Train Thoughts on Doppelganger (Pt. 2)
The covid, conspiracy theory, and discourse hell aisles of the mirror world
It’s fitting to write the second part of this review—the part about conspiracy theory culture and the anti-vaccine rabbit hole whose gravity has consumed Naomi Klein’s titular doppelganger—from a train where I’m one of only a handful of people wearing a mask. We’re in the height of holiday travel season, which conveniently coincides with the height of transmission for respiratory infections and illnesses. It’s just too bad we don’t have any proven methods to counteract the ill effects of this convergence on the most vulnerable people in our society.
As I wrote in the first portion of this extended book review, I was impressed by Klein’s ability to tie together all of the topics which have most concerned me in these past few years. Specifically, the contractions between connectivity and isolation that impact our bodies, both digitally and physically. Online, we’re connected, but often most closely with those who share our identity or ideology. We’re also hyper-focused on our self-expression and personal brand when we’re online, isolating by choice via curated, unique combinations of markers that constitute the contemporary performance of me-ness. Over the last three years, we’ve also shared an extreme offline experience of connection and isolation in the form of global pandemic. And, overall, we pretty much biffed our opportunity for effective collective response.
Klein deftly summarizes the toxic combination of hyper-individualistic belief, capitalism, wellness culture, and structural hierarchies at play in covid responses across the U.S. and Canada (where she lives) while investigating the roots and fruits of the conspiracy theories the crisis amplified.
This work is meaningfully deepened by her personal connection to conspiracy theory as the mother of a son with autism. The legacy of anti-vaccine anxieties being spread online by her own exact demographic of mothers is traced to our current moment. She writes, “Terror of having an autistic child, and of disability more generally, is part of what led us here [to a world of mass disbelief and conspiracy culture]. To quote the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, an old nemesis from my Shock Doctrine days, ‘the ideas’ were ‘lying around,’ ready for the right shock—so, too, were the digital informational pathways to carry those ideas far and wide.”
Since becoming chronically ill in my twenties, I have become non-consensually hyper-aware of the anti-vaccine movement. Will these forums of parents who so fear difference and disability generate a measles outbreak? Whooping cough? Will their soft eugenics stance clog the hospital system and make it impossible for me and others with higher needs to access care? The way that the ideas of the anti-vax movement mainstreamed in the first months of covid was dizzying and far too easy to replicate into a movement against masks, against the entire notion of public health.
Klein writes, “…the idea that we should think and function as communities of enmeshed bodies with different needs and vulnerabilities flies in the face of a core message of neoliberal capitalism: that you are on your own and deserve your lot in life, for better or worse. And, relatedly, it also flies in the face of a core message of neoliberal wellness culture: that your body is your primary site of control and advantage in this cruel and polluted world. So get to the work of optimizing it!…This is fascist thought.”
It is fascist thought, but through the magical logic of conspiracy culture, those trying to protect collective well-being are framed as the real fascists. It is also entirely unsurprising that a culture so historically steeped in waves of eugenicist belief and genocidal practice would take to this callous path with such enthusiasm. Klein uses not only her own family experiences of professionals and strangers trying to “solve” her child’s divergence from societally fabricated norms, but draws (albeit briefly) from the legacy of disability theory and movements.
In some ways, I’m thankful for the pandemic’s timing, which pushed me to seek out disabled thinkers. I knew that my life would be different after a systemic immune disorder diagnosis, but until the obvious, pervasive vulnerability of deadly airborne infection struck, I was still living in some degree of denial. I was still contorting myself to keep up with a culture of productivity, still thinking I could optimize myself out of being a little bit sick, forever. It took the constant hum of casual eugenicist discourse—“only the weak and old will die,” “I’m healthy so why should I sacrifice,” and so on—to send me in search of clearer, more caring responses to mass death and disablement. What Klein illustrates so well is the mirror of that pathway, in which the fear of death, disablement, weakness, and interdependence sent so many rushing back to a “normalcy” that never served us, and to a world of conjecture and conspiracy served up as fact.
“Do your own research,” the battle cry of the people traveling this path. I received heartbreaking emails from a friend, a former journalist, which charted his descent into beliefs I never would have imagined him capable of holding just a year before—“plandemic,” “planned depopulation,” and so on. It was frustrating because he understands, under normal circumstances, the meaning and the weight of the term “research.” Like “science,” it describes a structured process of many steps, checks, counter-balances, and lingering unknowns.
Klein writes on her own frustration with this phenomenon:
“It’s clear that some people consume investigative journalism, fact-based analysis, and fact-free conspiracy interchangeably, drawing their own connections and mixing and matching between the three. From the researcher’s perspective, the differences between the genres should be glaring. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards…Conspiracy influencers perform what I have come to think of as a doppelganger of investigative journalism, imitating many of its stylistic conventions while hopping over its accuracy guardrails.”
I have written at length in public and for works-in-progress about the problems of “truth” in our time. The majority of my life has been spent in a society without a consensus reality, but it has been jarring to watch our gaps in perception widen exponentially in tandem with the explosion of communicative technologies. At the same time, I don’t advocate for a consensus reality (outside from perhaps the simplest structures i.e., we live on—or better yet, in partnership with—a living, changing planet whose systems ought to inspire the forms and limits of our own existence). The dogmatic push for consensus, without meaningful representation and collaboration with the structures of power who demand it, is one of the grievances the right has so effectively capitalized upon in recent decades.
I am also, perhaps problematically to some in my political sphere, a bit of a free speech absolutist. Free speech is among the terms that’s been stolen and distorted by the far right, then fumbled out of usefulness by the reactionary timbre of liberals. It’s been appalling to watch alleged leftists cheer on the FBI and grand juries, as long as they’re going after Trump and his cronies this time around. I feel backed into a corner by the sheer cartoonish-ness of our contemporary opponents. In the reactionary state we’ve been living in, a common retort is “well, should we do nothing, then?”, as though punitive, unaccountable systems of justice and “nothing” are the only two options available to us for dealing with despots, bigots, fascists, and wannabe dictators. It’s the same online, the now-dominant realm of free speech, only there’s no illusion of representation or access to the levers of power on the internet as shaped by the wealthiest corporations in history.
I completely understand the feelings and logic which drove the banishment of Donald Trump and other hate-speech and misinformation spewers from pre-Elon Twitter and other platforms. There was no precedent for a president to speak so directly to the world, let alone to apparently share his every impulsive thought from the toilet. We do want to make the internet (and all public space) safer, more inclusive, places where we can, like, exist without being doxxed or threatened with death. However—and as many, many mostly queer, Black, radical, sex-worker, and other creators who shape all the best and most culturally lucrative parts of the internet have pointed out repeatedly—these companies are neither equipped nor incentivized to create that safety and inclusivity. For every white wing radical banned for saying Nazi shit, how many of the rest of us are shadowbanned, harassed, and de-platformed?
Klein writes, “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 upon as a basic civic right.”
God, I love how much she talks about the enclosure of the commons in this book, it’s literally one of the only three things I will talk to you about if we meet in person and I have had wine.
What I love even more about Klein’s analysis of our complex reality problems is that she refuses to fall into the easy trap of liberal smugness. It’s too late for that, and anyone still high on that horse only appears deeply un-serious. She asks us to examine ourselves—as the disparate “left,” as everyday anti-fascists who don’t want to live in a Trumpian white power nightmare, as human beings who identify with notions of empathy and might even support social-emotional learning in schools—at least as critically as we examine our horrifying doppelgangers on the “other side.” This was especially poignant to me in this section which focused so heavily on covid, affirming my own frustrations with my so-called comrades and forcing me to examine the limits of my own empathy and capacity to organize.
Klein writes, “On this side of the glass, how much did we do to push our governments to keep mask mandates in place to protect the immunocompromised? Or to make clean, filtered indoor air a right in every workplace? Or to share the vaccines beyond our borders? In North American and Europe, our governments wanted us to get our second and third shots. What if we had refused until everyone in the world had their first ones? What bodies did we tacitly sacrifice by going with the flow? And how much did those of us who were lucky enough to work from home do to make sure that the workers we celebrated as ‘essential’ were actually paid and protected as if they were essential? Did we fight for their right to organize, or did we keep ordering from Amazon simply because it was convenient? The truth is that most of us could have done much more.”
We could have. And if you did, and continue to, I see you and thank you. You’ll get a special head nod on the train if we pass in the aisle. I need these kind of reminders and questions, and I need to have spaces (even if only in books) to chew on them in community with others.
Until next time, in the final installment of this review, on Israel, colonial legacies, and other troublesome political shadow selves in our midst.
To a brighter 2024, full of clarity and courage.
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Greatly appreciated this complex yet digestible food for thought. Thank you for oiling the ol’ mind-cogs by condensing several ideas with such clarity.