The centralized model of information dissemination that characterized much of the twentieth century has largely given way to person-to-person information sharing. Great publishers and news corporations have not disappeared. But their influence has been greatly diluted by the rise of information sharing and social media, to which they too have had to adapt.[491]
If knowledge is empowering, how does authoritarian rule persist in a world where most citizens carry a device in their pocket or purse with access to the world’s information? How could Secret Leviathan survive in this new world without paying the price of North Korea? It might be thought that the collapse of European communism marked a new era of more fragile dictatorships. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case: dictatorships are thought to have become more durable, not less, since the end of the Cold War.[492]
Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, an economist and a political scientist, describe a new model of authoritarian rule. The old model relied on censorship and fear; the new model exploits the manipulation or “spinning” of information and disinformation.[493] Examples of “spin dictators” that they give include Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.
The spin dictator’s first priority is the same as for other autocrats: to take and hold state power. Guriev and Treisman envisage a society divided into an informed elite and a relatively uninformed mass. The ruler spins the news to convince the uninformed mass that the regime is effective and competent. The new autocrat appears to promote national prosperity at home and to protect the nation’s interests in the world, especially along the nation’s borders. Mass opinion supports the autocrat—as long as the picture of the effective, competent ruler is not disrupted by elite dissidents.
Members of the informed elite might have a different view of the ruler. They have full access to the world’s information, and they can form a true picture of the ruler’s performance. Some are sincere regime supporters. Others might dislike the ruler, question the ruler’s competence, or see the ruler’s policies as counterproductive. But most elite dissidents are silent. Some are corrupted by power or money. Others are silenced by fear. Rather than mass arrests or deportations, they worry about targeted legal harassment by a tax or corruption investigation or a charge of immorality. A seemingly random beating or a fatal accident are not ruled out, but they remain less likely. Some choose to leave the country, which benefits the ruler by thinning the ranks of the openly discontented elite. A foreign refuge appears to offer safety, but an exile who makes too much noise can be vulnerable to diplomatic pressure or illegal force. The outcome is that nearly all elite members fall into line.
Guriev and Treisman call those who rule in this way “spin dictators.” The new-style autocrat regularly wins popularity polls and elections based on the unfeigned support of the uninformed majority. Discontent is limited to a few elite members who refuse to be bought or intimidated.
Under new-model autocracy there are still secrecy and censorship. Secrecy is not comprehensive; it covers only the lives and decisions of the autocrat and his circle. As for censorship, Glavlit is long gone and cannot be brought back. But censorship is practiced, nonetheless. Most mass media are owned by the state or by the state’s private stakeholders, who spread regime propaganda. Censorship is also practiced in another form, in the effects of legal harassment or imprisonment of independent researchers and of the assassination of investigative journalists. So, censorship still exists—but the model has changed.
But much information that the authorities would like to suppress cannot be kept out from the public sphere. So, curious citizens who search for it are shielded from it in two ways. First, internet searches are systematically pointed toward the state’s mouthpieces, which provide disinformation.[494] If the citizens look elsewhere, the inconvenient truths may be available, but they are fogged by a much greater mass of lies, myths, and rumors that are fed into public discourse through social media.
Consider the shootdown of the Malaysian MH17 airliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014. If the truth is that agents of the Russian state were responsible, Russia’s rulers must deny it because it calls into question their benevolence and competence. In Soviet times, the official media controlled what facts were released, if at all, and provided only official explanations (as with the Soviet-era case of the Korean KAL007 airliner shot down over the Far East in 1983). This cannot be done today. Instead, both true and false facts are all over the Russian state media, accompanied by a bewildering variety of alternative theories: the Ukrainians did it, the Americans did it, the British did it, using various means and based on various motivations. As a result, Russians feel no obligation to accept that their own country was responsible.
What cannot be concealed can be spun. By filling the public space with lies, the rulers hope to persuade the uninformed mass that the truth is unknowable, hidden behind a smokescreen of hostile deceptions. The government version can also gain support from many members of the informed elite, because no one can be equally informed about everything.[495]
To support their ideas, Guriev and Treisman bring evidence. The facts show that the more successful spin dictators are less violent than the old ones: they kill and imprison in dozens or hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. Where possible they subcontract the limited repression that they find necessary.[496] They no longer try to enforce every clause and subclause of an official ideology such as Marxism-Leninism, although they do assiduously promote nationalism, illiberal social values, and antiWesternism. In the name of protecting the public sphere against disruption by foreign values, they limit access to the global internet.[497] They praise themselves for promoting prosperity at home and protecting the nation abroad. And, as opinion polls tend to show, the strategy works: they persuade the poorer, less educated, less travelled members of society much more effectively than the informed elite that actually helps them run the country.
Guriev and Treisman call them “spin dictators,” but there is a sense in which the more violent dictators of the previous generation knew all about spin. Disinformation was disempowering then, as it is now. What is different about the new autocrats is that, as the centralized restriction of knowledge has become less practicable, disinformation has become more valuable to them and more practicable at the same time.
Are the new autocrats as bad as the old ones? Perhaps there is progress: a society where political killings are limited to tens or hundreds is better than one where they are numbered in hundreds of thousands or millions. A society where anyone can search out the truth, even if the search takes some effort, is better than one where every vestige of the truth has been rigidly suppressed. This is the progress that has been marked in the world of authoritarian rule.
But the full cost of spin dictatorship may become clear only in the long run. At the end of 2019, Sergei Guriev was optimistic that Putin’s magic spell over the loyalty of the Russian masses was wearing off, increasing the chance that his regime would crumble.[498] In 2021, he revised his view: Putin’s regime had taken a violent turn back to the mid-twentieth-century model of the fear dictator.[499] In 2022, Putin led Russia into violent aggression against Ukraine. With the war on Ukraine, Russia faced outright censorship of war news and severe penalties for truth tellers.
492
Frantz, Authoritarianism, 217, based on a dataset of 280 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 2010, described by Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions.”
498
Sergei Guriev, “The Future of Putin’s Information Autocracy,” Project Syndicate, 27 December 2019, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ putin-popularity-information-autocracy-by-sergei-guriev-2019-12.
499
Sergei Guriev, “We May Already Be Seeing Russia’s Return to the Repressive Dictatorship of the 20th Century,” Institute of Modern Russia, 5 August 2021, https://imrussia.org/en/opinions/3321-sergei-guriev-%E2%80%9Cwe-may-already-be-seeing-russia%E2%8o%99s-return-to-the-repressive-dictatorship-of -the-20th-century%E2%8o%9D).