26 January, 2023

Obama: I Underestimated the Threat of Disinformation

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/barack-obama-interview-disinformation-ukraine/629496/

What we’re seeing is a reversion back to old ways of thinking about power and place and identity. And I think part of our complacency grew out of the notion that once the Berlin Wall fell and Nelson Mandela was released and the world was flat and you had McDonald’s everywhere, and now suddenly that was it—we were done. And we forgot that that post–World War II 50-years stretch to 60-years stretch—that’s the anomaly. And that there is millennia of brutality and pillage and violence and displacement and cruelty, and we created a set of institutions out of 60 million people dying in World War II and tried to reconfigure how we might organize our societies. But it is not self-executing. It’s something that we have to continually nurture and respond to new circumstances, whether that’s changes in technology, changes in globalization, climate change—all those things require us to say, All right, what does that mean for our capacity to maintain human dignity and freedom and self-governance? And that’s the prism through which we should be examining these questions and being willing to modify, adjust, reform our institutions to keep up with that. And that’s something that I think we have not done as well as we need to.