, the communication modes that we use, are just ever present. You can’t escape social media, you can’t escape your phone. You can target people, because you can have access to their data. And they’d never disconnect from their devices, really. So you can get them more or less every… so the principle is the same. The means is just much, much easier.

Chapter 2: Twitter is Many Things

Given that social media has such an influence on war, it’s no surprise that it also has a significant role to play in politics. Previously, it was only on mainstream media, where we could find out about the plans of those in power. And given the varying degrees of bias among news outlets, there had always been restrictions on the truth that we were being told. But now, national figures, governments and organisations are starting to take control of their own narrative by speaking directly to the public, through social media, whether that’s for good or for bad. Some are even refusing to be interviewed by conventional news channels, much to the consternation of the mainstream.

David: Social media is like, take Twitter, okay? Twitter is this place that if you are like you and me, I imagine you’re fairly engaged with it, or at least you’re on it, you look at it. Most people don’t care about Twitter. Now the thing with Twitter, it’s a very interesting thing, because Twitter is powerful, because the corporations listen to it, like Nike will do stuff, because Twitter is saying one thing. A lot of things like academia, the media, they follow Twitter a lot. But at the end of the day, Twitter is Twitter and the Tories have been in power for 10 years. So there is that disconnect between what’s on Twitter and what’s in the real world.

So at the same time, you have this idea that now it’s more and more social media, but still your ordinary person watches TV. That’s how they imbibe their politics. You can tweet something and it’s great, and maybe it makes the news, Donald Trump tweets stuff that makes cable news. That’s how he gets his message out. He knows that his followers, his voters aren’t on Twitter, but that the mainstream media will pick up from Twitter and transfer it. So the mainstream media is still really important. So people saying, “Oh, we don’t need the media any more.” I’m not sure you fundamentally do.

But yes, I mean, it’s like, yes, you’re right. Now there is this increasing sense, and this was Trump actually, that did it. And now people, Cummings has realised this, Cummings is an obsessive focus group, for example. It’s like, “Well, we’re not going to go on Andrew Neil.” And that’s unthinkable. And that comment came out of Downing Street, you know, “sources say”. I’m sure it was Cummings. So why do we care? No one knows who this guy is. And it’s true. People know who Gary Lineker is. I look at Andrew, he’s got a million followers on Twitter. He’s a big deal. In the country at large, they don’t care. So there is this sense that actually, you know what, the media is less important. We don’t need to kowtow to it in the same way.

And in a sense, that’s probably healthy in, except, that I do think that if you’re running for prime minister, you should be subject to a grilling, and he didn’t want to go on because he didn’t want to be grilled, because he’d look stupid, like Corbin looked stupid. I’m not sure that’s entirely great for democracy, where you can just dodge that. You always could have done, the cost now for doing so, because faith in the media is so low are far less, if that makes sense.

Mark: It does make a huge amount of sense. And as I say, I do have some sympathy for it, because they are flipping the narrative and saying, “Well actually, which legal document does it say I have to go on Andrew Neil?” No, you’re right, from a democratic perspective, it would be good if scrutiny were upheld on our elected leaders. But I’m not entirely sure we’re living in that space at the moment. And what Cummings appears to be doing quite cleverly is redefining the scrutiny to which politicians should be held.

David: I agree with you and I have sympathy, in that what he’s doing, the only reason he’s able to do that is, because he’s reading the public mood. If the public really cared about that, he’d be screwed. This is why Cummings’ recent boo-boo was the definition of hubris, because he was a man that banked everything time and again on actually understanding what the public really cared about. Because if you went on Twitter, it was 90% remain, but Cummings understood that this isn’t the world, that London’s not the world, and that people out there thought something different. So I have sympathy, because how can you not have sympathy with someone who’s redefining stuff in tune with what people want and believe? So I do have a sympathy with it, to that degree. Which, he totally misread the public mood, it seems anyway, on his excursion to the castle.

Mark: I’ve been inside major corporations and seen executives, staring at a monitor that has a social media feed set to specific hashtags. And they’re usually about the company for whom the executives work. It can be a very sobering experience for a CEO or a chief financial officer to be stood staring at a screen as this stuff is coming through, directed straight down the line at an organisation. People are genuinely concerned and nervous about the reaction of the world to either them or their product or who they are or what they represent, aren’t they?

David: Of course. I mean, why wouldn’t you be? And I mean, now we live in a world where if people don’t like it they can let you know, in no uncertain terms. They can be extremely unpleasant. I mean, back in the day, and this is before my day even, you had the classic letters in green ink, right? To the editor. Now, if you’re on Twitter and you’re the subject of a pile-on, it’s horrendous. I’ve seen it. It’s awful. Look, Twitter is the mob. Don’t forget, Twitter is many things, but one of the things you hate is, is Twitter’s immensely plastic. It can morph into many things. One of the things it is, is from time to time, the mob, and it’s not a pleasant thing. So it’s unsurprising that people are scared.

Mark: It’s funny, I share the same spelling of my name with the editor of the South African news outlet called the Daily Maverick. And on occasion, on Twitter, I’m exposed to quite a lot of hate from people who assume that I’ve written an article that actually, my namesake has written. And what I find fascinating is, when I point out that they’ve got the wrong Mark Heywood, it’s almost as if we go from hate to, “Oh, terribly sorry!” And then hate has just moved on to the correct Twitter handle. It’s so easy to hide behind though, isn’t it? Because you can be anyone you want when you’re online.

David: Yes, absolutely. A lot of people say, “Oh, well, we’ve got to end anonymity online.” I don’t agree with this because anonymity is what enables dissidents, what enables opposition groups, opposition people. There are many good reasons to be anonymous. But yes, anonymity grants you a shield that unfortunately, for some people, gives them licence to say things online that they would never dream of saying in real life. It’s one of the things… I mean, look, the whole point about social media is… so when I give talks on this, I ask the question, I’ll ask you the question, you may actually know the answer, but do you know how long movies were silent for?

Mark: How long movies were silent for? A couple of decades?

David: Yes. Oh, we’ve got about 30 years.

Mark: Right.

David: You think about movies. For a third of a century, they were going before they even had sound. How old’s social media, really? Now I know Facebook went public and you could get on it 2007. But from when it started being a thing, it’s probably 2010, I’d say. Just before the Arab Spring. Whatever. But that’s 10 years. Now, it took movies 30 years to even get sound. I mean, can you imagine at what stage of infancy we are with this technology. Nobody really knows what to do and nobody knows how to regulate it. Everybody knows that there is a huge problem with abuse. Everybody knows there’s a huge problem with disinformation.

It was actually a very interesting thing, I do a lot of work on that. But nobody knows what to do with it. If I want to say… I want to say, “Mark, you’re a murderer.” If I want to write that, my editor will say, “Right, where’s your evidence?” Okay. “Well, I don’t have any.” They’ll say, “Well, you can’t write it.” If I want a tweet that, I can tweet it. And then, if I’ve got 50,000 followers and a lot of them retweet it, you’re screwed, my friend. You can sort of sue me and maybe six months later we’ll go to court, by which point it’s all over. Every time you Google search your name… and so, you can ruin people’s lives with this. No one quite knows how to deal with it, but we’re still in the very early stages of this. So it’s all very early.

As I say, movies were silent for 30 years. We don’t know how this is going to get. It’s like the Wild West out there. Really is, in some cases. So we’re going through to really disrupt. Whenever technological change comes, it’s the classic thing that everyone talks about. The first great informational change is writing. But in the sort of vaguely modern era, we have the printing press. Everyone talks about this and it disrupts everything. And the Catholic church ceases to be the arbiter of ‘the word of God’, and what happened to the wars of religion? Then you have the telegraph. And then, you have in the ’20s, TV and radio. And these mediums are then used a decade later by Mussolini and Hitler and then we have World War II. Now I’m not saying that war’s coming, what I am saying is that every time there’s a new evolution into an information technology, there’s a period of great disruption. That’s what’s happening right now. And we’re probably still only at the beginning, maybe, or the end of the beginning of it, if we look at it in historical terms.

Chapter 3: Humanity Empowered

Professor Sunny Singh told us a couple of episodes ago, to tell stories about each other and about others as a form of power. That’s what decides who we consider human. Well, that powerful sentiment really encapsulates the essence of what we’re talking about today. But when we speak about fake news or the narratives of war being spread via social media, it’s easy to get bogged down by its dangers. To leave out the enormous power for good that it can be. As with all things, the good and bad of social media is balanced on a knife edge. There are always two sides to a story.

David: What Twitter does is, it sort of aggregates the power of humanity. So you read about Anna Sandalova in Ukraine. She uses Facebook to crowdfund the army. And she’s delivering helmets to these people because they don’t have them. They’re trying to fight and they don’t even have body armour. So she’s doing a real good. How could she have done that, before Facebook? Her, a single person. Run an advert in the equivalent of the Times, the Kiev Times? And she couldn’t afford it. How many people would that reach? How would she find volunteers?

I mean, so it empowers humanity. It’s the essence of homemade digitalis. I talk about that in the book, this idea of homemade digitalis, which is the hyper-empowered, networked individual, but has the potential to do extraordinary things. Ordinary people have potential to do extraordinary things because they are empowered and networked. And when you empower a network, those of people, you get movements. And movements can be a force for great good and movements to be a force for great ill. Movements overthrew Hosni Mubarak. Movements forced Ben Abidine to flee in Tunisia. Certain movements, in terms of getting justice, whatever. The Windrush stuff. So absolutely, they can do a lot of good.

What’s interesting to me actually is, is looking at certain movements, that you see how social media has both empowered and muted them. So I look at the Arab Spring as very interesting. So the Arab Spring was absolutely fantastic. Social media was absolutely fantastic for getting people onto the street in their tens and hundreds of thousands. To do what they did 20 years ago would have taken six months. But what they didn’t do, and this is really interesting… what you can do when you’ve got loads of people tweeting — or Facebook, as it were actually — saying, “Meet here. Meet in Tahrir Square at three o’clock.” And everybody comes. You get people onto the street, but what that precludes, and this is what we saw, is it precludes a leadership. Because if the network is totally diffused, who is your leader? And this is the problem.

My first book was on Iran. I studied the Iranian Revolution. The point about this is, there was a nucleus around… Whatever you think of Khomeini, and I’m not a fan of Ayatollah Khomeini, whatever you think of him, he was the nucleus. He had the people around him. He distributed his text. As soon as they overthrew the Shah, he was there. The leader was there and they pushed through it and they founded a state. As soon as Mubarak fled, they were like, “Well, what do we do?” Couldn’t do anything because there was this… A diffused bunch of people. There was no leadership. There was no nucleus. So I find that more interesting. It’s like actually, how does social media work in sort of empowering people. It empowers them, but at the same time, the seeds of its own success… in its success, lies its failure, if you see what I mean.

Mark: I’m going to take you all the way back to Shakespeare for the want of a better example. What you’re saying is, we’re missing the young, charismatic, articulate Prince Hal that becomes Henry V, that leads the warring nobles against a common enemy in France. That’s how it used to be way back when, is that you had some incredibly articulate, charismatic figure that would then take charge. Nowadays, what you have is, “Something must be done. Therefore, I will set up a WhatsApp group and ask other people what should be done.” It’s almost sort of, yes, we’ve got the ability to talk about what’s happening, but not necessarily somebody to lead us through it the other side.

David: Exactly. And the thing is when you set up that WhatsApp group, and they set up another WhatsApp group, you have the ability to then draw 50,000 people to your cause within a week. Within a day, if necessary. But if there’s no one leading them, they can make someone flee, they can overthrow someone because they’re on the street, but what happens next? And as so far, unless you have a leadership, unless you have someone… when you create a vacuum, you need someone or something to fill that vacuum, because something will fill it. And if it’s not you, it’s going to be someone else. And it wasn’t the revolutionaries, it was the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mark: I know this is a very nascent topic in terms of how long it’s been around and how quickly it’s changing, but where do you see it going? How will success be defined in terms of social media, do you think? If you don’t engage with it, you will lose the narrative, quite clearly. That comes across in your book. Do you see governments, and indeed people with an ideology, embracing this more and more? Has it become unstoppable now, we could never go back it will only continue?

David: Yes. You can’t unring this bell. You just can’t go back. Now, whether it’s going to be in 10 years Facebook that we’re still on, or Twitter, who knows, but the platforms will be there. Going back to the pre-social media age would be like going back to the pre-TV age, you just can’t. No. I mean, there’s no going back.

The question is what do you do with it? Let’s look then at disinformation. That’s a really interesting topic, because you can mention this buzzword and everyone knows about disinformation. “Well, don’t Russians have something to do with this?” Everyone knows it’s a problem. Not many people actually understand it. And what do we do about misinformation? Now I look at misinformation. I look at how to battle misinformation. And the problem is we’re too obsessed with contents. We’re like, “Well, this is fake. This is disinformation. It’s not true.” I’ve always said, you ask them, “Where’s it going?” The big challenge is how do you deal with misinformation. And the thing is, it’s not about content, because here’s the thing, lying is not illegal and nor should it be.

Because if we can’t lie, we’re all screwed. You know, “I love your wife. Your wife is lovely.” “Oh, your baby’s beautiful.” I mean, you can’t do that then society breaks down. What you have to look at is not the misinforming content, but the misinforming actor and the misinforming behaviour. You know the Russian troll farm, right?

Mark: Mm-hmm.

David: That’s the misinforming actor, that’s the bad guy that’s a really nasty piece of work. That’s the actor. And then you have the inauthentic behaviour. Now, a lot of stuff, for example, around the 2016 election, the Trump stuff wasn’t actually lies. It was Trump is good, Clinton, bad. That’s actually content neutral. It’s just about emotion. It’s not actually about fact. You can’t say Trump is good, Hillary is bad, true or false or whatever your opinions. But what you had was inauthentic campaigns.

You had Billy Bob in Tennessee was, in fact, Ivan in St. Petersburg. That’s how you deal with this information. You say, “Okay, these are the actors. This is the inauthentic campaigns. These 50,000 accounts, all Americans from Philadelphia, they’re set up by a Russian format, run by bot format.” That’s how you deal with it. People get hung up on the content. That’s why fake news is a misnomer because how do you define it? There’s so many things about what’s true and what isn’t and all this stuff.

The big things I think to deal with social media, if you can say success, how do you start to deal with these misinforming actors and this misinformed behaviour? You can never stop. If you and me decide we want to support Boris Johnson in the next election, and we start tweeting out Boris Johnson saved my baby. It doesn’t matter, it’s not illegal. It doesn’t matter. I suppose someone could sue you, but who cares?

But if you and I decided to set up a troll farm and then set up 50,000 fake accounts, start spamming people, that can be picked up on. And that’s how we need to deal with misinformation. That’s what will change social media, because at the moment this stuff is ripe. We all know about trolls, bots, all these sorts of things. I think a big change in the way social media is perceived, the way social media is consumed, in the way that it works with democracy is when we get a grip on this. We have to, because it’s quite a severe problem.

Mark: And as long as we’re talking about that, we’re not addressing some of the other contributing factors in that election, which are very entrenched things like the electoral college system that exists in the US, and the fact that typically it is only a small handful of swing states that decide the election. I know people in the US, mainly New York and California, who don’t vote and won’t vote because if you add up all of them, it still wouldn’t have changed anything given the electoral college system. And that’s nothing to do with technology. That’s a very deeply entrenched political system. David, can I ask you, what’s the next project for you? The book’s been out for a while. What else are you working on at the moment?

David: Well, this the interesting thing. I had a big idea on the birth of the 21st century, but what I might do actually is, as a slight departure from the last book, I might write a book on Greece, because I’ve been here a while. I was thinking about how do you define a country in our age? How do you define a country?

If I want to describe you, what would I do? I suppose 20 years ago, I’d sit down, I talk to you. I’d mull on it and I’d write something. Now I do that, but also I’d probably try and get as much of your data as possible. I’d get the data from your Facebook profile. So something like a similar thing, how do you describe a country, you can do the Paul Theroux thing and wander around, and you do all that, that’s good. But also have a look at these. What are these countries’ keyword searches? I think that says a lot about a people, doesn’t it? So I’ve gone through the country in this sort of way, kind of like a travelogue, memoir type thing. Because, obviously, I’m half Greek. I’m mulling it over. It’s slightly different from the last one. Or I might write something on post-truth leadership, we’ll see.

Mark: David, thank you very much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

David: Thank you.

Conclusion:

A massive thank you then to David Patrikorakos for joining me on the podcast. And to recap, what have we learnt?

How we view the rights or wrongs of war, who we side with, who we trust, it’s all a result of the narrative that’s built up around the conflict. In your next piece of writing, try juxtaposing two points of view from characters on both sides of the conflict with the stories running in parallel. It will offer the audience a chance to see the power of narrative in action. Without a leader, a diffused group of people will struggle. Toy with this idea in your writing. Perhaps a movement with great momentum comes crashing to a standstill, or a leader is lost and ideals begin to fall apart. Highlight the internal role that leadership plays in our lives.

In literature and television, superheroes are usually the only people who have the power to single-handedly impact the world on a global scale. But we’re beginning to see individuals creating dramatic worldwide change thanks to social media. So maybe it’s time to reframe our idea of saving the world and to write more in fiction about ordinary people achieving extraordinary things.

Thanks for listening. I’m Mark Heywood. And if you’d like to get in touch, we’re on Twitter and Facebook as @BehindTheSpine. New episodes are released weekly. Please like us and review us on Apple podcasts, it really does help.

Up next week, we’ll be talking about sex toys for the disabled with disability activist Andrew Gurza:

“Most people, when they have a wank they can do it independently — whereas if you’re disabled, that is not an option for you.”

Goodbye for now. Stay safe and keep writing.

To listen to this episode of the podcast, visit the link below: www.behindthespine.podbean.com/e/david-patrikarakos