The Faking of Russian Democracy and the Fracturing of Democracy in America: Political Technology versus Disruptive Technology

Prof Andrew Wilson: Inaugural Lecture

The sheer speed of the moving target in this lecture is part of the problem; but Prof Wilson aims to contrast the dramatic effects of ‘disruptive technologies’ like social media and ‘alt-news’ in the 2016 US elections, with the ‘political technology’ long practised in Russia since the 1990s. Russia famously hacked the American election, but there are deeper problems of technology-sharing and technique-sharing that are an even bigger threat to Western democracy than already realised. Western institutions are already weakened by disruptive technology. The space is wide open for the unscrupulous, including Russia, to use technologies first patented in Russia twenty years ago to dramatically undermine democracy in the West.

This event is part of the UCL 2016-17 Inaugural Lecture Programm

Podcast of the lecture can be accessed via SoundCloud

Slides from the Lecture to accompany Podcast (PDF)