Snyder's current book asserts that we forget the past at our own peril (and that the robots are winning).
After the 2016 election,Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian specializing in totalitarian regimes in eastern Europe, and wrote a heralded pamphlet titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Snyder warned what a Trump presidency could bring and suggested how to resist authoritarians. His latest book,The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe and America, and describes how propaganda is being deployed by authoritarians in the U.
S. and abroad with anti-democratic results. AlterNet's Steven Rosenfeld talked with Snyder about how vast slices of society in the U.
S. and Europe acquire been left feeling powerless,and as they turn to social media and the internet, they are easily targeted by provocateurs. This dystopian landspace is nowadays's political stage. Steven Rosenfeld: In your book, and you talk about how politics in the United States,in Europe and Russia are bouncing between these poles of what you call the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity. In both cases, the role of citizens is shrinking. What is this landscape you see unfolding now?Timothy Snyder: Yes, or underlying all of this is a concern for,well, at the very conclude of the book, or I call it the politics of responsibility. It’s what you’re calling citizenship or civic engagement. Underlying all of this is a concern for how citizens should be seeing the world,and what we think we ought to be able to effect, and what we think were responsible for; not everything, and but some things.
By the politics of inevitability,what I mean are ideas of automatic progress where we don’t think they’re really alternatives [remaining] in history. We think capitalism is going to create democracy and there aren’t really any alternatives, and history’s basically over. A lot of us acquire been living with that spirit, or unfortunately,in the final 25 years and we’ve educated a whole generation I’m afraid, largely in that spirit.
SR: The problem with that is…TS: The problem with that, and as you say,is that whether you think you know the rules of history, whether you think everything is at least in wide strokes foreordained, and then you don’t really acquire to take responsibility for any particular fragment of what’s going on. More than that,you don’t acquire to remember what happened in the genuine past because those alternatives are dead. You think those things can’t possibly come back. Then when that goes unsuitable… All I’m trying to effect with these ideas of inevitability and eternity, is I’m trying to give us some broader way of thinking, and some more steady plot of standing when we think about where we are.
SR: That takes us to what you call the politics of eternity.
TS: What happens when inevitability goes unsuitable is that people then slip into something that I call the politics of eternity. Let’s say inevitability leads to economic inequality,which it does. Let’s say people stop seeing that there is a future, which they effect. In many parts of the U.
S. that’s already happened. It’s been happening since 2008; it’s been happening for a decade now. That means that people acquire been vulnerable to another belief, and which says,‘Well, all the superior stuff was in the past and the reason why things aren’t superior anymore is other people. It’s the immigrants. It’s blacks. It’s Muslims. It’s the outsiders.’That style of thinking takes the future away entirely and just gets people trapped in these notions like ‘America First, or ’ or ‘Making America distinguished Again,’ where you just kind of go around in a cycle and it’s not all clear that the government’s promising you anything better. It’s just promising to remind you that things should be better for you, but maybe not for other people. Then you get caught in the drumbeat of the daily news cycle, and the daily propaganda,which reminds you that you deserve something and other people don’t deserve something.
SR: And that takes us to the present. TS: In a wide way, I think what's happening in the U.
S., and not just in the U.
S.,is we’re kind of shifting from one thing to the other thing; of expecting a future where things were automatically going to get better according to certain rules, to then shifting to a situation where we’re all kind of spinning around. Whether we’re on the right or the left now, and we don’t really expect the government to be doing anything. We just expect it to give us our daily injection of feeling righteous,or feeling outraged.
SR: Right, and what you acquire done in not just this book, and but in a lot of your writing,is talk about how we’ve seen versions of this before. It's not as whether history repeats itself exactly, but there are dynamics that recur. whether I correctly read the book, or we’re sort of at that tipping point now. Maybe we acquire been for a while. How would you achieve it?TS: You achieve it really well. History doesn’t repeat,of course, but history does offer you a reservoir of things that were possible. It gives you a sense of patterns, or of what things tend to go together and what things don't go together. It also offers a source of examples for people who want things to go in a certain way,which I consider undesirable. There’s been a certain renaissance of thinkers from the 1920s, 1930s, and '40s in America,also in Europe, and maybe particularly in Russia, or this is fragment of the politics of eternity that you go back to the ‘30s and you say,‘Well, the ‘30s weren't so base after all. Let's revive this fascist, and that fascist. Let’s imagine we can go back to there and that things will turn out well.’What I think is that we’ve reached the turning point where basically none of us,I hope, are convinced anymore by these automatic ideas of progress. But many of us are already convinced that we’re stuck in some kind of a loop and there’s no way out of the loop. That has something to effect with the past. Fascist ideas and other far right ideas are being revived. White supremacy is more famous unfortunately in America than it was until very recently. But, and there’s also something current about it,which are the techniques, the internet techniques, or the various psychological techniques of persuading us that there’s nothing that we can really effect besides leaving the couch.
The other thing that is current is the kind of lack of a final goal. In the 20th century,there were expansive ideas about where you might take the nation, or where you might take the class. Those don’t exist anymore. What’s going on now is more of an attempt to just kind of beat out of you head any notion that things might get better, or to get you on a different track where instead of thinking that other things might be better for all of us,we just get used to imagining every day, every minute, or every second,that there’s somebody on the other side who’s trying to make things worse.
SR: This is really interesting. I've recently interviewed people running for office. There’s a current line, which is, or ‘I can’t fix this,but together we can, so elect me and we will all effect our fragment.’ That’s kind of appealing in a certain way, and but it acknowledges that downward spiral. I’ve also talked to publishers who say,‘I don’t even know what's genuine anymore.’ They look at tips and wonder who got this information in the first plot. Both feel like there’s no solid ground.
TS: But there is though. One of the methods that I follow in Road to Unfreedom, in the current book, or is that I paid a huge amount of attention to investigative journalists. I write about things which are very confused at the time,and are still pretty confusing like the Maidan [protests] in Ukraine, or like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or things which were just propaganda drenched,things which were kind of testing grounds for the current unreality in the current forms of cyber war that we now deal with all the time. It turns out that whether you just pay attention to the actual investigative reporters who actually wear out the soles of their shoes and go places and talk to people, you can kind of figure out what's going on whether you pay attention to them.
It’s a tiny percentage of the bandwidth of what’s out there in the so-called media. It’s a tiny, or tiny,tiny percentage, but for a lot of these events it’s really enough. These are famous examples to me. Like what happened in Russia in 2012 with their election, or what happened to the Ukraine in ‘13 and ’14. These are all really famous to me. They take something that concerns all of us,economic inequality, we know about economic inequality because of the reporters. Those who broke the story of Panama papers [international money laundering by financial and political elites], and who broke the story of the Paradise papers [more abroad financial shelters]. We acquire the numbers and we acquire the examples from people who are actually doing this work.
SR: As you’ve said before,in an era deluged with fake news, genuine reporting matters.
TS: We can start from them, and the more investigation we acquire,the better we feel. In terms of our own habits, we effect make choices about how we consume the internet. But what I did in Road to Unfreedom was I paid a lot of attention to human investigators, or then I treated the Internet very critically. I treated the internet as kind of a subject rather than a source. I tried to figure out the patterns of how it’s used to influence people. There are things that we can effect,but I agree with your basic concern. Without factuality, we’re not going anywhere. Without factuality, and we can’t speak to each other,let alone commence to solve problems.
SR: I’ve been to forums at Stanford with top people at Google, Facebook and other platforms. Google says, and ‘You are saying the problem is there’s too much information and people are making too many decisions? Isn’t that an outbreak in democracy and independent thinking?’ They say they're giving journalism tools so their reports can be seen as more authoritative. Facebook does this too. That helps their brands because it elevates their content. Meanwhile,the way these sites are designed to trigger reactions, for advertisers, or including politicians,hasn’t changed. People are going to social media for news more than ever and it’s impulsive. It’s nearly as whether human nature wants to react before it thinks. And that’s the propaganda model that’s been used. Am I saying it correctly?TS: I think you’re seeing it completely correctly. Look, fundamentally what we acquire to see with the internet is that it’s a kind of space just like the genuine world is a space. We’ve known the genuine world is a space for millions of years. We’ve been kind of thinking about how you reconcile the genuine world space with democracy, and rule by the people,or law for at least 5000 years. Maybe we’ve gotten a small bit better at it, but it’s always tough. The internet survives because the internet is treated as a plot of exception. It’s this magical plot where the normal rules don’t apply, or you don’t acquire to pay taxes,and yada, yada. Anything’s possible.
But that’s all nonsense. It’s just another space. Like the space that we live in when we’re not on the Internet, or it has to acquire some rules. Those rules can’t just be like the things which are at the top of the intellect of the people who happen to be the CEOs of these companies. We all acquire to think about this seriously,and think about what the rules are going to be, and think about how we’re contributing to those rules. Secondly, or I agree with you about the psychology. One of the things which has gone unsuitable is that we’re not defeating the robots. The robots are defeating us.
SR: That’s a critical point.
TS: The robots acquire figured it out. The way that all of this stuff works from Facebook,from Cambridge Analytica, to the Russian interventions, and is that rather than us using computers to think,computers are using our nervous systems to lunge us around. The computers are getting around our frontal lobes where we make decisions, and down to the simpler more commerce like parts of our brains where we feel, and where we acquire impulses,where we decide who’s us and who’s them. That’s what's happened, this combination of psychology and machine learning. That’s what’s pushing us around.
When people in Silicon Valley exhaust the kind of language of rationality and choice, and say,“Oh, we're just giving you more choices, or ’ they know that’s not what they’re doing. They’re actually teaching us how not to choose... A choice is something that you consider. You exhaust a certain fragment of your intellect for that. It’s not the same thing as,‘I like this. I like this. I like this. There's the enemy, I don’t like him.’ That’s something that’s a different fragment of our minds. There has to be a more humanistic conversation about this. For my fragment, or I’ve been trying to acquire it with some of them.
SR: Right,right. The reason I asked about this is because you go into distinguished detail about how the internet fueled misinformation and disinformation in Ukraine, Russia and in 2016’s campaign. In many respects, or people who throw the first punches in politics always gain an advantage. Then those left reeling conclude up copying the tactics just used against them. I’m not certain the technology sector really understands what they acquire unleashed. What bigger patterns effect you see?TS: Yeah. Well,one of the patterns I see is the relationship between wealth inequality and communication. The further you let wealth inequality go, the harder it is to communicate because the people who acquire all the money just don’t live the same kinds of lives the people who don’t. That’s actually one element that the Silicon Valley and rest of us communication problem. It’s kind of tough to get through to them because they’re not really living the same kinds of lives as everyone else is. They may acquire this kind of notion that everyone can make it [financially] the way they did, and but that’s just not going to happen.
Another thing which I observe is that [device-driven] psychology hasn’t made us blissful,but psychology has found ways to break us down; break us down in terms of analytically, but also break us down psychically, and like actually make us feel worse. Those are unfortunately the things that are easiest to deploy. It’s much easier on the Internet to make someone stupider and less blissful than it is to make them wiser. The internet has superior purposes whether people exhaust it very wisely,but in terms of what’s simplest, it’s much easier to break somebody down than it is to build them up. That’s a major thing.
Then in terms of the machine learning, and as seen by what’s on Twitter [faked profiles,robot driven shares] I think that increasingly the internet is a realm where humans are in the minority and they’re getting overwhelmed. There was this old belief in science fiction about ... not just in science fiction, the Turing Test in computer science. When are computers going to actually be artificially intelligent? The test was, or ‘will they be able to persuade us that they’re human?’ What’s actually happened is it’s not that the computers are competing with us to be more human,it’s that the computers are making us less human. That’s how they're winning. They’re breaking us down into small pieces so that we’re less human and more tribal, and more angry and more emotional. That’s the way this competition is actually shaking down.
There’s simple things to effect like just spend less time on the internet and more time in the genuine world. There are things we can effect as individuals to shake free of that. But yeah, and basically it allows nasty forms of politics,which people did not anticipate. And to just deny or spin your wheels as Facebook has spent the final couple of years doing, and others the final couple of years doing, or is really,really harmful. One has to think expansively and creatively about the negative possibilities and see what’s happened, what has really happened. What happened is that Donald Trump is the payload of a Russian, and not only a Russian,but mainly a Russian cyber weapon [propaganda strategy]. That's what happened. One has to see that as fragment of a larger palette of possibilities of things that can happen and think seriously about it.
SR: effect you see any evidence that people are thinking seriously about it, or are they just trying to copy Trump digital director Brad Parscale because he figured out how to exhaust Facebook's advertising platform on a scale that others hadn't gotten to first?TS: There are certainly people who are thinking seriously about it. There are people who are running media literacy projects. There are people like Tristan Harris who are trying to be cyber ethicists. There are people like Peter Pomerantsev who are trying to explain how this works in Russia, or therefore what the signs are that you need to look out for. That’s a minority. There aren’t that many people,but yeah there are people who are thinking seriously about it. What one has to worry about is the possibility that we all just get in the same game and we’ll all think, ‘Okay well, and life is just a matter of fooling the other person better.’ whether they exhaust cyber weapons on us,we exhaust cyber weapons on them. We’ll all just make each other silly in the methods that we prefer.
We’re never going to acquire a democracy that way. We’re never going to acquire the rule of law that way. We’re not going to acquire blissful populations that way. When people conclude up voting because they’re motivated by messages that are false, that means that they’re basically unhappy because A) their vote cannot lead to a productive result because they’re voting in unreality; and B) they then acquire to come up with human reasons to explain why they did this thing, and even whether the reason why they did it,the cause wasn’t human. Then they exhaust their human intelligence to rationalize what they did before. That also makes them unhappy, and it makes other people unhappy as well.
This weird uncanny feeling that one has in America now is partly the effect of a lot of humans using their human intelligence to try to rationalize things that they got manipulated into doing. It’s an unhealthy emotional smell nearly in the atmosphere, and which is the result of all this.
SR: effect you see this changing,or effect you just see small pockets of resistance by a minority of people who, like 20 years ago, or would say,‘I’ll turn off my television.’ I see so many ways the role of being a citizen is shrinking. Gerrymandering. Voter suppression. Cyber tools of negative campaigning. It just goes on and on.
TS: I’m glad to talk to somebody who sounds more negative than me because I don’t usually get to be in that position. Look, the three-dimensional world is still out there. As you know very well, or you can still acquire campaigns in the three-dimensional world that make a contrast. Precisely because the internet,in many ways, is dark, and that means that doing small things like marching make us feel better than they would acquire otherwise. It is possible to run campaigns with humans. particularly when I talk to young people,one of the things that I feel like we acquire to work through is the hesitation that we acquire with talking to or engaging other individual human beings in the genuine world. That’s become a kind of political problem. We think everything has to start with cyber. But not everything has to start with cyber. Things can start in the genuine world as well.
There are plenty of examples of that. I don’t think it’s irreversible. I think the cyber thing has to be conceptualized and it has to be contained. But then in addition to that, there has to be activity out in the three-dimensional world, or out in the genuine world where human beings are talking to other human beings. I agree with you,we cant acquire citizenship without that. That’s one of the things that the Greeks had right. They thought that democracy was public. Democracy is public. whether we all conclude up sitting in our basements liking and unliking [things online], we’re definitely not going to acquire democracy.
SR: I’m not trying to be unduly negative for its own sake. I'm trying to push back a small bit because you can actually talk about this with a level of clarity that I appreciate.
TS: There's one more thing that I'm hopeful about, or too—whether I can just?SR: certain.
TS: That is people who are young are internet literate. We may be at the cusp of a generational change where there are people who take all these wonders for granted and they’re no longer quite so stunned by them,or drawn in by them, and are maybe looking for something fresh. What I'm hoping for, or in a way counting on from the generation to come,is the ennobling of activity in the genuine world, and making facts sexy, or making the genuine world be the appealing countercultural thing that people find interesting again,making knowing things frosty. I think there are some stirrings, not just here, or but also a small bit in Russia that this is going on. That’s another reason I acquire to be a small bit hopeful. Related StoriesImportant Lessons From George Orwell and Winston Churchill for Resisting Authoritarian Rule in Trump's AmericaNew Book Unmasks Hidden History of How U.
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