Tactics and Technique and Reading Pomerantsev

Part Three: Features and Bugs

Part One was Writing in a Networked World
Part Two was Identity in a Networked World

Part Three is mostly a book review ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Peter Pomerantsev published Nothing is True and Everything is Possible in 2015, and I don’t think anyone, including Pomerantsev, understood the impact the book would have.

It looked, at first, like “just a memoir” of a young British television producer who goes to work in the “New Russia” of the early aughts: all post-soviet and opened to Western capitalism, yet still worlds away from the hegemonic “normal” of Western Europe and the USA.

This Russia he describes is fucking weird — and there is sensationalism — sex, betrayal, dreams dashed, the occasional forbidden romance — in his behind-the-scenes stories of state-approved television productions, as well as the stories about the stories Russian television never let him tell.

So it’s interesting. Cute. Nice little book of insight into cross-cultural world affairs. One man’s strange journey into an industry wavering between cultures and economic systems. Except, no: that’s not why the book is magnetic, that’s not why it haunts you even as you read it, that’s not why it won loads of awards and established Pomerantsev as an accidental expert on Russian propaganda.

Because the impact of the book comes not from how strange this “New Russia” of the recent past is, but how familiar it is. And we are drawn in not by how mysterious his Russian subjects are, but how naked they are. It’s like we’re promised an x-ray of a squid, and see on the screen the Vitruvian man — and so we come to understand that the man and the squid are one.

The dystopia he’s describing, it is us.

In the US “move fast and break things” was a Facebook motto that generalized well onto the pushers of technological change, but the pushers must in part push against mules with hooves dug in. Until and unless you disrupt an entire country’s government, culture, and economy — unless you take that country to a point of collapse — you can’t really move as fast and break as many things as you’d like to.

The Soviet Union collapsed. That left its societies vulnerable to the change-makers and world-builders. This un-moored Russia where “nothing is true and everything is possible” is a dystopian nightmare, but it’s as much our future as an echo of our past: it is our still-emerging day-to-day.

It’s a world where people’s whole concept of a “life path” — what to learn, where to work, whom to serve, whom to love — is disintegrated and scrambled, and millions are left desperate and willing to become a prostitute or a gangster or a toadie or whatever niche seems to present itself, to survive.

His book shows how, in a change that took mere months, the things you used to do to be successful, like work hard and follow the rules, became worthless, even foolish; and the thing that once got you thrown in jail? That now earns you celebrity status and makes you the strong-man leader of an entire city.

Scattered and disillusioned individuals, believing there must be more to life than brutal grabs for money and power, coagulate into cults, and follow charismatic leaders into the Mongolian mountains, or congregate by night to writhe in anonymous sweat lodge orgies, or pay huge sums for self-brainwashing sessions, or go to “geisha school” for guidance in obtaining the fickle financial support of a newly-wealthy man seeking a collection of ready “kept” women.

Today we in “the West” live in a fog of endless rhetorical war, much of it online, but not all. And from within it’s hard to see through the surrounding haze of deception and fakery; but when Pomerantsev lights up that squid, we see arms and legs in the shape of us.

And so, to use the language, we more clearly see the features and the bugs.

The medium is the message, and the medium of modern life has a message which LM Sacasas introduced me to, an idea from Jacques Ellul called “technique” — it is the calling card of the modern mental matrix, and best described by the title of the piece I just linked: “The One Best Way is a Trap.”

Technique is the culture of life-hacks and short cuts, “working smarter not working harder,” it’s all about optimization and efficiency, the one weird trick that will leave others wondering how you do it. It’s the whole idea that life is a game to be won, and winners do things a certain way. And I can sell you that secret for the low-low cost of free, just a moment of your time, and then all your anxieties will fade and your dreams will flower.

Technique is what every advertiser is selling, and, therefore, it’s what every advertising-based platform is selling: your life is a squeaky wheel in need of just this — eco-friendly and delivered-monthly-to-your-door! — grease.

When we see in Pomerantsev’s book what they were selling in Russia in the early 2000s, we gasp not just because the manipulations and “solutions” being sold are demented and deformed, but because they are us: they are the message of our culture encroaching on new territory — where, like patriarchy in Barbieland, they’ve never been exposed, and so they have no immunity.

We in the West have been dealing with this world for quite a while, and so our collective and individual immune systems have a history of battles and counter-battles.

As Sacasas Wrote:

Ellul believed that the technological society was, in fact, very savvy about anticipating this failure mode of the human component of the system. It was already deploying perhaps the most critical layer of techniques, what Ellul called human techniques. In short, these were techniques designed to assure the survival and suitable functioning of the human being in a milieu ordered by technique. They included, for example, pharmacological interventions and a regime of diversion and entertainment as well as an attempt to “humanize” the base layer of techniques.

We’ve been a Valium nation, a Prozac nation, an Adderall nation; we’ve built successions of markets around “self-care” from Calgon take me away to tanning beds and body wrapping to fat-freezing and botoxing; we had boudoir “Glamour Shots” in shopping malls before we had Instagram filters in our bedrooms; we’ve been addicted to Pac-Man, Candy Crush, Medal of Honor, World of Warcraft; we’ve altered our breasts and plugged our hair; we have a garage full of expired MLM supplements and out-of-style athletic wear, and a spare room in the house for our high-end shoe and handbag re-sales.

Americans have a reputation for naivete in Europe, but they misunderstand our brand of cynicism. We’ve been playing along for a long time, and we keep playing along because so often it pays off for us. One of the shocking things about Pomerantsev’s Russia is that it’s obvious (to us) that playing along won’t help them. It’s like watching tourists stumble drunk towards the roulette table with chips dripping out of their shorts: you know this won’t end well for them.

But then you realize, this won’t end well for me either.

The system is obviously rigged in the Russia Pomerantsev describes, but our system is rigged too, just in a way that’s less obvious to us. “Authoritarian Government” has been seen through — the new innovation is “Surveillance Capitalism,” which most people haven’t quite wrapped their heads around yet.

When a liaison to the Kremlin says aloud to a meeting of the television network’s stars, “who will be our villain of the week?” we are shocked. Not because we don’t think there should be an agreed-upon cross-media villain narrative that plays on a regular cycle, but because we expect our Karens to emerge through a more subtle process involving TikToks and viral videos, because that seems to us more organic and less contrived — but is it?

We might have a better-trained immune system, but the virus has evolved to super-bug status and can exploit its targets more efficiently than ever before. Small amounts of money are drawn from your accounts, so many and so pesky, but you’re so distracted and exhausted and it’s so hard to identify each little draw to stop it; it’s the plot of Superman III, only instead of a trickle of penny-parts from banks, the trickle is coming from each of us at 10.69 a pop. And there are a lot more of us than there are banks, and we don’t have lawyers and anyway this isn’t against the law. You clicked “agree” to every bit of it, just to get the damn thing to work. This is next-level stuff.

The Silicon Valley propagandists have been very effective at stigmatizing anyone who questions the system. You’re just old, not with it, the technology confuses you (you’re dumb), you don’t get it, you’re a Luddite, you’re History, you’re a fossil past its prime.

And so the people who have most effectively questioned the system have had to be people who really understood the system, people who could not be easily dismissed: Sherry Turkle, Shoshana Zuboff, Jaron Lanier. But even them: every year that passes they get a year older and the propaganda gets more effective, even on them.

At the University of Arkansas in the Fall of 2000, just weeks after the professor in the office next to mine was murdered, a freshman student in the very first class I ever taught wrote in an essay: “Everyone’s like ‘compliments to the chef’ when the food tastes like ass.” (These things stick with you.)

We live in a system of features and bugs: the features tempt us, the bugs make us pay. Atomized as individuals, we try to navigate this treacherous jungle and survive, and maybe if we’re lucky, thrive. Collectively, we might try some slash-and-burn, see if we can improve the landscape for human use; but everything in the system is designed to stop “collectively” from happening. Any groups we form are weaponized against opposing groups, to keep us busy. We can’t see past the next tree or the next villain of the week. And every time there is a major social disruption, like Covid-19, or January 6th, it weakens the body and makes us more susceptible to whatever new exploit the masters of optimization wish to work on us.

We live in a system, and historically most of us have decided that its features are worth its bugs. We play along, with a big American smile: “compliments to the chef!” And we figure we’ll get thru this still on top, with maybe just a few embarrassing photos to show for it. But the planet is warming and the world is at war, and the newest technologies are not being developed to solve any actual problems, just to mine the same human sources even deeper for profits, to exploit the users in new ways and give venture capital a place to go.

Pushers and users is the best metaphor: and if you’re old enough you may recall that users are losers. The pushers want “Learning Management Software” so what children do in school can be monitored and monetized (and if you disagree you’re behind the times). The pushers want proprietary software in tractors, so even the food that grows from the soil can fall under the Tech Sector’s terms of service (and if you disagree you’re a hippie relic). The pushers want to own a little bit of everything and everyone. It’s kind of like the Kremlin, only, you know, American.

We too have come to believe that nothing is true and everything is possible, as reality has become a subjective thing, shifting beneath our feet. Not because of a former-KGB puppet-master, but because of algorithms and optimization. We don’t have a Putin. We have technique.

Note: Pomerantsev’s second book, This is not Propaganda (2019) is in many ways an even better book. It’s more global, less sensational, with more researched stories and fewer personal ones — although he does weave in the story of his family’s escape from Soviet Ukraine when he was a baby.

His second book focuses much more on Ukraine, Syria, Mexico, and the Philippines, and if you have any desire to understand what’s going on in these parts of the world, you will definitely appreciate reading this book. I recommend them both.