Russian/British writer Peter Pomerantsev follows on to his previous book on the propaganda state of Putin’s Russia with a series of essays (interspersed with the story of his only families experience as Soviet dissidents) on how the same tactics have taken a hold globally since he left Moscow in 2009.

The basic idea is that authoritarian regimes have gone from a traditional totalitarian model in which they attempt to control knowledge and impose a “truth” on a population to a model in which they undermine the very concept of objective truth through a targeted campaign of conspiracy mongering and trolling.

This all gets wrapped into what I think is his larger thesis that we are transitioning from enlightenment values to identitarian values. That is, the core organizing principles are no longer a set of ostensibly falsifiable scientific truths but an identity to which we belong.

As in all such pieces, it’s hard to tell whether the apparent trends are real or only apparently true because of changes in the composition of information that we consume.