24 May 2022. Russia | Cars
Constructing Putinism: everything is dissimulation // EVs hit a tipping point.
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1: Constructing Putinism: everything is dissimulation
The Atlantic pointed me to its 2014 article about “the author of Putinism”, Vladislav Surkov, written by the Russia specialist Peter Pomerantsev. How young we all were then: since then Surkov’s playbook has been copied by populists on both sides of the Atlantic, and in several other places as well.
Surkov has had various roles in the Russian administration, but his main claim to fame, says Pomerantsev, is that he “has directed Russian society like one great reality show.” Here, he conjure a new political party or a youth movement; there he meets the heads of Russia’s TV channels, instructing them on whom to attack.
And over there, he conjures up slogans that can mean whatever you want them to mean:
The president is the president of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the president is an enemy of the great God of “stability.”... “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective.”
This reminded me of a famous 2015 Conservative election campaign claim, even if it hasn’t aged well.
Surkov is one of a cadre of “political technologists” who emerged in Russia as communism collapsed, and politics suddenly had to be managed differently. These days, of course, they are at the heart of the political machine.
The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West... The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls.
Surkov himself is a perfect candidate for this kind of political operation. By Pomerantsev’s account, he is “an aesthete” who writes about modern art and a fan of gangsta rap who keeps a photo of Tupac on his desk. He may be the author of a satirical novel, Almost Zero, that he wrote the introduction to. It’s become a bestseller, and it seems at least partly autobiographical.
(Surkov with Putin in 2012. Photo from premier.gov.ru, via Wikimedia. CC BY 4.0)
By 1992, he was working in PR just as it became a valuable skill in Russia, working first for the oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and later as head of PR at Ostankino’s Channel 1, owned by Boris Berezovsky, joining the Kremlin in 1999:
When the president exiled Berezovsky and arrested and jailed Khodorkovsky, Surkov helped run the media campaign, which featured a new image of Khodorkovsky: instead of the grinning oligarch pictured handing out money, he was now always shown behind bars. The message was clear—you’re only a photo away from going from the cover of Forbes to a prison cell.
Pomerantsev works a clever transition from this in his article, but the underlying story is that ‘everything is PR’, and ‘everything is dissimulation’.
Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only “simulacrum” and “simulacra”... If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the U.S.S.R. by uniting free-market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package... Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.
As well as tearing those associations apart, he has also turned the fragments back on the West.
The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting U.S. hegemony; U.S. religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.
Pomerantsev’s piece, adapted from his book Nothing is true and everything is possible, weaves elements of Surkov’s fiction through his story. It’s hard to read the article without thinking of Surkov as an extreme projection of the ideas of Edward Bernays, the pioneer of American public relations and propaganda in the middle of the century.
It was Bernays who described cigarettes as ‘torches of freedom’ to sell smoking to women, and created and manipulated third parties and front organisations to promote campaigns
. According to Wikipedia, he wrote that “propaganda is the modern instrument by which (intelligent men) can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos”. Surkov has turned this idea on its head, and turned it back on the West. He uses propaganda to create disorder—helped along by some willing students, or useful idiots.
2: EVs hit a tipping point
Those concise people at Axios have shared data from EY which shows that global consumer interest in electric vehicles has just hit a tipping point. More than 50% of prospective buyers surveyed across 18 countries say they want their next car to be an electrical vehicle (EV). Italy and China are at the top—Australia and the US lag behind. It seems relevant that both have a lot of low density cities with high levels of individual transport related emissions.
The data comes from EY’s annual Mobility Consumer Index.
It’s the first time that interest in EVs has climbed above 50%, and that figure has climbed by 22 percentage points in two years. I think it’s reasonable to suggest that bthis is a sign of a market that’s going to start accelerating quite quickly.
Some of this is being driven by public policies:
34% of respondents identified rising penalties on conventional cars as a key factor in their purchase decision, EY found.
And it helps that the idea of ‘range anxiety’ is disappearing, as batteries improve and charging gets better. This is more true for existing EV owners, so it seems that ‘range anxiety’ isn’t borne out by actual experience of an EV.
Other relevant factors are the rise of petrol/gas prices worldwide, but environmental concerns are also a critical concern among consumers.
And even the US market is showing signs of change:
electric vehicles accounted for a record 4.6% of new car registrations in the first quarter of 2022 — nearly double last year's 2.4%, according to new data from S&P Global Mobility. But EV ownership varies widely throughout the country, ranging from 14.7% in Los Angeles to 1.6% in Detroit.
But as Axios notes, something like one half of one percent of the cars on US roads are currently electric vehicles.
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