Jonas Bendiksen The Book of Veles

The provincial town of Veles, in Northern Macedonia, put itself on the world map as an epicentre of fake news during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, when tech-savvy youths in the town posed as US political news portals and flooded the internet with click-baiting articles. While the fake Veles articles were disseminated to millions via social media algorithms, many of the ‘news hacks’ made substantial amounts of money and the sites are often credited with helping to elect Donald Trump. Travelling to Veles, Jonas Bendiksen discovers the landscapes and people that make up the unlikely centre of disinformation. In this book, his images of the city are interwoven with excerpts and facsimiles of a 1919 archaeological find, also known as the ‘Book of Veles’, a cryptic collection of 40 wooden plates discovered in Russia by an army officer, written in a proto-Slavic language. Once thought to be an ancient history of the Slavic people and the god Veles himself, the text has since been disproved as a forgery by scientific consensus. As intelligent as it is visually compelling, Bendiksen’s book examines historical and current efforts to produce and guard against disinformation and chaos.