Library:Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible
| Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible | |
|---|---|
| Author | Peter Pomerantsev |
| First published | 2014 |
| ISBN | 978-1-61039-455-0 |
| Role | Analysis |
| Domains | Politics & Elections Technology & Media |
| Tactics | Propaganda Technique Fabrication |
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is a 2014 book by Peter Pomerantsev.
Summary
Peter Pomerantsev published this book in 2014, drawing on nearly a decade of working in Moscow as a producer of reality and documentary television. It is an insider's portrait of Russia under Vladimir Putin, describing a political system in which reality itself seemed to have become a production.
Inside the machine
Pomerantsev worked inside Russian television during the boom of the 2000s, when the state controlled the major channels but allowed them to be lively, glamorous and entertaining. He describes a world in which producers understood that their job was not to report reality but to shape it, and in which entertainment and politics were run on the same principles.
The political technologist
A central figure is Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin's leading political strategist, who studied theatre and wrote fiction. Pomerantsev describes how Surkov's approach went beyond simple censorship. The system sponsored political parties, youth movements, nationalist groups and even opposition figures, creating the appearance of a competitive democracy while ensuring that the outcome stayed in Kremlin hands. Politics became a performance in which the audience could not tell which actors were real.
A postmodern dictatorship
Pomerantsev argues that this was something new: an authoritarian system that did not need a single ideology. It could present itself as liberal, conservative or nationalist as circumstances required, and offer many contradictory versions of events at once. If nothing is true, the reasoning goes, then everything is possible, and no account can be held against those in power.
The people
The book is also a series of portraits of individuals caught up in this world: young women attending courses on how to marry rich men, gangsters turned filmmakers, members of the new elite, and people destroyed by a system with no fixed rules. Their stories show how cynicism becomes a survival strategy when truth has no reliable value.
Relevance to Bullshitopedia
The book explains a style of deception that does not depend on any single lie: a state strategy of offering so many versions of events that the public stops believing anything at all. That strategy is a direct threat to the premise of fact-checking, and understanding it is essential for the Politics & Elections domain. Read it alongside Pomerantsev's later This Is Not Propaganda, which follows the same methods as they spread worldwide.