#the shock doctrine

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[deepdrearn]

So friends I am reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and omg did this headline appear simultaneously???

[margaretqualleytruther]

“With electroshock, Cameron annihilated memory; with his isolation boxes, he annihilated sensory input. He was determined to force his patients to completely lose their sense of where they were in time and space. Realizing that some patients were keeping track of time of day based on their meals, Cameron ordered the kitchen to mix it all up, changing meal times and serving soup for breakfast and porridge for dinner. “By varying these intervals and by changing the menu from the expected time we were able to break up this structuring,” Cameron reported with satisfaction. Even so, he discovered that despite his best efforts, one patient had maintained a connection with the outside world by noting “the very faint rumble” of a plane that flew over the hospital every morning at nine.

To anyone familiar with the testimonies of torture survivors, this detail is a harrowing one. When prisoners are asked how they survived months or years of isolation and brutality, they often speak about hearing the ring of distant church bells, or the Muslim call to prayer, or children playing in a park nearby. When life is shrunk to the four walls of the prison cell, the rhythm “of these outside sounds becomes a kind of lifeline, proof that the prisoner is still human, that there is a world beyond torture. “Four times I heard the birds outside chirping with the rising sun—that’s how I know it was four days,” said one survivor of Uruguay’s last dictatorship, recalling a particularly brutal stretch of torture. The unidentified woman in the basement of the Allan Memorial Institute, straining to hear the engine of an airplane through a haze of darkness, drugs and electroshock, was not a patient in the care of a doctor; she was, for all intents and purposes, a prisoner undergoing torture.”

Excerpt from The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

[komododraggggqueen]

It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy - like a national oil company - held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

Tomorrow (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

I learned this rhyme in Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's indescribable semi-memoir that is (more or less) about the way that people confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and how that fact has taken on a new urgency as Wolf descended into conspiratorial politics, becoming a far-right darling and frequent Steve Bannon guest:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the two Naomis' divergence – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjcwVhFhTA

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf's politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to "empower" individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

The past forty years have seen the rise and rise of a right wing politics that started out extreme (think of Reagan and Thatcher's support for Pinochet's death-squads) and only got worse. Liberals and leftists forged an uneasy alliance, with liberals in the lead (literally, in Canada, where today, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party governs in partnership with the nominally left NDP).

But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot.

Lacking any kind of transformational agenda, the liberal answer to capitalism's problems always comes down to minor tweaks ("making sure half of our rulers are women, queers and people of color") rather than meaningful, structural shifts. This leaves liberals in the increasingly absurd position of defending the indefensible: insisting that the FDA shouldn't be questioned despite its ghastly failures during the opioid epidemic; claiming that the voting machine companies whose defective products have been the source of increasingly urgent technical criticism are without flaw; embracing the "intelligence community" as the guardians of the best version of America; cheerleading for deindustrialization while telling the workers it harmed with "learn to code"; demanding more intervention in speech by our monopolistic tech companies; and so on.

It's not like leftists ever stopped talking about the importance of transformation and not just reform. But as the junior partners in the progressive coalition, leftists have been drowned out by liberal reformers. In most of the world, if you are worried about falling wages, corporate capture of government, and scientific failures due to weak regulators, the "progressive" answer was to tell you it was all in your head, that you were an unhinged conspiratorialist:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2

For Klein, it's this failure that the faux-populist right has exploited, redirecting legitimate anger and fear into racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist and transphobic rage. The deep-pocketed backers of the conservative movement didn't just find a method to get turkeys to vote for Christmas – progressives created the conditions that made that method possible.

If progressives answer pregnant peoples' concerns about vaccine risks – concerns rooted in the absolute failure of prenatal care – with dismissals, while conservatives accept those concerns and funnel them into conspiratorialism, then progressives' message becomes, "We are the movement of keeping things as they are," while conservatives become the movement of "things have to change." Think here of the 2016 liberal slogan, "America was already great," as an answer to the faux-populist rallying cry, "Make America great again."

When liberals get to define what it means to be "progressive," the fundamental, systemic critique is swept away. Conservatives – conservatives! – get to claim the revolutionary mantle, to insist that they alone are interested in root-and-branch transformation of society.

Like the two Naomis, conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. Progressives cede anti-surveillance to conservatives, defending reverse warrants when they're used to enumerate Jan 6 insurrectionists (nevermind that these warrants are mostly used to round up BLM demonstrators). Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

These issues are transformed in the mirror world: from grave concerns about real things, into unhinged conspiracies about imaginary things. Urgent environmental concerns are turned into a pretense to ban offshore wind turbines ("to protect the birds"). Worry about gender equality is transformed into seminars about women's representation in US drone-killing squads.

For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and "clean eating" to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and "natural" living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on "personal choices," leads inexorably to eugenics.

Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn't a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we're increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

The mirror world's overwhelming motif is "I know you are, but what am I?" As in, "Oh, you're a socialist? Well, you know that 'Nazi' stands for 'National Socialist, right?" (and inevitably, this comes from someone who obsesses over the 'Great Replacement' and considers themself a 'race realist').

This isn't serious politics, but it is seriously important. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," its obsession with "international bankers" the mirror-world version of the real and present danger from big finance and private equity wreckers. And, as Klein discusses with great nuance and power, the antisemitism discussion is eroded from both sides: both by antisemites, and by doctrinaire Zionists who insist that any criticism of Israel is always and ever antisemetic.

As a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians, I found this section of the book especially good – thoughtful and vigorous, pulling no punches and still capturing the discomfort aroused by this deliberately poisoned debate.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

I'll be Klein's interlocutor tomorrow night (Sept 6) at the LA launch for Doppelganger. We'll be appearing at 7PM at the @LAPublicLibrary:

https://lafl.org/ALOUD

Livestreaming at:

https://youtube.com/live/jIoAh-jxb2k

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

[dendrochronologies]

when god invented time and aging he truly did not take into account how long it takes me to acquire & read & understand books. we should revolt

[sapropel]

This book is really interesting but it's 600 pages and very dense so it's like. :(

[littlebigplanet]

dying to know your thoughts on william easton 👀

i want to put him in a jar and shake it

[leohtttbriar]

my biggest character-building move with T'Pring is making her obsessed (academically, spiritually, etc) with prairie dogs. when Uhura expresses a small interest in prairie dogs, T'Pring says 'marry me.' is this not how people fall in love?

[papirouge]

Christians downplaying the biblical prescriptions explicited by Paul are such a big fat red flag 🚩

[beguines]

One particularly unedifying commonplace of capitalism is the regular claim of its apologists that it has superseded the 'boom and bust' cycle. Marx and Engels—along with a few unsentimental advocates of hard free-market libertarianism—scoff at this. The Manifesto's position is that such crises are absolutely inevitable features of capitalism, that it will as long as it exists be wracked by such catastrophes of waste and human misery. Claims that crises can be tamed are thrown up in anxious disavowal, and they, too, will continue, and they will continue to be false. Frankly, more useful to the capitalist class than such lullabies, particularly at this point in history, is that unsentimental and growing current that sees acquisitive opportunity in the inevitable crises—the 'disaster capitalism' so bitterly and brilliantly outlined by Naomi Klein.

China Miéville, A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto

[komododraggggqueen]

Authoritarian Communism is, and should be, forever tainted by those real-world laboratories [of Stalin and Mao]. But what of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars and slaughters to install and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excesses of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts of the Cold War, and now the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or Iraq today, that suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism - almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism... Seen in that light, the Chicago school strain of capitalism does indeed have something in common with other dangerous ideologies: the signature desire for ideological purity.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting "Ideas Lying Around"

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “Ideas Lying Around: Milton Friedman was a monster, but he wasn’t wrong about this,” which I describe a theory of change for unrigging markets, addressing the climate emergency, building worker power and fixing the imbalance between news publishers and Big Tech:

https://doctorow.medium.com/ideas-lying-around-33a28901a7ae

What is this amazing theory of change, that can do so much to right the world’s wrongs? Fittingly, it’s the same theory of change that got us into this mess. It’s Milton Friedman’s theory of change.

Friedman was the archduke of neoliberal economics, the man who led the counter-reformation that destroyed the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society, restored corporate monopolies to primacy over democratically accountable government, gutted labor power, and put the world in the hands of mediocre, narcissistic billionaires who are determined to set it on fire.

We live in Friedman’s world, but it wasn’t always thus. When Friedman set out to restore America’s deposed oligarchs to their Gilded Age thrones, his ideas were incredibly unpopular. The post-war reforms —��trustbusting, unions, environmental and labor protections, Social Security, etc — were wildly popular. Year after year, these reforms grew, and the groups who had been excluded from them — women, racialized people, queer people, colonized people — launched liberation movements demanding (and winning) inclusion in this broad prosperity.

Friedman’s financiers and acolytes — plutocrats and the temporarily embarrassed millionaires who aspired to join them in despotic rule — loved Friedman’s vision, but they were naturally skeptical that he could make it into reality. They had been painfully disabused of the notion that their social inferiors were comforted by a life of forelock-tugging servitude:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9

How would Friedman convince these sharp-elbowed proles to go back belowstairs and stay there? Friedman had an answer:

Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

Even the best-run society is subject to exogenous shocks — pandemic, invasion, natural disaster, meteor strike — and in the reeling dislocation of the crisis, people will turn to the loudest, most persistent critics of the failed status quo, desperate for alternatives.

Friedman got his crisis. In 1973, OPEC cut off the global supply of oil, and plunged the world into recession. The source of the recession was obvious: OPEC didn’t keep it a secret. But Friedman and his pals were able to convince the people shivering in the dark that their pain was caused by women’s lib, labor unions, civil rights and the EPA. In the crisis, his ideas moved from the periphery to the center.

Jimmy Carter got the ball rolling, adopting Friedman’s proposals for coddling monopolies and forcing workers out of guaranteed pensions and into the market’s rigged casino, where they would bet their 401(k)s against shrewd stock brokers for the chance of a dignified retirement:

Next came Ronald Reagan, who incinerated whole libraries’ worth of regulations that protected the American people from corporate predators, gutted unions and ripped out society’s steering wheel and brakes and set it rolling towards extinction’s cliff, whose brink we can see growing closer daily:

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

Friedman’s been in hell since 2006, but we live in Friedman’s world. His ideas are firmly rooted in the center, and the ideas that delivered environmental regulation, decent jobs, and progress on gender and racial equality have been banished to the periphery.

But there will be crises. As Stein’s Law goes, “anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.” In every domain of human endeavor, we lurch from crisis to crisis: labor, climate, discrimination, corruption. Each of these crises is terrible, and each one is an opportunity for ideas lying around to rush into the center currently occupied by Friedman’s intellectual descendants.

80 years on, Woody Guthrie’s 1943 New Year’s Resolutions are a hell of a read, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of number 19: “Keep hoping machine running.”

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/news/a9130/woody-guthrie-resolutions/

My hoping machine runs on the creation and spreading of ideas lying around. Last year, Rebecca Giblin and I published Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The first half of the book consists of detailed explanations of the scams that the highly concentrated tech and entertainment sectors use to reduce the income of creative workers, even as their own profits rise to never-seen heights. Readers tell us that by the time they’re reached the book’s midpoint, they hear the dangerous, high-pitched keening that signals an incipient rage aneurysm.

But the second half of the book consists entirely of detailed, shovel-ready, systemic reforms that would make immediate, significant shifts in the pay creative workers get for their labor. None of these are individual solutions: we don’t tell you how to shop better or other consumerist theater. You’re not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism — no more than you’re going to recycle your way out of the climate emergency.

These are meant to be ideas lying around — ideas that are more than “let’s just make copyright last longer or cover more works,” which is all we’ve done for 40 years, to disastrous effect. After all, giving an artist more copyright to bargain with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies or the one ebook/audiobook company is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. There isn’t an amount of lunch money that will get that kid lunch. You’ve gotta do something about the bullies. Hence the back half of Chokepoint Capitalism — ideas lying around for unrigging labor markets, to be deployed in a crisis.

On those lines: for the past month, EFF and I have been publishing a series called “Saving the News From Big Tech”:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

This series lays out four “ideas lying around” for fixing the real problem with Big Tech’s relationship to the news: stealing money by rigging ads, payments and social media, so that 51% of every ad dollar and 30% of every app-based subscription goes to a tech giant, and news companies have to spend whatever they have left to “boost” their social media posts to reach the subscribers who asked to see their stuff.

News is in (perpetual) crisis, and, as with creative labor markets, the “solution” of first resort is to force tech companies to share their profits with news companies. This makes the news and tech into partners, just at the moment where we’re relying on news to investigate tech and expose its rot. It also favors the largest news companies, which are overwhelmingly either billionaires’ playthings or skeleton-crewed ghost ships owned by private equity looters.

The ideas (lying around) I develop with EFF are designed to prevent tech from reaping its illegitimate profits, making it weaker and making the press stronger, including indie news outlets, from nonprofits to spunky outlets run by laid-off reporters who are determined to bring their readers real news.

Fiction is also a great way to create ideas lying around. My next novel, The Lost Cause, is a science fiction thriller set in a world where the Green New Deal is underway and people are confronting, rather than denying, the scale and urgency of the climate emergency. It’s a novel full of joy, an emotional flythrough of what it would feel like to formulate and execute a plan to save ourselves, rather than hoping that the threat just goes away on its own:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Kim Stanley Robinson describes The Lost Cause thus:

This book looks like our future and feels like our present — it’s an unforgettable vision of what could be. Even a partly good future will require wicked political battles and steadfast solidarity among those fighting for a better world, and here I lived it along with Brooks, Ana Lucía, Phuong, and their comrades in the struggle. Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this.

I am a firm believer in the power of ideas lying around, and I admit to feeling a guilty pleasure every time I cite Friedman’s own words. I like to think that whenever he hears his words in my mouth, he looks up from the spit he’s turning on in Hell, and amuses the demons turning the crank by gargling a curse around the red-hot bar protruding from his jaws.

Here’s the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/06/11/ideas-lying-around/

And here’s a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive, they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://ia802608.us.archive.org/28/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_445/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_445_-_Ideas_Lying_Around.mp3

And here’s a link to subscribe to my podcast’s RSS feed:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/12/only-a-crisis/#lets-gooooo

[Image ID: A workbench with a pegboard behind it. from the pegboard hang an array of hand-tools.]

Image: btwashburn (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Garage_Workbench_-_%281%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[anreill]

Fascinated by Liz Truss in her wee submissive day collar getting into power and then immediately tanking the UK economy and going into hiding

[queen-mabs-revenge]

is this the year i can finally remove 9/11 from my filters? literally haven't even seen a placeholder post that wasn't the fireman show. beautiful stuff

[dirt-mccracken]

Like any sane person on vacation I bought 3 books for academic inquiry and a fourth because it was hilarious to own.