A Manichean Internet: “Uncanny Valley” and “This Is Not Propaganda” Book Review
Anna Wiener and Peter Pomerantsev cast light on the Internet as a battleground between politics, business, and humanity
Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener, MCD, 288 pages, $27.00
This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, Peter Pomerantsev, PublicAffairs, 256 pages, $28.00
The enemy is inside the walls. The battle for the Internet was lost before we realized it had ever started.
The attack came subtly from two fronts. The first, emerging from Silicon Valley, deployed enterprises that transformed the incentives of the online ecosystem. The formula of optimization and monetization did not breach defenses like a battering ram; rather, it was allowed in, like a Trojan horse. As power and wealth accrued to self-styled disruptors, their social effects — inequality, homelessness — accumulated outside the shiny citadels the conquerors built for themselves.
The second front was much more diffuse. It was an experiment decades in the making, a theory of power that hatched in a shattered former empire. A renascent authoritarianism learned through years of turmoil to exploit the disruptors’ platforms to chip away at trust and facts. Information operators developed recipes to manipulate discourse, trolls tunnelled beneath institutions and norms, and bots poisoned the wells of democracy and civil society. When the strongmen came, the polis was too weak and divided to respond.
This is a Manichean Internet, a battleground between haves and have-nots, between citizens and rulers, that blurs the boundaries between the digital and the real. Its chroniclers are Anna Wiener and Peter Pomerantsev, the authors of two vivid and unsettling books. Wiener is a contributing writer to The New Yorker who covers the technology and culture of Silicon Valley. Her debut memoir, Uncanny Valley, is a deeply personal account of her journey through start-up world. Pomerantsev, a journalist and fellow at the London School of Economics, instead melds family history with snapshots of information warfare. In This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, he captures the ground shifting beneath our devices’ screens in Southeast Asia, the U.S., Latin America, and Europe.
Pomerantsev’s book proceeds on two parallel tracks. In the first, he narrates his parents’ life story: their dissident activities in Soviet Ukraine, KGB surveillance and interrogation, and their escape to Western Europe as political asylum seekers, where Pomerantsev himself grew up in a cosmopolitan environment. The second is a mirror-image of the first: rather than progressing from oppression to emancipation, it follows the degradation of information and democracy worldwide. He charts this decline through the perspective of information agents in different countries: a Filipina journalist, Serbian and Mexican pro-democracy activists, a Brexit advocate. Each has goals, strategies with which to pursue them, and shifting sets of allies and adversaries.
While Pomerantsev humanizes these individuals, he also recognizes the more numerous operatives who constitute the faceless armies of the information age. These too have a hierarchy, an organizational chart of propaganda. So-called architects — advertising or public-relations experts — sit atop the pyramid. A tier below, established media personalities act as “influencers,” injecting political smears into their routines for a fee. At the bottom, generic “community-level fake account operators” provide the 24/7 grunt work of patrolling social media, inserting themselves into conversations and comment threads either to promote or to attack. The lower tier attracts people “who need a little extra cash” like students or, in the case of the Russian Internet Research Agency’s troll farm in St. Petersburg, former journalists. No ideologues, these are merely professionals for whom receiving “several times more than a regular media salary and steady work” is reason enough to spread toxic messages through fake personas on the internet.
It’s remarkable how much this parallels Wiener’s career in San Francisco. Disenchanted with a low-paying publishing job, she follows the sirens of a start-up into a menial but well-paying customer support role. (She tells of others like her — writers, teachers, artists — who follow the same path.) As one of a few women in a male-dominated environment, Wiener feels demeaned and dehumanized: “Some days, helping men solve problems they had created for themselves, I felt like a piece of software myself, a bot: instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice.” Yet she holds out on the job, buoyed by her salary and a handful of friends.
Wiener witnesses the pathologies of her industry from the inside, yet keeps finding excuses to continue, mimicking Pomerantsev’s low-paid operatives. In Manila, he reports, “no one, at any level in this business, ever described their activity as ‘trolling’ or producing ‘fake news.’ Everyone had their own denial strategies.” In Moscow, “most treated the [troll] farm as if it was just another job, doing the minimum required and then clocking out.” Had she been born in either of those places, Wiener could have easily ended up at the Internet Research Agency rather than at GitHub. Instead, she would spend the last years of her tech career fighting a losing battle against hate speech and pornography, a community-level operator trying to police her lawless peers.
Wiener’s story, like that of Pomerantsev’s parents, is one of escape and revelation. His father joined the BBC World Service and his mother became a documentary filmmaker, both exposing what lay behind the Iron Curtain. Wiener is eventually able to leave her support job to become a journalist, laying bare the entrails of tech culture. Uncanny Valley itself is a crescendo of awareness. When Wiener settles in San Francisco, she is insecure and in reverence of the founders and developers who proliferate like many small gods in an emerging pantheon. With a keen sense of observation and profound self-perception, however, she breaks through oppressive attitudes that would limit her voice by virtue of her being both a woman and a non-engineer. (One of the most glaring paradoxes of the tech industry is the glorification of coders paired with the belief that anyone can easily teach themselves this trade.) Wiener’s book assumes an increasingly broad scope, questioning both what drove individuals to buy into the tech mentality and led an entire society to bend the knee to Silicon Valley.
Here, too, Wiener’s narrower frame and Pomerantsev’s global narrative overlap. Igor Ashmanov, a Russian internet entrepreneur and character in This is Not Propaganda, expounds the importance of “‘information sovereignty,’ government control over what information reaches the population.” Countries are justified in pursuing information sovereignty because it underpins their ideology, and grants them freedom from interference. It allows China or Russia to restrict the foreign media and platforms their citizens can access with the excuse of preserving their way of life. The same thrust can be seen in companies jostling to maintain control of their users and data, fighting over proprietary algorithms and the exclusive right to moderate their communities with no external interference. As Wiener describes it,
At the end of the idea: a world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything — whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself — could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.
Authoritarian regimes and surveillance capitalism had co-evolved. In San Francisco, friction was whatever stood in the way of start-ups’ scaling. The CEO of her analytics company demanded that employees be “Down for the Cause,” putting the company above all else. Elsewhere, friction was democracy, with Vladimir Putin or Rodrigo Duterte laying out “the Cause.”
Both Wiener and Pomerantsev contrast their beautiful prose with the crude jargon of business and propaganda. “I travelled from Greece to the Middle East, up the lifts to Poland. Sometimes I would find myself lost in Latin America, stranded in Africa, with only the gloomy London light in the windows constant,” Pomerantsev recalls about roaming the halls of the BBC World Service as a child, full of excitement and discovery. Wiener’s sarcasm, meanwhile, cuts through the materialism and self-absorption of the world around her: “The presentation that evening was top-shelf: a fireside chat between two venture capitalists. […] It was like watching two ATMs in conversation. ‘I want big data on men talking about big data,’ I whispered to one of the engineers, who ignored me.”
Their stylistic choices also reflect efforts at capturing identity and meaning. Pomerantsev mostly refers to his interviewees by their first names, expressing familiarity with a community of others around the world who, like him, are information professionals. By contrast, Wiener obscures the names of the companies that permeate her (and our) world, referring obliquely to “the on-demand ride-sharing startup” (“a company committed to domination at all costs, including profitability”) or “a highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate.” It is a testament to the influence of these corporations that they don’t need to be named to be immediately identifiable.
Whereas Uncanny Valley is flawlessly written and edited, however, This Is Not Propaganda suffers from several lapses. A glaring error attributes the shooting down of a “Malaysian Airways” passenger aircraft over Ukraine in 2014 to a Russian “gun,” mistaking both the name of the company (it is Malaysia Airlines) and the instrument of death, in this case a missile. Elsewhere, names appear to be swapped, leading to confusing passages. Pomerantsev also seems to lend too much credence to claims of influence by some of his interviewees without seriously evaluating their assertions, and claims to offer “recommendations” in his conclusion although no such takeaways are apparent.
Both books embody in their psychedelic covers the ephemerality of old certainties in an uneasy world, full of deceit. Close to the end of her book, Wiener tells the story of a rave she attends in the Sacramento Delta, outside of San Francisco. She sees a lamb meandering among the partygoers, and asks the rave’s host about it. He informs her casually that it was going to be spit-roasted the following day: “‘You wrestle her to the ground and spoon her until she relaxes,’ he explained, as if he were sharing a recipe for fruit salad. ‘Then you just reach around and slit her throat.’” We never learn of the lamb’s fate, but it is — intentionally or not — a fitting metaphor for the internet’s information wars. Lulled into a false sense of security, voters and consumers are at the mercy of figures who appear well-meaning, but still wield the digital equivalent of butcher’s knives.
Pomerantsev and Wiener portray the internet’s Manichean tension ably, letting readers into the battlefields — corporate and national, global and local, large and small — that are shaping our information ecosystems. To their credit, neither blames software for this dire state; rather, both focus squarely on humans and their political and economic incentives. Though neither offers a cure, both show that self-knowledge, rather than data or metadata, may offer a truer path to stemming the tide.
