"When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like FaceBook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience; we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears."
#ZadieSmith, quoted in Doppelganger by #NaomiKlein, 2023
"There is something uniquely humiliating about confronting a bad replica of one's self - and something utterly harrowing about confronting a good one. Both carry the unmistakable shudder of the doppelganger. A shudder that turns into a quake when we realize that it is not just individuals who are being artificially copied, however poorly, but the entirety of human existence."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/2)
"AI is, after all, a mirroring and mimicry machine: we feed in the cumulative words, ideas and images that our species has managed to amass (and digitize) over its history and these programs mirror back to us something that feels uncannily lifelike. A golem world."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(2/2)
"When Wolf says 'they start purging your enemies, then they purge you', she's not wrong. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, progressives in North America had been pretty complacent about this threat, because it had mostly been their political adversaries getting booted off platforms."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/?)
"But well before Musk started suspending the accounts of people who displeased him, the same kinds of power abuses had deplatformed Palestinian human rights activists at the behest of the Israeli government, and advocates for the rights of farmers and religious minorities at the behest of India's Hindu-supremacist government."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(2/?)
"Yet in North America, raising the alarm about the fact that we have outsourced the management of our critical information pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies, working hand in glove with governments, somehow became the terrain of the Bannonite political right, which points to a dangerous ceding of ideological territory."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(3/3)
"Establishing a democratic, noncorporate media - through public broadcasting and community access to the airwaves - was once a core progressive demand. Though there are civil liberties groups that still stand up against corporate censorship, as well as civil rights groups that fight for net neutrality, progressives today have not, for the most part, made fighting for a democratic and accountable information sphere a cornerstone of their political agenda."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(4/5)
"On the contrary, many happily cheered corporate deplatforming - until the same dynamics came for them."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(5/5)
"The spread of lies and conspiracies online is now so rampant that it threatens public health and, quite possibly, the survival of representative democracy. The solution to this informational crisis, however, is not to look to tech oligarchs to disappear people we don't like; it's to get serious about demanding an information commons that can be counted on as a basic civil right."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(6/?)
"The tech writer and theorist Ben Tarnoff, in his book Internet for the People, argues that this is an achievable goal but it must begin with a process of 'deprivatization' - putting the tools that have become our public square into the public's hands, under democratic control."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(7/?)
"To build a better internet, we need to change how its is owned and organized. What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of democracy - a possibility that an internet organizes by the profit motive precludes."
#BenTarnoff, Internet for the People, 2022
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2674-internet-for-the-people
Quoted by #NaomiKlein in Doppelganger, 2023
(8/8)
The Doppelganger chapter on diagonal politics is intriguing, and challenging. The description of the maverick leftist role Naomi Klein sees Wolf as playing in post-covid US diagonalism sounds a bit like a description of me, at least superficially 😬
Food for thought, for sure.
"In essence, Big Tech has appropriated commonly-held tools for private gain, while adopting the discourse of the commons to describe their gated platforms."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
"So in addition to the usual attempts to smuggle in policies that benefits corporate elites at the expense of broader publics, and to directly profiteer off the need for medical equipment and treatments ... we have also been confronted with a small army of diagonalists peddling over-the-top conspiracy theories about how the whole disaster was manufactured by a shady cabal so that it can bring in their New World Order/ eugenicist agenda."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/2)
"I have come to think of this army, which relies so heavily on conjecture and clickbait exaggeration, as disaster doppelgangers, since their highly profitable performances serve to distract from the very real scandals that are right before our eyes and urgently need our attention."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
Years ago I read about a disinformation tactic called a "limited hangout". This too seems like it could be a disinfo tactic, with a similar goal.
(2/?)
In a 'limited hangout', people working on behalf of conspirators will pretend to expose it. Publicising the least compromising parts of the real conspiracy, mixed with a bunch of absurd, pre-existing conspiracy fiction published by other disinfo agents and the Useful Idiots who parrot them.
The goal of a limited hangout, is to make it easier for any reporting on the true conspiracy to be dismissed, and for investigate journalists to be lumped in with paranoid conspiracy fantasists.
(3/3)
"Even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, most liberals and leftists didn't bother looking for months because we didn't want to be like *them*, in the same way I didn't want to be like *her* [Naomi Wolf]. In an odd way, their over-the-top conspiracies fed our overcredulity; their 'question everything' led to many of us not questioning enough."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
Exactly.
The advent of troll farms and botslop made me immediately think of digital chaff. Shotgun propaganda, flood the zone with so much widely varied shit everyone gets to pick their favorite flavor of conspiracy. Shreds of the truth everywhere, camoflauged to oblivion by increasingly plausible garbage.
Watching this wave come on, just as dangerous as any of the the climate disasters or tipping points, and seeing it get the same blank shrug reaction from most people, is getting to me. I mean, it tracks. Oh, how it tracks.
How do we get news out and movement communications flowing when this is getting locked down? People growing up siloed in whatever their phone assistant feeds them, and are scared of even clicking links outside their corporate factory zombiefarm, are not going to pick up education or messages very easily. That effect has got to be stopped before the self-reinforcing flywheel of ignorance gets worse.
(1/?)
Absolutely agree with everything you say here. I'm nodding so violently I'm in danger of my head falling off ; )
@violetmadder
How do we get news out and movement communications flowing when this is getting locked down?
This is the critical question. One I suspect it's one that activists who reached adulthood before the net went mainstream are uniquely positioned to answer.
(2/?)
As soon as we discovered email and the web, some of us could see their potential as tools for movement communications. Both for internal coordination and public outreach. But how to get non-geek activists to try them? This is exactly the situation we're in now with decentralised social network tools.
(3/?)
There were lots of strategies used. But the ones I found most effective relied in 2 key principles; a dogged pluralism, and a promotional strategy focused on what the tools I was spruiking could do for the people I was reaching out to, the groups they worked with, and the causes they championed.
(4/?)
Pluralism (with some limits) because of network effects. An online activist news network like Indymedia could never have worked if everyone involved refused to yoke themselves together with 'unbelievers'. It was only by making common cause with those who we agreed with about some things, even while violently disagreeing about others, that we were able to build the wide range of media tools Indymedia could offer at it's peak, and a diverse audience that made it worth publishing there.
(5/?)
A 'what can this do for you and yours' approach because I knew that's what would convince me. I was working on serious issues, unpaid, with minimal support or resources, as were most activists (then and now). I didn't have time to muck about with well-intentioned organising efforts that didn't support my activist work. I suspected I was not alone in this.
(6/?)
In the early stages on building the Aotearoa IMC website, a decision was made to put a huge 'Publish' button in a prominent spot on the sidebar that appeared on every page. Why?
(7/?)
Activists were already awash in stuff to read, even before the net. So we figured most wouldn't come to the site for the first few times to read what others had published there. Especially since the idea of Open Publishing was new, and radical;
https://disintermedia.net.nz/indymedia-stories-2-another-anniversary/
... and they'd probably assume all the stories on the site were published by one group, pushing their own political lines. As was standard at the time.
(8/?)
But by focusing our pitch on *publishing*, we were pitching the site to other activists as a place their could their own news out to a different audience. Once they'd done that a few times, and not been censored (unless they violated the very clear editorial policy published on the site), they'd believe us that Indymedia wasn't just a front for one group, or type of activist.
While coming to the site to publish their own news, maybe they'd read some of the articles from others?
(9/9)
The hope was that the site would become a clearinghouse for news from anyone working for positive social change (basically anyone not obviously a fascist or other authoritarian), and a place for respectful open-minded debate between us. At it's best, it was exactly that.
I think a very similar approach could work as a way of promoting the fediverse and other decentralised social network tech as movement communication tools.
"This is the irony of liberal Twitter celebrating Wolf's seeming disappearance (at least until Musk welcomed her back). Since most liberals don't watch or listen to Bannon, or the other shows where she has become a regular, they thought she had evaporated as a cause for concern ..."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/?)
"... the widespread belief in her irrelevance got me wondering if this thing so often referred to as cancel culture is partly a result of the way these platforms have programmes us with their tools. It's been years since I blocked anyone on Twitter, but I mute pretty freely - as soon as I see a bad-faith attack, or notice someone whose posts are reliably putting me in a bad mood, I click 'mute'."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(2/?)
"It's satisfying and feels a little like self-determination on platforms where everything else is determined by others. But I am unsettled by the ease with which we turn off other humans. I fear there is something habit-forming about making other people disappear with a keystroke. (Just as there is surely something habit-forming in the sadistic pleasure that comes from being part of a pack that drives someone of a platform for good."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(3/?)
I've noticed that every time there's been a major scandal involving Titter, and a bunch of the exodus ends up here, they bring their algorithm-trained, misanthropic habits with them. The departure of most of these people for BlueSky is a net good for the day-to-day experience of using the fediverse. Although whether using BS helps them calm down and deprogram themselves, in the same way I've seen in those who stick around in the fediverse, is another question entirely.
(4/4)
"Johnson & Johnson, one of the major vaccine makers, not only is caught up in the opioid lawsuits but also has been ordered to pay out billions in legal settlements in recent years over alleged harm caused by several of its prescription medications and even it's ubiquitous talcum powder (found to have contained asbestos)."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
I wonder if this could be connected to the pandemic of asthma that seemed to affect every second kid when I was young?
(1/2)
"Against this backdrop, and given the lack of debate and allowable questioning of the vaccines in many progressive spaces, it's no surprise that so many went off to 'do their own research' - finding my doppelganger, and many more like her, waiting with their wild claims about vaccine shedding and mass infertility."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
Preach! I'm so glad I made the impulsive decision to buy this book when it saw a copy on a sale table at one of the local bookstores.
(2/2)
"This was another kind of exploration of doppelgangers: Roth presented the gun-toting, muscle-bound Israeli 'Jew' as a kind of collective doubling of the Old Jew, the artists and intellectuals, like Roth himself, whom many Israelis branded as soft and useless from inside their tough nationalist project. Or perhaps the New Jew was a Macabbean mirror of the chauvinist nationalists in Poland, Ukraine and Germany who had used Jews as their scapegoats for so long."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
"It seems so distant now, but there were a few months in 2020 - a good half year - when there had been a widespread belief that the pandemic might be a catalyst for a great many of the structural changes our societies had been collectively procrastinating and avoiding."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/?)
"Many of us even let ourselves dream that the emptiness of our highways, the rest the skies were receiving from planes, and all of the talk about missing nothing more than one another would actually leas to a meaningful change in how we decided to live when the pandemic finally eased."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(2/?)
"These were the weeks when so many of us shared and quoted and posted Arundhati Roy's essay 'The Pandemic is a Portal', imagining that a global calamity might take somewhere not just different but better."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(3/3)
The full version of The Pandemic is a Portal' by Arundhati Roy can be read here;
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
If you want to read it using the resources of the Internet Archive instead of those of the Financial Times (although I don't know why you would) you can also read it using the Wayback Machine;
(4/4)
"Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to 'normality', trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality."
#ArundhatiRoy, 2020
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
"These are ideas with blood-soaked histories in the Americas, reaching back to the stories European conquerors and colonists told about how the infectious diseases that ravaged Indigenous populations - already weak after settlers stole their lands and decimated their food sources - were actually God's handiwork, a divine sign that these continents were meant for white Christians."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/?)
" 'A wonderful plague' is how King James of England described pandemics in the 1620 Charter of New England. 'Almighty God, in his goodness and bounty towards us,' had sent it 'among the savages'. "
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
Projection much there James? I think it's the person *celebrating* the mass deaths of other human beings as economically convenient who's the "savage". Don't you think?
(2/2)
"Many people who are knowledgeable about alternative health and preventative medicine could, like [Dr Rupa] Marya and [Raj] Patel, have used their expertise to advocate for collective and structural responses to our collective health crises during the pandemic. That is what happened during the Great Depression in the US, when New Deal programs created millions of jobs building public swimming pools as well as hundreds of state and national parks."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/2)
"The guiding philosophy of these ambitious public works projects was that exercise and and access to nature were rights that should not be reserved for the rich. Similar programs could be launched today, with an emphasis on Black and Brown neighbourhoods that never received their share of New Deal infrastructure, or that lost it afterwards when whites revolted against integration."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(2/3)
Rather than attack nurses and teachers, experts in wellness could have joined with them and fought for kids to have more outdoor education and access to nature, and for their parents to have shorter workweeks with better pay and union protections - all of which make it easier to lead an active life, and to choose and prepare healthier food."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
Also, it's not too late. We can still build alliances around goals shared by leftist, unionist and wellness folks.
(3/3)
"In many ways, the most successful influencers in the wellness and fitness worlds - the people who make fortunes selling us idealized versions of themselves and the idea that you, too, can attain nirvana through a project of perpetual self-improvement - are a perfect fit with far-right economic libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, who also fetishize the individual as the only relevant social actor."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
This is one place Klein and I part ways.
(1/?)
I agree with her overall take here, about why it made sense for the likes of Joe Rogan and Natural News to buddy up with Alex Jones and Steven Bannon. Arguably the supplement spruikers were cosplaying having anything in much in common with the wellness/ green left in the first place.
But at the risk of splitting hairs, I take issue with 2 implicit claims folded into the bit I just quoted; the references to "nirvana" and the "far right". Let's look at each.
(2/?)
Putting aside the radical left musicians who chose it as band name, nirvana is something people try to attain by joining Buddhist groups. Since the 1990s, Consensus Buddhism in the anglophone world has been allied with the green-left. To this day, Buddhists in the Americas are still predominantly left-leaning, anti-militarist, and concerned about the environment.
Ok, this one really is splitting hairs, and I only know this due to my recent reading of #DavidChapman's descriptions.
(3/?)
More significantly, characterising "economic libertarians and anarcho-capitalists" as "far-right" is about as fair as claiming (as many do) that the Soviet bloc countries - and sometimes even the Nazis - were 'far left'. In both cases, it's a mistake that comes from reducing all political positions to a monolithic left/right continuum.
Genuine right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists are *hard* right, not far right. They oppose the far right more vigorously than some leftists.
(4/?)
How do I know? I've spent decades debating far-right economic libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. I've worked with them in single issue campaigns around things that all genuine libertarians (right or left) agree on, like drug law reform and civil liberties. As well as in building and maintaining activist infrastructure, including Indymedia, and projects to advance Free Code software and decentralised, privacy-respecting tech.
They have no more in common with the far rights than we do.
(5/?)
It was because of experiences like these, and the way they failed to fit neatly into a left/right model of political space, that I was so excited to discover the political graph at;
This analysis didn't just make sense of the huge gulfs between radical left anarchists and far left tankies (or Stalinists as we used to call them). Or between hard right libertarians and far right neo-Nazis. It was also the work of political *scientists*, not partisans.
(6/?)
It's important to keep in mind one of the key political strategies of the corporatists who took over the anglophone world in (mostly) bloodless coups in the 1980s; confusion. Bannon might deserve credit for coining the phrase 'flood the zone with shit'. But as the Lever News folks explain in lurid detail in their excellent political history podcast The Master Plan podcasts, corporatists have been flooding the zone with shit since the 1970s.
(7/?)
One of the ways they do that is by sowing confusion over the meaning of political terms, and inciting people to fight over them. Making it harder for us to articulate and recognise common concerns, and form the broader alliances we need to resist the 1% effectively.
(8/?)
When that strategy fails, and we do talk constructively across ideological lines, new things can happen.
Take the mass protests against corporate globalization in the late 1990s/ early 2000s, including activist infrastructure networks like Indymedia. The massive anti-war mobilizations after 9/11. The waves of square occupations; from the Arab Spring to M15 in Spain, Occupy in the anglophone world, Sunflower in Taiwan, and Umbrella in Hong Kong.
All blurred traditional ideological lines.
(9/?)
So to be clear, my purpose here is *not* to pick a fight with Naomi Klein (even in the unlikely event she notices minor criticism from a political nobody).
No doubt we agree far more than we disagree, when it comes to political economy. Including on the need to revitalise the "movement of movements" (to borrow a phrase Klein has used often) to fight the recently unmasked technofascism of the platform billionaires and zombie political parties (remember even NZ Labour are spruiking "AI").
(10/?)
Rather, I want to encourage everyone to think more carefully about the political language we use, and the buckets it puts people in (ourselves included). Is it language that helps us unite and resist the imposition of power? Or helps those in power to divide and rule?
(11/11)
I presumed that last quote from Doppelganger would be a rare exception, in a book I was mostly in enthusiastic agreement with. But I said that quote was where we parted ways, and it turns out we remain on quite different tracks through much of the 'Far Right Meets the Far-Out' chapter.
At one point Klein says;
"At the risk of causing more confusion by sounding like my Doppelganger ..."
But this chapter draws a low bow, again and again, and reads very much like a reverse Naomi Wolf.
(1/2)
I'm torn between getting into the nuts and bolts of the very vague criticism I just made, or getting on and finishing this chapter. For now, I'll go with the latter. Maybe I'll come back to this topic when I have time to kill (got a train ride coming up ...).
But briefly, I think some of the methodology here is uncharacteristically sloppy. Falling heavily on one side of the health politics divide, despite an attempt to frame the book as a Jon Ronson style exercise in nonpartisanship.
(2/2)
And then I finish one troubling chapter of Doppelganger, and I see the next one is on vaccines and autism. *Sigh*.
I know exactly the song it will sing. The one about how a doctor invented being "anti-vaxx" by claiming that vaccines cause autism. A song that routinely ignores the fact that opposition to vaccines, with many different motivations, has existed for as long as vaccines themselves. And that Dr Andrew Wakefield was dunking on 1 vaccine to favour another he had an ownership stake in.
Called it. Klein starts the chapter discussing her lived experience as a parent of an autistic child, which I relate to, as an AuDHD person with an autistic child and a number of neurodivergent siblings and niblings. I agree with Klein, of course, that we're born autistic. It's not caused by vaccine harm or anything else that happens during our childhoods.
But then, sure enough, Klein brings up Wakefield and the retracted Lancet study.
(1/?)
Klein mentions that Wakefield was "banned from practicing medicine in Britain in light of undisclosed conflicts of interest", but not the details;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/116736669993550595
Which I think are relevant, because they reflect badly on the medical professionals who promote vaccines, at least as much as on those who oppose them.
(2/?)
Klein then goes on to parrot a common claim that, ironically, is a good example of shifting blame for collective failures onto individuals. Which is the main topic of the previous chapter.
"Their debunked claims have contributed to to a resurgence of diseases including measles ..."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
A drop in vaccination rates *may* have contributed to this. But the evidence available only proves correlation, *not* causation.
(3/?)
It seems just as likely that these 'diseases of poverty' have resurged because of a resurgence of ... well ... poverty. Is it really so "far-out" to think that malnutritioned or chronically stressed bodies are more vulnerable to infectious diseases than well-fed ones? That people crammed into climactically inadequate and overcrowded housing - or none at all - might be more vulnerable to spreading such diseases amongst themselves?
(4/?)
Blaming a lack of vaccine uptake shifts the blame from those who revived poverty in countries that had almost eliminated it, including Aotearoa, to the victims of these economic attacks. It's not poverty that made them sick, but their own unwise decisions.
This also serves as a powerful promotion for a very profitable product made only by a cartel of under-regulated corporations. A promotion that's hard to criticise without being subject to the guilt tripping Klein leans into there.
(5/5)
#MeaCulpa, contrary to what I said here;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/116739834557259145
Naomi Klein does expose Andrew Wakefield's financial interest in a competing vaccine later in the chapter.
So she knows this, but still associates his shady behaviour with being "anti-vaxx". When his story is just as much about the lengths to which some vaccine promoters will go while attempting to line their own pockets.
There's certainly chronic misinformation here. But not all coming from the vaccination critics' side.
Klein segues from "momfluencers" spreading anti-vaccination discourse to stories of changelings in the legends of various culture, as potential evidence of the rejection and abuse of autistic children. I'm hesitant to read specific meanings into mythical narratives created by people with very different worldviews to mine. But this discussion is nuanced and well-referenced, and well worth considering.
(1/?)
From there, Klein switches to a topic where we're firmly back in agreement. Changes of policy around children with disabilities and differences in the transition from "Red Vienna" to Nazi Vienna, and the origins of autism as a diagnosis.
(2/?)
"[Hans] Asberger's claim that autistic children were pathological because they lacked Gemüt was less a medical diagnosis than a highly ideological one about what should constitute normal behavior: he was diagnosing them with, quite literally, with a deficit of fascism."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
You'd think that mean us autistics would be particular valued by anyone who wants to preserve and realize the potential of antifascist social systems like democracy. So are we?
(3/3)
"In truth, any number of identity-based divisions can be marshaled to perform this function: Jews vs. Blacks, Blacks vs. Asians, Muslims vs. Christians, "gender critical" feminists vs. transgender people, migrants vs. citizens."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/2)
"This is the playbook used by Trump and other pseudo-populist strongmen the world over: throw some minor economic concessions to the base (or at least claim to do so), unleash the dogs of race and gender-based hatreds, and preside over a rapid upward transfer of wealth, alongside an authoritarian concentration of power."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(2/2)
"Yet in the crowding of these two, twinned peoples onto this tiny sliver of territory - the wrenching intimacy of the home invasions, the ritualistic regularity of the pummeling of Gaza, the spectacle of once-stateless refugees exiling other people into the sea of statelessness - we see in hyper concentrated form the dead end of this project that dared to call itself 'civilisation'."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/?)
"Because, though it may be tempting, Israel-Palestine cannot be written off as a confounding ethnic conflict between a set of intransigent Semitic twins. It is, instead, the latest chapter in that story of the construction of the modern world, a world that is now on fire. A story in which we are all implicated, wherever we live."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(2/?)
"It began in the lead-up to the Inquisition, with the burnings, torture, and then expulsion of Muslims and Jews; continued with the bloody conquest of the Americas and the ransacking of Africa for riches and human fuel to power the new colonies; wreaked colonial havoc in Asia; and then returned to Europe for Hitler to distill all the methods forged in those ... - scientific racism, concentration camps, frontier genocide - into his Final Solution."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(3/4)
"But the story didn't end there. Because the Allies, who finally saw fit to stop Hitler, decided that they did not want to open their borders to his surviving victims, and instead offloaded their Jewish problem, along with their collective shame and guilt about the Holocaust, onto the Arab world and said: 'You take it'."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(4/4)
"Because for me, while Israel is a place, it has also always been a warning. A warning about the perils of building identity based on re-traumatization rather than confronting our collective grief; about the dangers of building a group identity around insiders and outsiders; about what happens when once vibrant debate gives way to fiercely policed speech."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
I sometimes ask myself why I spend so much time staring into the Abyss, and trying to describe it here, or share the descriptions of other, better, writers who stare into it to. Am I just upsetting myself, and the people who follow my account?
Maybe. Reading Doppelganger has certainly been upsetting at times. But I strongly suspect that whether we're brave (or foolish) enough to look, the Abyss is always there. We feel its horror, even when we don't see it.
(1/2)
I think what I'm trying to do is grieve, and help others do the same. Together, rather than alone. And maybe, in my own small way, help to build something better.
(2/2)
Klein gently leads us to the Abyss, and we stare together, in awestruck grief. Overwhelmed by the size and sheer horror of the centuries old problems we inherit. Then, as I suspected would happen, in part 4 the book turns to the question of how to live with it, and what - if anything- we might be able to do about it together.
"So many forms of doubling are ways of not looking at death/trouble. And death feels awfully close these days - as close as a fentanyl-laced pill, a heat dome, a hate crime, an intake of virally loaded breath. Much closer for some than for others, as usual - but not far enough, I suspect, for anyone's comfort."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/?)
"So how do we stop averting our gaze? How do we face our second bodies and our mortal bodies in a sustained way, rather than throwing up partitions, performances, and projections to hide from them? What would it take to stop running? To know - really know - what we already know?"
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
Again this seems to converge with my recent reading of #DavidChapman. Which I think is right that - whether or not we do it via Buddhism - this is not something we can do alone.
(2/2)
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Intriguingly, Klein seems to share my suspicion that these 2 threads are somehow connected;
"Whether we are loving ourselves too much or loathing ourselves too much - or, more likely, doing both - we're still at the centre of every story. We're still blotting out the sun."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(1/?)
"All of which is why, over the course of this now concluding journey, I have come to embrace the Naomi confusion as an unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego. I could never quite get the hang of nonattachment before this; but I think, thanks to her, I have."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(2/?)
#DavidChapman would likely quibble with the wording. But, I suspect, would still endorse the underlying insight; the self - selves - are not all we have, nor all that really matters.
@sj_zero
> you gotta get on an instance that lets you post longer
So people keep saying. I have a number of places I can post longer texts. Yet I seem to post most of my thinking-out-loud and obsessive quoting here. There must be a reason for that.
Maybe 500 character chunks is all my frazzled and fragmented mind can hold right now?
Klein anticipates exactly such quibbling, and goes on;
"This, I concede, is far too neat an ending to this story. If performing and partitioning and projecting are all techniques of avoiding the Shadow Lands, then neither [*Sutrayana*] Buddhist detachment nor Freudian integration of the unconscious is enough to help us confront that which we have been avoiding."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
(3/3)
"'We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people', says the civil rights scholar john. a powell. That is the very opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
This! A billion times this!
Also, this!
"This kind of universalism is hard. There are so many perfectly good reasons for people on the broadly defined left to be fed up, angry, and disappointed with one another, and to latch onto those disappointments to rationalize splintering into smaller and smaller groups. But when power and wealth and weaponry and information technology are concentrated in so few hands ... splintering is tantamount to surrender."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
"Up against oligarchy, all we have is the power latent in our capacity to unite. Race, gender, sexual orientation, class and nationality shape our distinct needs, experiences, and historical debts. We must hold onto those realities *and* build on a shared interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth, while constructing new structures that are infinitely more fair, and more fun."
#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023
That final word is super important. Piousness will not help us here.
(2/3)
I can't think of a better argument for growing the fediverse through open-hearted solidarity, not hype and salesmanship. Keeping defederation and Blocking to the absolute minimum necessary to keep it useful and *fun* for the people participating in it.
Not because I expect the fediverse itself to change the world (my early 2000s techno-utopianism has proved unjustified). But because it's a way to practice the habits we need, to transform our atomised, struggling world.
(3/3)
