Autocracy Inc

Well it's a day that ends in 'Y', which means it's a beautiful day to despise the Russian government with every fiber of my being!

This is a powerful argument for asking Western governments to stop treating powerful heads of state as one-off, case-by-case studies; the Francos and Mugabes of the 20th century no longer provide the model of authoritarianism. Seemingly diverse countries with little in common beyond a desire to stay in power in the face of Western pressure (Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe to name a few) are all interconnected now in an effort to provide an air of legitimacy to each other. The overwhelming message they convey to their populaces is, "yes we're bad, but it could be worse, so don't fight to change things."

Rather than acting as a bridge to bring these oppressive regimes into the Western fold, post-Cold War economic overtures have instead acted as a rope that can be pulled against democracies for leverage (Germany being so dependent upon Russian gas pipelines and high-tech industries relying on Chinese rare earth suppliers come to mind). And on a smaller scale, cities like Vancouver and London allow powerful foreign nationals from hostile countries to park wealth in the form of real estate without repercussion, and at detriment to their own citizens.

I appreciate that the book tries to end on a more positive note, laying out a potential blueprint for how liberal democracies can combat deliberate misinformation, cyberwarfare aimed at infrastructure that we're pretending isn't already happening, and cultural defeatism in general, but it felt a touch too ambitious to me. Or maybe I'm already bought in to the idea that our enemies have too much of a head-start in the information age.

Applebaum paints a chilling picture of a global juggernaut of loosely allied autocracies that share weapons technologies, poor and powerless populations, a money laundering system that includes U.S. banks who choose to look the other way, methods of circumventing sanctions, and a lot of other horrors.

She admonishes activists worldwide to coalesce to fight autocracies, and suggests these steps:
" - Put an end to transnational kleptocracy
- Don't fight the information war -- undermine it
- Decouple, de-risk, rebuild"
The section on how to implement the above offers few details and feels pretty impossible in the face of the global greed suffusing autocratic governments and large corporations. Its represents only 25 of 176 pages, but should have been the primary focus of the book.

One example: "...the information system is based on a series of laws, rules, and regulations, all of which can be changed, if our politicians are prepared to change them. Transparency can replace obscurity. Customers of the social media platforms should be able to own their data and determine what is to be done with it. They should also be able to influence, directly the algorithms that determine what they see. Legislators in democracies could create the technical and legal means to give people more control and more choices or to hold companies liable if the algorithms they use promote content tied to acts of terrorism."

Well, yeah, but there are a lot of shoulds and ifs here, and I want to know exactly how to go about doing this. How do you convince legislators to change any of this if they are so passively entrenched in a system that often rewards them for inaction? What can we do at the grassroots level? What can an individual do?

Most of us know at least a little and often a lot about the terrors of global autocracies and the demise of democracies, but how to start pushing back at the micro level may be the biggest challenge of all, and we need our best thinkers and doers to tell us how to do that.