Tech Won't Save Us - How the Mirror World Distorts Our Reality w/ Naomi Klein

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Naomi Klein to discuss the problems with personal branding pushed social media, how the left’s insufficient response to the pandemic created an opening for the right, and the fight over the roots of Western society that will shape our future. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and a columnist with The Guardian. She is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her newest book is Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.  The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.  Also mentioned in this episode:Read excerpts of Doppelganger in The Guardian and Vanity Fair.Naomi mentions Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.Support the show

we really are talking about what happens when the logics of capitalism enter into our psyches, our souls, our relationships with one another. It's painful. It's very, very painful. But I think we should use the right words for it. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. Welcome to 2024 and a new year in Tech Won't Save Us. My first guest of the year is Naomi Klein. She is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author whose most recent book is Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World. She's also a columnist at The Guardian, the founding co-director of the UBC Center for Climate Justice, and a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia. Naomi Klein is someone whose work has been very influential to me over the years. So it was a real privilege to have her on the show to discuss

her new book and to dig into these very important topics. It'll be no surprise for you to hear that there seems to be a wave of conspiratorial thinking and a significant shift to the far right happening in our societies that is incredibly concerning and that we need to figure out kind of why this is happening and how to confront it. In this book, Naomi discusses, you know, her kind of adventure into what she calls the mirror world, where she is kind of paying attention to these narratives and how people like Steve Bannon or Naomi Wolf, her doppelganger, take critiques that the left used to make, or, you know, in some cases still makes, but reframes them in such a way that it works for

their ends and their goals and their kind of political project, right? To show people that they recognize that people aren't working in the system as it exists, but to give people answers that lead them down this path where the structural problems are not actually being addressed, but that they feel like they are kind of fighting back against the system that is actually just solidifying its power in the process. In this interview, we talk about the role of technology and social media platforms in particular, but we also talk about kind of bigger political questions that we're facing in this moment and, you know, what avenues for hope might exist in the face of the crises that we face and political systems that

just do not seem to be up to the task of addressing them, especially at a moment, as Naomi brings up, that we're seeing many Western governments allied with an Israeli government that is engaging in a genocidal campaign in Gaza, and that can't be denied. So it's a sobering conversation, but it's also a very important one that gets to issues that are incredibly deep and incredibly resonant for the types of things that we talk about on this show and the types of broader issues that we're facing out in the world. And so I was really pleased to have Naomi on the show, and I think that you're really going to enjoy this interview. So if you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform

of your choice, and make sure to share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, so we can keep having these in-depth conversations, you can join supporters like Jenny from Toronto, David from the Bay Area, and Jamila in London, UK, by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much, and enjoy this week's conversation. Naomi, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. UK by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Naomi, welcome to tech won't save us.

Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to speak with you. I have been following your work for a long time. I think one of my early kind of inspirations for kind of getting into the work that I do, which is probably something you hear a lot, but you know, I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show and I'm excited to dig into, you know, your most recent book with you. And so, you know, I wanted to start by just asking more of a general question, right? I'm sure there are many different topics that you are interested in or things that you have considered writing a book on. Why did you decide to delve into the mirror world, you know, this kind of alternate world of conspiracism to inspire this book?

Well, I think the appeal was precisely that it let me write about a lot of things. My friend Keo McClure, who's a wonderful novelist and memoirist and teaches creative writing, when I told her about my idea of using my doppelganger to write about, you know, at the time I was thinking about writing about our digital avatars, our digital doubles, the way we create doppelgangers of ourselves through personal branding, and also getting into the sort of right-wing conspiracy world that Naomi Wolf, my doppelganger, had gotten involved in. Keo said, you know, well, it's a narrow aperture through which to look at the world. And that's really helpful, right? Because as a writer, things can get unwieldy very quickly. And I found during the pandemic that I wanted to

understand this strange phenomenon of like our confusion about who and what we could trust online because we didn't know whether our own digital doubles were real or other people's digital doubles were real. Also the phenomenon of more and more people who were known as kind of prominent leftists or liberals flipping over to the right. And then I realized it was a really great way of talking about fascism and that a lot of novelists and filmmakers had used the figure of the double, the doppelganger to reckon with the menace of the idea that whole societies have evil twins that we can flip into. And friends of mine in India and Italy were going, it's happened. We've turned into our evil

twins. The crowd is now the mob. So yeah, I realized that it was this really kind of generous tool that would let me look through a narrow aperture at subjects that were so large that without that narrow aperture, I would just get lost. Timothy Morton's phrase, hyper-object comes to mind. It was a way to tame a lot of hyper-objects that were just too big, and I could shrink them down to the size of a double. I love that. And I think it will resonate with a lot of listeners who've also been kind of wondering what is going on out there in the world as we see so much of this shift to the right, you know, people who they might have once respected kind of, or at least thought had

some good opinions and good views on things kind of moving over to the right and seeming or just, you know, adopting these conspiracy theories and seemingly out of nowhere, right? You did mention Naomi Wolf there. I was surprised in the book to know how long the doppelganger effect or you getting mistaken for her had been going on back to the Occupy days, I believe you describe. I have to ask, has Naomi Wolf responded to the book at all? Have you heard anything from her? I haven't heard anything directly, but she has written quite a lot. She claims not to have read the book, but she has written much about me and Avi, my partner, who she claims works for Big

Pharma, which is hilarious because Avi went on a speaking tour with the Council of Canadians. Your Canadian listeners will know about who they are, they're, you know, lovely grassroots lefty organization that has been fighting for pharmacare, which means like we have universal, I know you have a lot of non Canadian listeners. So we have a universal public health care in Canada, but drugs are not covered. So Canadians still still have to pay for our prescription medications unless we have a private healthcare plan. And one of the ways that some of us talked about how to pull people back from conspiracy land, right? And I say in the book, one of the things that happens

on the right when conspiracy land is they get the facts wrong, but the feelings, right? So people really are angry at the incredible wealth consolidation. They have a strong sense that things are, that this whole system is rigged against them. They have a right to be angry at big pharma and big tech, as you well know, Paris. And so they take the true parts, the true feelings, and then they pivot it into a kind of a fantasy world. And then suddenly the vaccines are, you know, chipping us and tracking us and so on. And so one of the things that Avi and I talked a lot about is like, okay, well, how do you bring people back? Right. And one of the ways that you do that is you offer like a real solution to the feeling instead of this sort of simulation

of a response, right? Of like, yeah, we're going to like have a great storm where we unveil, you know, the evildoers and throw them all in Guantanamo, which is the story of QAnon. But okay, you want to stick it to big pharma? You know, how about if we include pharmaceuticals under a national healthcare plan? They really don't like that. And so somehow she has taken that to claim that Avi is like working for Pfizer, which is hysterical. Very, very funny. Because of course, it is the very last thing that pharmaceutical companies want is for prescription drugs to be included in national healthcare plans. Because then of course their prices go down. Yeah. Yeah. They're not sending their reps around to, uh, to advocate for lower drug prices to include it in a public system. Right.

I guess the short answer to that long, to that long answer, the short version of that long answer is that we have been fully folded into conspiracy land. Yeah. No, everyone's trying to deal with it these days. And it just pops up absolutely everywhere, even places where you don't expect it. You know, before we dig into some of the broader themes of the book, I also wanted to talk about the fact that there does seem to be a deep engagement with your past work in this book as well. You know, No Logo and Shock Doctor in particular seem to come up, you know, many times throughout it. I wonder if that was kind of a conscious effort on your part to want to go back and kind of look at how

these ideas developed, or did it just kind of come naturally as you were kind of digging into this world and then realize that there were so many connections back to things that you'd been writing about and researching in the past? Definitely the connection with no logo and shock doctrine. I think this, you know. I play with the shock doctrine at the start of the book where I have been writing about states of shock and what it does to our brains for 20 years now, more actually, really since September 11th. Realizing in the early days of COVID that this was a very different kind of shock for me because I was in it in a way that I had always had some kind of reportorial distance, right?

So I wrote about Hurricane Katrina. I went there when the city was still flooded with my notebook, but it was not my shock. I had that sort of privilege of distance of like, okay, I see what's happening here, people's misery and the fact that they are having to focus on where they're going to get their next meal and where they're going to sleep is being exploited to get rid of public housing, get rid of public schools, open up charter schools. It was not my shock. It was not my school. It was not my home. And though I still had a huge amount of privilege during the COVID, you know, lockdown months, I was still, you know, trying to get my kid to learn on Zoom and trying to, to hold it together in the way that, that, that all of us were. And, and so I thought there was something

interesting about trying to write about shock from the inside, like from the eye of the storm, as opposed to from the outside, and that you would have to, by nature, do it in a sort of funnier, more confessional way. And I also just wanted to have more fun with the writing itself. You know, I was sort of feeling a little bit bored by the conventions of traditional nonfiction. And I was working with a writing teacher and sort of playing with form. And I thought, well, this would be funny, like to like write from inside the shock and to try to capture the feeling of disorientation as opposed to just describe it. So I always knew I was going to deal with that. But I also had been looking for a way to go back to some of the themes of No Logo, which I wrote in the 90s. It came out just on the cusp of the

new millennium. Some people say it came out just on the cusp of the new millennium. Some, some people say it came out in 1999. It actually came out in January, 2000, but it's wrong on the internet. So I've given up correcting people. And, um, you know, in that, in that book, it's, it's mainly about corporate brands and what it, and how that was remaking the world of labor outsourcing marketing. But we were just starting to hear this idea that we should all become brands. And I quote management consultants like Tom Peter saying that in the future, we're all going to be brand you, the brand called you, and so on. Now, this was a kind of a joke in the book because it seemed so silly to our 1990s

brains that individuals who are not celebrities could become brands and market ourselves. How would we possibly do that? Who would care? How would they know? Were we going to put up posters? Because there was no social media. There were no iPhones. So the era of personal branding had been of great interest to me and how that intersected with social media, how it was changing our relationships with our friends, our family members, how we were all becoming kind of brand extensions, how it was changing social movements, how social movements were increasingly acting like brands, being very proprietary about slogans and things like that.

And so I started to teach a course about this. And I had taught a course for three years at Rutgers called The Corporate Self with a small group of undergrads exploring the ways in which this was reshaping the self and what it does to identity when you're trained from a very early age to think about how others are going to consume you and how you have to do a kind of a time travel, right? Like as a teen to think about, well, how will a future employer see this post that I'm putting online? And so, you know, they taught me a huge amount, these undergrads in terms of what Finstas were and Instagram husbands and things like that. Like they really got me up to speed. Shoshana Zuboff's book I read in galleys and assigned to them. So this is all like 2018, 2019. And when I ended up having a personal

branding crisis in the form of Naomi Wolf going off the deep end during COVID and everyone thinking it was me, I realized I had a very kind of funny literary gift because like in the same way that I could grapple with the shock doctrine from inside the shock, I realized I could grapple with personal branding from inside a personal branding crisis. That is awfully ironic considering that I wrote this sort of anti-brand manifesto in the nineties. So all of this just delighted me, Paris, is all I can say. So yeah, it was always an attempt to go back to that material, but in a different register, you know, like with the sort of benefit of time, you know, and distance and be able to have more of a sense of humor about the fact that, yeah,

I wrote an anti-brand manifesto in my twenties and then became a brand myself. And, you know, all these companies launched no logo products and I ferociously denied that I ever was a brand, even as I obviously was one. And so, yeah, the book became a way to just sort of play with all that a bit. Yeah. I love that because, you know, you absolutely feel those pressures today. It almost feels like regardless of kind of the situation that you occupy, right? Like you don't really need to be some kind of big public facing figure to still be considering how you present yourself online, you know, how people see you think about, you know, the way that even people just curate their Instagram profiles to try to, or the photos

that they post on Facebook or whatever, to try to show that, you know, they are a particular person or they experienced their life in a particular way and how then seeing others kind of, you know, false versions of themselves that they put out in this way can shape how others see them, can shape how people feel about themselves because they don't feel that they can live up to it. It even shapes how you relate to seismic historic events, because you don't necessarily have the freedom to just have a reaction to a horror that is not about you at all, except in the sense of maybe how you might show up, but because you have to do this sort of mental flip of like, well, what am I going to say about this? Even if, even if you're an undergraduate with, you know, 500 followers or whatever it is, you're still having to have an almost instant reaction of

what will I post about this? Not so that I express it, but so that people will think the right thing about me. So this thing that is not at all about you suddenly becomes about you very, very, very, very quickly. And that is really troubling in terms of what that means about movement building and the way something that should be collective is individualized on a mass scale, right? Because we shouldn't be experiencing these events as being about ourselves and how people see us. They should be moments of unselfing that, you know, to quote Iris Murdoch, they should be moments where we, as much as possible, let go of ourselves and show up for one another in need. Right. And so God, social media has

really done something to us. And I wanted to, I think there's a way that you can make people feel really attacked and judged when you write about this from the outside. That's why I wanted to write about it from the inside, because we're all in this. I don't want to shake my fingers at anyone and pretend to be above it. I want to admit that even me, who like wrote no logo really was worried about my personal brand when all these people thought that I was on Fox, you know, talking about vaccines, bringing a Chinese style social credit system to the United States. So, you know, I think you have to have skin in the game for people to believe that you're not just trying to put yourself above it and

perform some virtuous version of yourself, which is what we're all accusing each other of doing all the time. Totally. And, you know, I feel like one of the risks, and you talk about this in the book, that it really brings up is, you know, obviously we live in this culture that is highly individualized already. You know, that's kind of, I think, one of the expectations that capitalism has on us, because, you know, it expects that of us not to have that solidarity, but to think of the self and how we move, you know, our kind of working together on something, the idea of solidarity just becomes so much more difficult to imagine or to put together or to think of how to relate Bernie campaign to lockdown without missing a beat. I mean, there was no distance. I remember the very last thing that I did in the real world was go on Democracy Now on March 11th. I remember because Amy gave everybody in the studio flowers for coming to work that day, despite the fact that we were in a global pandemic. It was very funny. And that was the last day that Democracy Now was in person.

Similarly, one of the last things I did out in the real world was knock doors in New Hampshire for Bernie. Well, exactly. I'm surprised that we didn't see each other there. Yeah. But when I was on DN spinning that Bernie could still win, you know, that's what I was doing. And it was pretty clear that wasn't going to happen by March 11th, but we were still, we were still hanging on. And then, you know, I, I'm sure you remember like that moment where you're in your, you know, you're in your home and there's no going out and we're trying to figure this, what this wild thing is, you know, and whether we have enough toilet paper and whether we have to wipe down our

groceries and we're watching the entire party coalesce around Biden. And the Bernie campaign was not perfect. I want to be very clear about that. But there was something really beautiful about the fact that it went to the heart of what we're talking about with the slogan of not meet us. And so it created a container for all of us atomized individual brands to unself and show up for each other, to fight for people we don't know. And it gave a language. And I wrote a piece at one point during the campaign about the slogan and the way the slogan kind of took on different meanings as time went on. You know, I think the first time I heard not me, us, I thought that was just Bernie

saying, it's not me, it's us. But then when you're on the campaign trail, and I'm sure you experienced this in New Hampshire, when you're talking to people, the not me is the not me, the person carrying their medical debt, carrying their student debt, carrying the sort of individual shame of the burdens of trying to survive in this brutal system and the fact that I'm failing at it is my personal failing. And then that flipping to, no, there could be an us. There could be an us that is universal healthcare. There could be an us that is debt cancellation. There could be this collective response. And then we were just kind of summarily dropped into a sea of me, right? Of just, okay, we're on our own. There's no way to sort of physically regroup. I don't know,

maybe there was like a Zoom call, but I didn't even think I attended it. And so, and I just remember suddenly everybody just went off into their podcasts and sub stacks and, you know, and it's like, well, if there isn't going to be an us, there's damn well going to be a me. And plus I'm going to spend a lot of time attacking you. Hey, I started my podcast April of 2020. Right. So yeah. Your podcast is awesome. And your podcast is about an us. Thank you. But you know, I, I just think there

should be a way to be a little easier on each other. These are structural failures. And I think one of the lessons of the Bernie campaign is a presidential campaign is not the right container for a transformational political project like that, because it has an end date, you know, and whether that end date is actually, you know, getting into office or, you know, not or the campaign ending in defeat, either way, it's not going to really be able to hold the promise of a mass social movement. But we do need those movements. So. Absolutely. And I think talking about that moment where, you know, there's all of this hope kind of before the pandemic is happening, or as kind of the news is out there and we're slowly hearing about it. And then finally kind of the lockdown comes down

and we really feel the effects of it. It, you know, it feels like that moment was a real kind of catalyst for a lot of the things that you're talking about in the book or really kind of gave them a point to, to really take off. And, you know, early in the book, when I was reading it, I was like, if I was watching this much kind of right wing conspiratorial media, I don't even know if I'd be able to like admit it, you know, in the way like you talked about the book has kind of a confessional nature to it as well. But what was it like digging into this mirror world in this moment? What was the appeal you think that so many people had to these kind of alternate framings of our reality in that moment? So I did listen to a lot of in particular Bannon, because Wolf was on Bannon's show all

the time. And he's an interesting figure. I have been interested in him for a long time, not that long, but certainly since the Trump campaign. As somebody who was involved in the Bernie campaign, we were always aware that what Bannon was doing was a kind of a doppelganger of what we were trying to do, right? And you'd meet these voters who were like choosing between Bernie and Trump, right? Because they were mad. They were mad at the system and there was no way they were going to vote for somebody who they perceived as being a representative of that system, like Biden or Hillary. And so, you know, Bannon's political project and the way he has, and I think, unfortunately, deserves a fair bit of credit for changing the nature of the Republican Party to take parts of the left, you know, parts that had been abandoned, you know, that were not really being spoken to and mixing them with this very nefarious, xenophobic, racist project. He did that with free trade in 2016.

And so that was, you know, interested me because that was sort of, that was the issue that I came into politics with, you know, the ultra globalization movement was a movement taking on these, these trade deals, you know, outside the World Trade Organization and the free trade area of the Americas. Were you there? Where were you? Where were you like 12? I would have been a bit too young for that one. Yeah.

But so, you know, I had been part of these mass mobilizations that were taking on those trade deals from the left, right? And that were, you know, trying to get at the structures that were causing this gulf of inequality to widen. They weren't looking for a few individual scapegoats. It wasn't just about Bill Gates. It was a very wonky movement. We would have these huge teach-ins where we would read trade deals, have them read to us. I was just actually talking about this with Avi that we could use another wave of teachings. You know, these deals advanced because they were so arcane. They were kind of like what Zuboff and others write about, about the terms of service agreements, right? Where it's like, you know, no one's going to read it. So you just press accept, you know,

like, like NAFTA was like a phone book and it was just assumed that it was too complicated for regular people to be involved. So the ultra-globalization movement was really, it was, there was a ton of popular education. It was just like regular people reading these agreements, finding out what was in them and what it meant to privatizing water and education and, you know, Monsanto's hold on agribusiness and so on. So watching Bannon take that issue in 2016 that had been an issue of the left that the Democrats had promised in campaign after campaign to reopen the trade deals, you know, not to pass another one, and then had broken those promises, you know, I had sort of watched with horror as he had taken that issue, handed it to Trump, mixed it with anti-immigrant racism and the rest of the nefarious agenda. And so I was kind of horrified to watch him do that during the pandemic with all kinds of other issues. Do you know he has a transhumanism correspondent?

Just from reading the, just from reading your book, yeah. So I sort of picture him just picking up all of these issues that sort of are the traditional terrain of the left. But, you know, when the left is busy splintering and attacking itself. Which the left is good at, you know? Yeah. And, and, you know, when the left is weak and the center is the corporatist center that we have, that is just, you know, optimal conditions for somebody like Bannon. So, so yeah, my moments of horror in listening to him were when he would say things that I recognized from, you know, being traditionally issues that the left would talk about, but I'd stop talking about. So for instance, you know, there would be a montage that he would, that he would play,

which was just intros and outros to big cable news shows on CNN and MSNBC that said, brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Moderna. And the reason it chilled me was not because I thought, oh my God, I have been injected with a bioweapon, which was really the point of segments. It was that, oh, I remembered when we used to really talk about media consolidation and make arguments for why we needed a nonprofit media ecosystem. And so, yeah, I think he's really, really expert. He studies the left. He's watching us. The image that I use in the book is the one way mirror where we tend to ignore what's happening there. You know, you're like, I wouldn't admit it if I listened to him. And I felt quite a

bit of shame, like when I would quote something like that, if I tried to say that to one of my lefty friends, they would mainly just be like, why were you listening to him? They wouldn't engage with what I was saying. They would just be like, why, why did you do that? You know, like I did it so you don't have to, but what I really feel is we have to pay attention to him because he's paying attention to us and he's paying attention to what issues are being neglected and also who is being neglected and how. So when people get sort of shamed and mocked, um, de-platformed, you know, he's always there with open arms. And that's the other thing that I was really struck by just culturally by listening to his show is the way he performs.

He creates a kind of a theater of inclusion and kindness, which is kind of funny if you know Bannon. And, you know, the idea that he could be kind, you know, because he's we usually see clips of him threatening to put people's heads on pikes, you know? I mean, he's a very angry guy, but he has this other side, which you come to recognize if you're more of a longitudinal listener, which is very kind of caring to his listeners, you know? And that's his whole pitch to them is that the whole world has been mean to them. Trump does this too, right? You are the discarded, you are the deplorables. They're still dining out on Hillary Clinton, calling them the deplorables. He's collecting all of the people that have been ejected, discarded, insulted, and saying, you know, I won't do that to you. Plus, you know, subscribe to my this, that, buy these ready-made

meal kits for the apocalypse and invest in precious metals or whatever. Well, why do you think someone like Bannon and the type of narrative he weaves has an easier time, I guess, kind of getting someone to come to his side or to listen to what he's saying than, say, a left-wing argument? Because as you say, a lot of the things that he's saying are kind of versions of critiques that people on the left have been making for a while, but divorced of kind of the structural nature or the kind of criticisms of capitalism that are in there, but are kind of weaved in a whole different way to target a different group or, you know, get them to buy into a very different kind of political program.

I don't think it is that it's easier. I think he's filling a vacuum. I think he goes into silences. In the book, I talk about this mirror world relationship that we on the sort of left or the center have with quote unquote them. So when an issue becomes an issue on the right, it then becomes kind of untouchable for everybody else. So in the early months of the pandemic, when it was clear that there was this big push for a vaccine, there was a lot of talk about whether or not the vaccines should be patented. I'm sure you remember this, and I think you've done shows about it, right? But if we're honest, that was not a major rallying cry for leftists during the pandemic. You know, maybe we tweeted about it. There were a few NGOs that really made it their issue, but there was not a mass movement.

When I saw the trucker convoy shut down Ottawa, that was my first thought. Why didn't we do this? Like, why didn't we shut down Ottawa? In the sense that this was a mass movement of the kind that I've been involved in. I'm not saying that we should have brought 18 wheelers and harassed residents, but what they were doing was disrupting business as usual, kind of on the model of a general strike, which is why I thought it was really dangerous to hear leftists talk about how it was okay to use emergency measures under the argument that they were disrupting the economy. What else is a strike? What else is a blockade?

You know, we don't, I don't believe that. I don't believe that that should be a pretext for seizing people's bank accounts and things like that. So that was dangerous precedent, but more to the point, it underlined the fact that there weren't mass mobilizations about the extreme injustices and inequalities of the pandemic. There was a racial justice uprising that I think absolutely was connected to the fact that there were such huge racially coded differences in who bore the risks. I mean, the catalyst was obviously police murder of Black people, But a lot of people have

made the argument that the backdrop of that was the fact that this was, as Kangyamata Taylor said, a Black plague in its early months. And that is because of who the quote-unquote essential workers were, and who had the space to socially distance and so on where they they lived and who had preexisting conditions that made COVID more deadly and how that connects with economic injustice and environmental racism and so on. But, you know, if we look at the vaccine apartheid and the fact that we were lining up to get third and fourth shots before much of the world had gotten one. If we think about the ways that this could have been a moment demanding, you know, so many of the kind of emergency temporary measures to become permanent, whether it was eviction moratoria or, you know, a guaranteed income,

livable income, you know, there, there were a lot of things that we could have mobilized around and didn't mobilize. And instead, a lot of the discourse on the left became very kind of obedient. The right was like anti-lockdown, anti-shots. And we were like, get your shot, play by the rules. And we were very ruly. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't have been pro-vaccine and that was an important part of public health, but I think we could have been so much more ambitious. I think we should have been demanding... One of the things I did in the first year of the pandemic is do some work for The Intercept. I did some podcasting for Intercepted. the precedents from the Great Depression, where you had the ambition of something like the Civilian Conservation Corps, hiring millions of young people to plant trees. Why couldn't we have

had a program like that, that could have gotten young people out of their homes, into communities with each other, doing meaningful work, or different parts of New Deal jobs programs that could have been addressing the fact that part of the reason why COVID was spreading so much in the schools is because we have these huge overcrowded classrooms. Why weren't we fighting to hire more teachers, smaller classrooms, more outdoor education, like a vision of a different world, right? Something that brought together Black Lives Matter, the Green New Deal, indigenous rights, like the Black, Red, and Green New Deal, as some were calling it. So we didn't do that. There were some position papers and there were some things that happened, but there was not a mass movement. So I don't believe that it's that these ideas spread better

on the right than the left. I don't think we competed in that realm. I think we went silent. And I think the right moves into left silences and divisions. And every victory of the fascist right is always a story of defeat and fragmentation of the anti-fascist left. And where you see that, that the potential is, first of all, what we were talking about earlier about the Bernie campaign is that when Bernie was telling that story, tons of people wanted to hear it, right? We weren't able to seal the deal, but I think we got a kind of proof of concept that, you know, when you are offering people, you know, a vision of solidarity and structural change that gets at some of these root drivers, it is an alternative

to the right fascist project. And even something like the UAW strike is another one, right? And, you know, seeing Sean Fain out there in the media in his Eat the Rich t-shirt, you know, saying like record profits means record contracts. That to me is how you fight conspiracy culture on the and it's just like vote for Joe Biden, you know, get your shot or whatever it is, there's going to be a lot of energy for those Steve Bannons of the world to tap into. But I don't think it's that they've got a better pitch. You know, I think their pitch is worse. All they really have to offer is sadism, which is something, you know, as China Mievo will remind us, it's not nothing. And, you know, I think kind of picking up on that, it's interesting to hear you describe

it that way, because I guess, you know, in a sense, they were acting in a void, you know, after the kind of defeat of the Bernie campaign, there was not much else to rally around in terms of, you know, there were not many alternatives being offered. So you had the right being able to take full advantage of this moment. I want to pivot a little bit and maybe you kind of already sort of got to the answer to this question, but you were talking about tech and, you know, when it comes to this kind of radical right, this mirror world, a lot of it does take place online through social media, through these various platforms. And I wonder how you think that technology and social media relates to the popularity and kind of the proliferation of these ideas, because I feel like there are kind of

two different schools of thought here, where on one hand, it's kind of, you know, the evil tech platforms who are driven to maximize their profits, pushing us down these rabbit holes, because it increases engagement and kind of radicalizing the public as a result. And then on the other side, I feel like there's an argument where it's more that, sure, you know, the tech plays a role in this, but it's one of a number of factors. And, you know, what explains it more, I guess, is just the fact that a lot of people are having a really hard time, the material factors are kind of working to make people, you know, seek out alternatives. And this is one of the things that they're finding most

prominently. So I guess, where do you kind of fall on the question of the role that tech plays in all this? I think it's pretty important. This business model, this privatization of discourse and interpersonal relationships and the spaces where movements organized all happening on these corporate platforms, to me, is just part of a story of capitalist enclosure. Like it's just the latest phase of it. And of course it has a tremendous effect on our interpersonal relationships because they are enclosed, but the power of it is an interplay between those incentives and, and the other forces that we're talking about. The fact that we, that we're looking for ways to make sense of extreme inequality and,

and, and increasing precarity and insecurity. So we're, so we're drawn to, to somebody who's claims to have unlocked it or claims to have a plan. Right. I mean, that's the other thing that the right has is a sort of a simple story of justice, right?

I mean, I joked about the QAnon great storm, but at least they have a vision for justice. Like what's our vision for dealing with rampant impunity and criminality among our elites? I think we should have a plan, you know? But the other piece of it that I feel is under discussed is the commodification of the self on these platforms, the interplay between the idea of the branded self, the idea that that is all we have in these roiling capital Cs, and those incentive structures. I often feel like that piece is missing, right?

So we're just talk about the incentives a lot that are built into the platform and what the algorithms are encouraging us to do, but not enough about what we need from them, right? And why we need it. So yeah, I mean, I don't think it's the tech that matters. I think it's the business model that matters, including the business of the self, the business of the self meeting the business of a town, quote unquote, town square that is actually a corporatized space. So really we're talking about the final frontier of privatization.

And this is what I try to make visible with my students or what I tried to make visible when I was teaching that corporate self class, because when you are swimming in it, you don't realize how relatively new it is. I have a little passage in the book about thinking about my pre-internet childhood and teendom and just not realizing how lucky and good we had it that we left no trails behind, like no digital trails, that nobody knew what we thought or cared about our tastes. And they left no record, except for maybe some old pictures in a drawer or scribbles in a journal. And the migration of so much of life, not just into digital form, but privatized form. Right. And I think that we don't spend enough time thinking about what it means to privatize

so much of interpersonal life. So I don't see that as primarily a tech question. I see that as a capitalism question. And that that is, you know, when we're talking about how we're behaving with each other and just the kind of culture that we use the shorthand of like how toxic Twitter is, we really are talking about what happens when the logics of capitalism enter into our psyches, our souls, our relationships with one another. It's painful. It's very, very painful, but I think we should use the right words for it. Absolutely. No, I completely agree. And it's interesting. You talk about how, you know, now we all kind of leave these records. A few years ago, I kind of went back to try to see if I could like clean up some of that kind of, you know, delete some old accounts and things

like that, that I used when I was a teenager and just found that it was so, you know, if the websites were still up, some of them were gone, but it was hard to even do that because then their usernames you need to remember and passwords. And maybe you don't have the email address that you use to set it up if you forgot the password. So it just kind of sits there. Like you don't have the ability to even do that if you want to. It's weird. That is like a doppelganger thing. Like that there is a you that exists outside of your control, right? I mean, that's one of the things, that's one of the doppelgangers I wanted to get at. It's more like a golem, right? It's a digital golem of you because it's like, there's the you that you curate and you control and you get the affect just right, right? And the tone just right. But then there's the you that is tech companies have that you have lost control over.

That is sort of a lumbering around the internet somewhere out of your control. That's the ultimate Frankenstein. And so this is where doppelgangers once again are so sort of useful. Like you realize that artists have played with them through the ages to try to get at these tricky subjects of how we lose control over ourselves even well before they could have ever imagined that you couldn't, you know, go find your old Tumblr accounts. It's interesting too, like, you know, you occasionally see people who can dig into like the advertising profiles that the companies have on them. And like some things are super

accurate and there's other places where it's like, how do they think that this describes me like these terms or whatever that they have? Right. So it's this version of the self that exists in the servers of the tech companies. I know. And it's, I was actually just having that experience yesterday on YouTube where it's like, I feel like the algorithm has gotten more sensitive. So I'm just like, I just wanted to watch that one video. I don't want to only see videos exactly like that for the rest of my life. You know, it had something to do with like, I, you know, I, I'm a researcher, so like, I have to see what the other side is doing, but it's like, okay, there are limits, you know? Totally. Don't bombard me with it now because I watched one. I still care about cooking. You know, I wonder, because you were talking about Bannon and his kind of thoughts on technology and,

you know, in this kind of conspiratorial right or whatever we want to call it, you know, during the pandemic, and I'm sure that this continues now, tech was one of kind of the central things that they were talking about, whether it's vaccine passports or technology used for surveillance. How did you see their understanding of technology? And I guess, how did you see that kind of differing from critiques that are kind of offered on the left? You know, is it kind of, you know, obviously you talk about a mirror world, like how does

it distort those critiques for something that works for them? That was the moment when I decided that this was worth writing something longer form about. Just to back up a bit about my doppelganger experience. So during the pandemic, I would really have this experience where I found myself increasingly unable to say much of anything, like just felt futile. I didn't want to compete in the attention economy. Things were going off the rails. I didn't see how to get them back on. But Wolf was just really on a tear

and was kind of riding the digital magic carpet ride. She had been on the forefront of a few claims. One was that mask wearing was leading children to lose the ability to smile. That got a lot of traction. And then another had to do with vaccine shedding. And, you know, there was a study that was done by NPR and a data analyst firm that was trying to get at why people believed that unvaccinated people could have vaccine particles shed on them by people who were vaccinated and that could interfere with their fertility. And they made a data map and found that

sort of ground zero of this piece of misinformation was Naomi Wolf, or if you're not reading too closely, Naomi Klein. But where she really kind of like hit the jackpot of the attention economy was when she was having to do with vaccine passports. She made this video that said, at this point, she was getting deplatformed on and off, but she got it on YouTube. It went viral. And it was, I think the headline was vaccine passports equals slavery forever. And in this video, she makes the argument that vaccine passports were a way of bringing the Chinese Communist Party social credit system to the United States.

And that if you had this app on your phone, the government was going to know not only everywhere you went, but who you were with and what you were talking about, even in your own living room. So basically, she thought they were a microphone. And this got a lot of attention on the right. And so that's when she first went on Tucker Carlson, I think. And that's when things started to get really crazy for me because everybody was kind of freaked out about that. And then she got Bannon's attention and he had her on, oh my God, dozens of times to talk. Because that's an obsession of his show,

is the Chinese Communist Party. And that's his theme. His theme song is like, let's take down the CCP. It's a whole thing. And so they really bonded over this claim that it was a Chinese plot, right? They really settled in on it. Because originally they were like, is the virus a bioweapon? No, it's not the virus. It's the apps. It's the apps.

And so they really landed on that. They went to town. Now, the response from liberal Twitter to all of these claims about the apps putting us under surveillance was, wait till you hear about cell phones. That was exactly what I was thinking as you were describing, you know, yeah. I think I retweeted that. It's possible that I retweeted that. I know I laughed when I saw that and I felt very smug, you know, because this is what

we know. This is what you have been covering for years, this is what we know. This is what you, you have been covering for years. This is what my, what we studied in our class. It's like, you know, there's a New York times piece, like your cell phone knows what you did last night. It isn't afraid to tell. And it was all about, you know, sharing, you know, location tracking data, that sort of world weary, knowing retort, wait till they hear about cell phones, implies that we are okay with it, right? Right.

The thing about, but I'm not okay with it, right? But the thing about what she was doing with Bannon and Carlson is they were telling a story that projected all of our collective surveillance fears onto this one app, which is great because it means that if you get rid of the app, if you don't get the app, then you don't have to worry about surveillance. And that's another example of them taking an issue that is traditionally or should be an issue of the left, high-tech surveillance, privatizing our lives. That's a good left issue. And then kind of warping it, taking the fears, projecting it onto something that is not really doing that. Those apps know they couldn't listen in on our

phone conversations. Doesn't mean they were a great idea. It doesn't mean it's a great idea to digitize access to restaurants and public spaces. I'm not a fan of that. I still get frustrated when I go into restaurants today and they still have the QR code menus. Yeah. Oh, thank you. I thought all young people were okay with that. I'm glad to hear you say it. It makes me feel better. So that's, I think, a good example of how all our tech fears get absorbed and just kind of turned into a doppelganger of themselves. And of course, you know, Bannon isn't interested in regulation that is going to challenge the surveillance model. I mean, if we think about what he did with Cambridge

Analytica back in the day, he seemed to be okay with taking our data and selling it to third parties. So, you know, or the fact that he was funded by the Mercers, you know, and that was their whole business model. So, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Like, it doesn't matter if it's true. It matters if it feels real. It matters if it's speaking to something real. And he's good at that. about how the conspiratorial right has kind of taken these narratives and shifted them. And obviously we see them more and more making their way into mainstream politics in many parts of the world, right? As we see more and more governments or, you know, more and more kind of far right parties making gains in parliaments. You know, obviously things are not looking so great for the next US election, even up here in Canada, you know, with the influence of these things on the conservative party influence of these things on

the Conservative Party and how these things are spreading. It looks not so great, especially at a moment when we have all of these crises that we need to collectively address and deal with the climate crisis biggest of all, but certainly not the only one. So I wonder, you know, after writing this book, after looking into this world, where do you see hope that we can kind of turn this around, that we can address these problems when it does seem that many things are going against us? Interesting. I'm not sure I feel hope in the short term, like in the timeframe of the next wave of elections. I think we're in big trouble. And I think we were in big trouble before, but the alliance of center-left, really centrist, corporate centrist political parties like Trudeau, like Biden's Democrats, with Netanyahu's genocidal violence in Gaza is catastrophic in a way that we have yet to reckon with. Because the only thing they've

ever had is fear of fascism. If you don't vote for us, the fascists are going to get in. The fact that they have aligned themselves so closely with a fascist government in Israel that is openly committing genocide against Palestinians is going to harm them and harm all of us. It's obviously harming Palestinians most of all. It doesn't even bear comparison, but there is, to me, you know, a particular horror in the fact that a state that claims to speak, you know, on behalf of Jews everywhere and to exist in the name of Jewish safety is actually actively helping fascist parties cleanse their reputations, like Georgia Maloney, you know, palling around with Netanyahu and Marine Le Pen marching against anti-Semitism in France. But, you know, what I'm talking about is the fact that I think we are all seeing a modern

iteration of fascism right now with Israel's stated genocidal intent for Palestinians and its actions acting on those. And so for liberal politicians, you know, both small and large L to stand with that project and then turn around and say to voters, vote for us or you'll get fascism. You know, after we've watched a genocide live stream, I don't know how that pitch works. I just don't, I don't know how it works. And I'm not saying that there's no difference between Biden and Trump. I think there really is. But I just think that this is the implications of what is happening globally. We have not begun to reckon with. Where I get some hope, and it is qualified, is that I think there's been unprecedented levels of both solidarity and principled truth-telling that is, I think,

where we are right now is really in a battle of narratives, of stories about how the modern world was born. And the battles over, you know, critical rates theory, you know, over denying the genocide in the residential schools here in Canada, all of this, you know, predates Gaza. But what's happening is that, you know, like when I say all of the war on memory predates Gaza, but now you have this ferocious kind of new McCarthyism that is specifically taking aim at people who are drawing connections, right? So, you know, indigenous people who are saying, well, there's a connection between settler colonialism here in Canada and settler colonialism in Palestine, you know, or attacks on Black Lives Matter and publications like Hammer and Hope for publishing works by Palestinians that draw connections between militarized policing in the U.S. and mass repression,

surveillance, incarceration of Palestinians. So when I say there's two stories, you know, and this is what I get into in the book, is like the doppelganger I'm most interested in and that I most fear is the fascist double at the core of our societies. And the story I grew up with in Jewish day school, and that I think is the sort of mainstream Western story of the Holocaust, sees the Holocaust as exceptional and as a rupture from an otherwise sort of cheerful story of Western enlightenment. And that when, you know, the virtuous allies defeated Hitler, you know, the world was set right. There was always another story that reckoned with what Hitler had learned from settler colonialism, the technologies of enslavement, of the Bantustans that saw,

as M.S. Cesar did, a Martiniquin intellectual and poet politician, that this was colonialism turned inward in Europe. And if you think about Raoul Peck's documentary, Exterminate All the Brutes, that came out in 2021, I believe, this was building on Sven Lindquist's book, Exterminate All the Brutes. Title comes from Conrad in the context of colonial exterminatory rage in Africa, and makes the argument that the logic of extermination is at the heart of the European project. It can be traced from the Inquisition through the Crusades, the Pillage of Africa, and the Holocaust. It comes home to the heart of Europe. That's the story that is trying to be told. And it has tremendous implications because it explains, it's the only story that can explain the extreme inequalities that scar our world. It's the only story that can explain why our governments have done nothing except for accelerate the climate crisis, because they knew that the crisis would follow the same lines of inequality and dispossession that colonialism did.

So if you look at who is getting attacked right now in this McCarthy wave, it's people who are daring to connect the dots. It's like an indigenous art curator, Nwanda Nanabush at the AGO getting fired after she posts on Instagram that there are connections between colonialism here and colonialism there, between genocide here and genocide there. But it's also Greta Thunberg, you know, being in solidarity with Palestinians, making connections between climate justice and occupation. So that, it gives me hope that even in the face of this massive repression,

people are finding another story. And it's a story that has been like having birth pangs for like more than, you know, 75 years, because there were always people who understood that this was one long, snaking, bloody story and that there was a logic. And if you don't look at the logic, if you don't get at the logic, then you'll just replicate it. And so then reparations for the Holocaust becomes passing the mantle of whiteness to Jews in Israel who then get to practice settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine because you learned a rule and not a principle. And the rule was like, okay, we have to be nice to Jews now. And victims can become perpetrators. And so

I think we're starting to get this. I think we're starting to get this, that we actually have to get at the logic. I think like Gramsci said this, that we actually have to get at the logic. I think, like Gramsci said, now is the time of monsters. Because when you have one worldview dying, and the spasms of death are Black Lives Matter. We're going to tell another story of how this country came to be. And in our country, in Canada, it's the unmarked graves at residential schools and a national reckoning over that. It's very, very hard to have the stories that you grew up with be challenged in that way. And so there's always going to be a pushback and it's very, very fierce. And there's always going to be an attempt to forget again. The real test of this moment

is whether or not these movements that are coming together in protest can also come together in a vision for a horizon of another kind of world. Because it's so hard to look back. It's so hard to reckon with horrors and even including the horror that the Second World War actually is still going on, that it was just moved, that what was called reparations was a continuation. That's a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to reckon with, right? have a horizon of a future that includes everyone that is inviting, that is beautiful, or else the forces of forgetting will win. So we have to be looking back and looking forwards at the same time or I think we lose. Absolutely. I think it's a sobering, but a very important point to end on. Naomi Klein, it's been fantastic to have you on the show and to speak with you to get your insights on all these topics. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure.

Naomi Klein is the author of Doppelganger, A Trip Into the Mirror World, a columnist at The Guardian, and a professor at the University of British Columbia. Tech Won't Save Us is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham, and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.