For centuries information was scarce. The math was simple: The higher up the societal food chain you were, the better the information you had. And it could be explosive. Information made Microsoft and it brought down Richard Nixon. It helped us navigate the globe and it feeds the Facebook algorithm. But what happens to society when information ceases to be scarce? This is the question Peter Pomerantsev explores in his finely written and deeply intelligent This is Not Propaganda.

THIS IS NOT PROPAGANDA: ADVENTURES IN THE WAR AGAINST REALITY by Peter Pomerantsev PublicAffairs, 231 pp., $28.00

Pomerantsev, a writer who also lectures on online propaganda at the London School of Economics, is well placed to provide an answer. Early on in the book he sets out the information dilemma facing us. More information, he argues, was supposed to mean more freedom to stand up to the powerful, but it’s also given them new ways to crush dissent. More information was supposed to mean a more informed debate, but it has led to more confrontation and enabled “new and more subtle forms of conflict and subversion.” For Pomerantsev the logical endpoint is both depressing and dangerous: “a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, fake news, deep fakes, brainwashing, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump.”

The book’s landscape is, accordingly, one of “Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, trolls, info-war charlatans” and “behavioral change” visionaries, and the reader is taken on a picaresque gallop through it. We meet, among others, a social media manipulator in Manila who helped get Rodrigo Duterte elected, a troll in St. Petersburg who peddled fake realities for the Russian state, and a Serbian expert on non-violent—and vertiginously humorous—protest.

Pomerantsev’s thesis is simple: In an age of information abundance, the belief that the best ideas will triumph has been discredited. Malign actors ensure that bad information now pushes out the good. Politicians lie not furtively but with pride; falsehoods are rewarded with virality; and anger and hysteria are the highways to attention. In the meantime, we wall ourselves up in echo chambers, busily constructing our own realities. This is dangerous because if there is no shared, evidence-based reality upon which we can all agree, then the very idea of democracy falls apart.

The book begins in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, with its “gusts of rotting fish and popcorn smells, sewage, and deep-fry oil.” Here, Pomerantsev meets “P,” who has been “controlling” people online since he was 15. P started out small—and personal; getting people to share stories of their love life on forums he created. Eventually, he wound up in politics after agreeing to work for Rodrigo Duterte, an outsider in the presidential elections “who looked to social media as a new, cheap route to victory.”