Russia, we now know, opted for door number two: information dominance. It was a logical choice for a weak but proud nation, one that could not match the West in the traditional forms of economic or military power. And it was less about matching the West than it was about bringing the West (especially the United States) down to Russia’s level by challenging its confidence in itself and its institutions. And the enabler for all of this was the World Wide Web and social media, the ability to publish without credentials, without the need to offer proof (at least in the traditional sense) or even to identify yourself. The demise of a respected media as an arbiter of fact or at least as a curator of data let loose impulses that were at once leveling, coarsening, and misleading. A. C. Grayling, the British philosopher, says that this explosion of information overwhelmed us and happened so quickly that education did not keep up, leaving us, he laments, with regularly reading the biggest washroom wall in history.