Summary
Chapter 11: Investigate.
Snyder’s advice is to figure things out for yourself, to spend time with long articles, to discern what is useful on the internet and what is not, to take responsibility for what one communicates to others. He explains how President Trump in 2016 banned reporters from events, said they lied and were enemies of the state—similar tactics to Hitler’s treatment of the media. In 1971, Hannah Arendt saw the lies the U.S. was telling about the Vietnam War as problematic but believed that facts would ultimately triumph over falsehoods. Snyder doesn't believe that is the case anymore, because “the two-dimensional world of the internet has become more important than the three-dimensional world of human contact” (74). We are used to dealing with people on Facebook, not real life.
The solution is print journalism so stories develop on the page and in our minds; we need to get away from the logic of spectacle. Anyone can repost an article, but real journalism takes time and is dangerous. It is problematic that we “find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free” (77). We all need to be aware that we have a responsibility for the public’s understanding of truth, so only reposting the work of real journalists is a start. We have to be aware of the damage caused to people when false news circulates, just like we’re aware when we are driving a car that there are real people behind every wheel even if we cannot see them.
Chapter 12: Make eye contact and small talk.
This is part of being a citizen, and will help when we enter a “culture of denunciation” (81). Even banal gestures are normal and important, as they were during the Stalinist purges. Old friends are the “politics of last resort” (82) and new friends help us move toward change.
Chapter 13: Practice corporeal politics.
We should place our body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people and make new friends and march with them. Resistance succeeds when people put themselves next to those who do not agree with them, in places that are not their homes. It has to be real and on the streets even if it was conceived online. Snyder’s example here is the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980-81, which brought diverse people together for the cause.
Chapter 14: Establish a private life.
Snyder warns us to be careful about email, to have personal exchanges in person, and to resolve legal trouble. Anyone who can pierce our privacy can humiliate and control us. This speaks to Hannah Arendt’s definition of totalitarianism, which is that it is a collapse between public and private life.
She also saw that we have an appetite for the “secret,” and are easily seduced into thinking there are conspiracies everywhere. We are more interested in the revelation of something meant to be secret than the value of the revealed thing itself, which Snyder supports by providing evidence of the distracting, overblown reaction to Hillary’s emails in 2016, meant to distract from substantive news.
Chapter 15: Contribute to good causes.
Snyder recommends setting up autopay to support a couple of organizations or causes because it makes us feel good and because “one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members” (93). This is the creation of a civil society, so it is no surprise that tyrannical governments were hostile to NGOs and charities and other such organizations.
Analysis
In these later lessons, Snyder is starting to move away from the big picture to the small, meaning how we behave in our everyday lives. He counsels actually talking to people in person, getting away from the internet, making sure to be careful about our digital footprint, about supporting causes that we believe in. This is good, practical advice since many readers of the text are not in positions to make major changes but are instead regular people, nervously seeing what is happening in their world and wondering how to combat it and keep themselves and their families safe.
Lessons eleven, twelve, and thirteen ask people to step away from their computers and the concomitant two-dimensionality of the things they’re reading and sharing and the convenient distance of the people they are interacting with. Instead, if we are going to consume media, it needs to be scrupulously researched. If we are going to talk about politics, it should be in person. If we are going to try and protest, it should be in the streets. We need to be responsible for other people in the same way someone driving a car knows that every other car contains a life, so they need to be careful about what they’re doing.
Snyder has expanded on his views about the internet and social media in recent interviews. He told Maclean’s that “I see social media as kind of a grim necessity—that it’s basically evil and life is elsewhere. I post, but I don’t read comments. I don’t know what my Twitter password is. If you stay offline, it’s like treading water: you may not be improving yourself, but at least you’re not sinking. I want to remember that social media is a different, non-human realm that’s calling out to us all the time, but that we don’t necessarily have to listen to it.”
Lesson fourteen speaks to the fears people have about the government’s reach into their personal lives. As Hannah Arendt explained, totalitarianism is the collapse of difference between the public and private spheres, so it behooves us to protect our private lives as much as possible—especially since Elon Musk’s unconstitutional Department of Government Efficiency is obtaining access to our personal data. An article from Perspective Media about the book agrees with this lesson, noting “Every social media platform we use, every website we visit, every loyalty card we scan, a profile is built of us, bit by binary bit. It’s the tyranny of the algorithm and it’s the trade-off we accept for the switched-on life we enjoy. We have laws to protect our data, but they only go so far. We can integrate the technology while choosing privacy. We can decide that we have nothing to hide but something to protect. We can choose to reject surveillance. Snyder’s words warn us that we should.”
