Pomerantsev’s book is an investigation into the world which shaped the world we live in. Even though it was published less than a decade ago, it already feels as though history is running away from those pre-pandemic times when the reality of what was about to confront us was something that people were warning about, rather than living through. Pomerantsev investigates on a global basis the evolution of the post-truth world, fuelled by social media and its bot farms, by individuals like Nix for whom ethics are an offshoot of capitalism, entirely beholden to the idea of profit. In the process of which are facilitated sense-deranging attacks on reality, allowing the wanton killing of women and children, the elderly and the innocent, to be reframed as actions taken in self-defence, and promoted as such to the point that anyone who questions this logic is in danger of being excommunicated. This is the world Pomerantsev saw coming, and now it has arrived. The dangerous edges of democracy, a system beholden to the manipulation of the masses, are laid bare. The author of the book outlines his personal journey from Soviet Ukraine to the UK. His family fled from a repressive totalitarian regime towards the hope of something called ‘the west’. But the west is not an ethical construction. It is a market driven society. And now the fusion of vast wealth which the technocrats of the internet have succeeded in generating and seek to preserve, with the autocratic ambitions of wealthy men and women driven by nothing more than personal ambition, threatens to decimate the planet with an uncontrollable ferocity. Anything that stands in the way of this behemoth will be levelled. Pomerantsev sees the writing on the wall and traces the way that this is a global epidemic. But there’s a sense that his concerns have been overtaken by the actuality of the present.
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