WHEN: Tuesday 24 September, 2019, 7pm
WHERE: 79 Holland Park, London W11 3SW
Admission: £10 (£7 students). Book here
Language: The event will be in English
Organiser: Ukrainian Institute London
“Hypocrisy of the Cold War has now been replaced with something more sinister: all information becomes a tool to undermine the enemy. Disrupt, confuse, delay and subvert. Ideas of themselves are irrelevant.” This a quote from This is not propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev’s second book, which follows the success of his award-winning Nothing is true and everything is possible (2015). Peter travels far and wide, from the Philippines to Mexico, from Ukraine to Estonia, to record accounts of media activists and info warriors. He tries to dissect the era of post-truth we all live in and the impact it has on reality. Peter goes back to Cold War realities and traces the stories he lived through in his childhood and youth, growing up in a family of dissidents, kicked out of Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s.
Peter’s book will be unveiled alongside the work by David Patrikarakos, another author and media expert with multi-layered identity. In his War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is reshaping the conflict in the 21st Century, David draws his lessons on the cases drawn from the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Gaza conflicts. He books puts forward the notion of “homo digitalis,” “a tech-savvy postmodern creature, who inhabits the online world and whose fighting prowess is equal to the battalion of infantry.” Both Peter and David, who have done a lot of on-the-ground research in Ukraine, will be reflecting on the global trends of the crisis of mainstream media, impact of conflicts which rage online indefinitely, power of tech companies and how to mould cognitive abilities to adjust to new realities.
Speakers:
Peter Pomerantsev is an author, TV producer and media expert. He is a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics where he directs Arena, a research programme dedicated to overcoming the challenges of disinformation. Peter has testified on the challenges of information war to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee.
He writes for publications including the Financial Times, London Review of Books, Politico, Atlantic and many others. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages.
David Patrikarakos is a journalist, author and TV producer, best known for his acclaimed book War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. He is also a contributing editor at the Daily Beast and a contributing writer at Politico Europe. In 2014 he was appointed a Poynter Fellow at Yale University and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow in the School of Iranian Studies, at the University of St Andrews.