Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

  Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein exists within a network of similar texts, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. The text operates in conversation with other books like Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin, The Digital Closet by Alexander Monea, Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks, and Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble. Each of the texts deals with the way that technology impacts our relationship to sex, gender, race, and politics. Moreover, Data Feminism (like Automating Inequality) focuses on how data is used to manipulate real-world, tangible politics.

The unfortunate thing for D’Ignazio and Klein is that they are late to my reading party; I’ve already read several related books prior to their contribution to the discourse. As a result, a lot of the information presented here isn’t exactly new or revolutionary. Some of the examples are even pulled from texts I’ve already read and so it left me feeling a little bit lukewarm.

I thought some of the language they added into the conversation was valuable. First was the idea of “privilege hazard”---essentially that one’s entitlement in society creates dangers for others, often in the form of blind spots when collecting and presenting data. That term seems useful to me for conceptualizing oppression without it necessarily assigning a particular blame and without assigning a foregone conclusion. It’s a hazard—something to consider, but also something that can be avoided or minimized. Also, something that is a hazard to us even when it is unintended. On the cheekier side, D’Ignazio and Klein use the term Big Dick Data to describe a masculinized approach to data, and I thought that was an amusing characterization.

Another layer of the book I found compelling was their discussion of data visualization and the debates which surround it. Common opinion is to present data as being value-neutral and being presented in as clear and concise a manner as possible, without even icons to suggest emotion. However, as we know, data is never neutral. Even the decision of what to include is rooted in values. So, D’Ignazio and Klein discuss the idea of data sensationalism. They describe some interesting projects with how data gets presented. For example, they describe a death-by-gun-violence map blocking out entire sections of neighbourhoods or showing a tally of “stolen years” from children that have died by gun violence. They also talk about a presentation where people read the alphabetized names of all the artists in (if I remember correctly) the MET? The Smithsonian? MOMA? Anyway, they read the names out and it becomes a wave of Marks, Jasons, Jameses, Andrews, and so forth. It cascades like a wave and then every once in a while, there is a joyful insertion of a woman’s name and the presenters change their demeanour for that brief instant. It’s a way of presenting data in such a way that the implications are immediately obvious. Exploring those creative means of presenting data to give a particular point of view were especially interesting.

In any case, the book is pretty good, if not really ‘new for me’. If you’re exploring the discourse for the first time, it would be well worth it to start here.

Happy reading!

How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

Andreas Malm’s book won’t actually tell you how to blow up a pipeline—and, to all the corporations and governments reading this, I assure you: I am not going to blow up a pipeline. That being said, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is certainly a provocative title that drew me in. The text is less of a how-to manual and more of a book of philosophical and political theory. Offered as a short primer, it is a defence of taking action in a world in desperate need of it.

Andreas Malm essentially makes the case that typical liberal reactions to climate catastrophes is not leading us to the kinds of change that are necessary in order to save the planet and human life as we know it and that “radical” alternatives are necessary. Demonstrations, protest signs, and letters aren’t cutting it. Running parallel to Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” Malm makes the case that corporations and governments are actively killing people through their ongoing inaction and active facilitation of environmental destruction. By allowing polluters to continue polluting, so runs Malm’s argument, it is a form of mass murder.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline makes the case that our typical climate action is ineffective. Our “demonstrations” and “protests” do nothing to shift policy. Our impassioned speeches are not moving the needle for any of the people out there causing the most pollution. There are times when environmental movements and animal liberation movements can rely on peaceful protest to gain public trust and generate conversation, winning hearts and minds, but sitting by peacefully is not putting any pressure on the pollution industry to change.

As an alternative, and at least implicitly referencing The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, Malm encourages violence. Recognizing that violence against people is generally unpalatable for garnering support for a movement and that it would lose the moral high ground by doing so, Malm’s main tactic essentially shifts towards violence against property. He references a project in which air was let out of tires for high-polluting vehicles. It’s an inconvenience that consumers need to consider and that puts pressure to change consumption behaviours. I might make the case now that we’re seeing similar kinds of destruction against Tesla (although they’re supposedly the eco-friendly option…).

Reconstructing the argument could be done through a series of syllogisms and in the moment, it was pretty persuasive. The objection might be raised that property destruction would do more harm than good for average consumers, but the reality is that we cannot allow the status quo to persist. We need to make it inconvenient and undesirable for people to pollute.

Nor can we revert to despair. Malm challenges the hedonistic laissez-faire of some intellectuals that feel none of the direct impacts of climate change. If it is too late to make a change, it is still not acceptable either to throw our hands up in the air and shout that we might as well enjoy our final days and pollute as much as we please. Malm refers to intellectual figures like Jonathan Franzen who asks that since it’s too late, why should we deprive ourselves of the same joys other polluters get to have? Of course, Malm rejects this self-serving philosophy.

Malm suggests that every revolt has been put down by the defeatists. Yet, there is still a political function for hope: “Hope is not a door, but the sense that there might be a door somewhere. [...] Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.” People voice a common objection to controversial situations: “If only people had protested peacefully, change could have happened.” Malm shows how the objection falls flat and refers to all kinds of historical precedents where change only happens when there are strategic, active interventions. Some may protest peacefully, of course, but the real changemakers are the ones who actively dismantle the system by force.

And thus we are here. A world in need of fewer pipelines and more action. May the book serve as a kick in the pants and the light of a fuse.

Happy reading!

Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin

        Nonfiction sometimes serves to inform, sometimes to persuade—but rarely does it serve to excite. In the opening pages of Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, you can feel the energy and the push to take action. The doom and gloom despair of statistical realities have their place, but Benjamin’s focus is on creating a vision for what might be otherwise, which seems to be confirmed in the excellent supplementary interview between her and Ibrahim X. Kendi that is added as an appendix to the book.

        Viral Justice is the kind of book we need: a book that looks backward to explain, but looks forward to empower. The book is about social justice advocacy, particularly as it pertains to race, in the wake of the Covid pandemic. In the introduction to the text, Benjamin offers an excellent outline of the project. She begins with the following reflection: “Racism, inequality, and indifference are a juvenile rebellion against the reality of this interconnection, microscopically, and sociopolitically.” Citing from James Baldwin’s address at the National Press Club on December 10th, 1986, she writes, “I want to grow up and so should you.” She then sees the Covid-19 pandemic as “perhaps [...] forcing us all to grow up, exposing that vulnerability and interdependence are our lot, whether we like it or not.” As an aside, there’s an excellent Propagandhi song that expresses a similar sentiment: “There is no me / there is no you / there is all. / There is no you. / There is no me. / And that is all. / A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. / A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of / the Universe is love” (“Duplicate Keys Icaro (An Interim Report)”).

Anyway, Benjamin suggests that “Covid-19 is a social disease” and draws from the work of sociologist Eric Klinenberg, to note that “solidarity is an essential tool for combatting infectious disease and other collective threats. Solidarity motivates us to promote public health, not just our own personal security.” She then notes that he cautious: “It’s an open question whether Americans have enough social solidarity to stave off the worst possibilities of the coronavirus pandemic.” If I retain one essential element of Viral Justice, it is that the myth of independence is seriously overblown and politically precarious. At every turn, collective action and solidarity are required. Even “vaccines” (both literally and metaphorically) “are no magical fix for the kind of pathological self-interest that masquerades as independence.” Benjamin explains, “When we look worldwide, access to a Covid-19 vaccine has widened the gap between those whose lives matter and those deemed disposable” and then notes that “we don’t have to resign ourselves to this infantile individualism-cum-vaccine-nationalism.”

The questions that guide the text are as follows: “What if instead we reimagined virality as something we might learn from? What if the virus is not something simply to be feared and eliminated, but a microscopic model of what it could look like to spread justice and joy in small but perceptible ways? Little by little, day-by-day, starting in our own backyards? Let’s identify our plots, get to the root cause of what’s ailing us, accept our interconnectedness, and finally grow the fuck up.” This passage gives an example of Benjamin’s inviting and direct tone. I appreciate the humour and emotion in her strategic use of expletives as we embark on her vision of a “microvision of social change.”

Essentially, Benjamin brands the text as a selection of lessons we can learn by modelling action after the virality of Covid and crafts the text with a blend of autobiography, statistics, anecdotes, and academic studies. That said, she very specifically notes in the closing interview that looking at problems academically is a privilege of those who do not need to live the realities; academia diagnoses but does not reimagine. The framework for social change presented as an alternative is drawn from the work of Dean Spade; Benjamin notes that there are three types of movement work:

1. Dismantling harmful systems
2. Providing for people’s immediate needs
3. Creating alternative structures that can meet those needs based on values of care, democratic participation, and solidarity.

One of the highlights of Benjamin’s work, for me, is the way she makes discussions more nuanced and truly progressive rather than replicating models that do not serve us. The point is made clear when discussing the carceral systems in an early chapter of the book. A few quick reminders: the prison system is harmful for inmates, but also for the families of inmates—of which there are many in the United States. The impact of that system is far-reaching, including the innocent families of incarcerated people. Benjamin notes that when we see people doing wrong, our knee-jerk reaction is often to want to see them punished or imprisoned. Benjamin notes, though, that this model is fallacious, since it replicates ideas of carceral justice rather than reforming it to better serve us.

As a point of contrast, take the example of Ecuador. Benjamin explains how in 2007, they “began a bold experiment that didn’t cost a lot of money.” She notes that “rather than continuing to criminalize street gangs, the country legalized them, and as sociologist David Brotherton documents, gangs were able to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming, just like everybody else. Some members went to school, started businesses like catering and graphic design companies, or took advantage of grants for job training or setting up community centres. As a result, homicide rates dropped dramatically and gangs began operating more like social movements, even collaborating with their rivals on cultural events.” The approach is simply a reworking of policy in the same way that legalizing drugs is simply a shift in policy that changes policing practices and allows people to seek help and addiction resources. The notion is that over years, “trust and long term relationships had a chance to build up. It wasn’t the policy alone, but how people used the legalization of gangs as an opportunity to transform how they related to one another.”         From the opening chapters, Benjamin then transitions into a discussion of inequities in education. I value those conversations, of course, given my profession. There’s some excellent discussion of hiring practices, the impact of suspensions, the idea of segregated schools (either directly or indirectly), and some of the grassroots initiatives that were supportive of true social change (cf. Cultivating Genius by Gholdy E. Muhammad). In a tangentially connected passage, Benjamin discusses how job descriptions can be rewritten in order to be more inclusive and facilitate more diverse applicants. This, I think, is especially needed for a school system that is significantly, homogeneously White.         I can hear the objections of people who will say “but jobs should go to the most qualified applicants!” I’ll counter that with a fantastic passage from Viral Justice. Benjamin recounts being at a conference and presenting in a majestic place and when they are being praised for their distinction, her fellow panellist interrupts: “Yes, you are worthy—but you are also very lucky.” The conversation Benjamin offers about luck is incredibly poignant. I believe this is a blend of her fellow panellist’s commentary and her own: “Lucky. Not a word one hears often enough in elite spaces. Being lucky doesn’t mean you are not qualified, it just means many others could have been in your shoes, but they were not chosen, and there are many more besides who might have qualified if given the same opportunities.” Summed up in one glorious sentence, Benjamin offers this line: “Luckiness does not negate worthiness, it negates entitlement” and continues that “Luck is the kryptonite of elitist delusions of specialness. And even then, the language of luck doesn’t do justice to the sheer organisation of selectivity, a key dimension of elite spaces, as a process [...] These processes are more often than not obscured.” These kinds of insights allow us to reconceptualize our relationship to power and privilege. Being aware in this way is necessary to take action for change.         Alas, I feel like I’m always waiting for a book that offers a list of ten ways to make the world perfect. That never happens here or anywhere—I guess you could count something like 12 Rules for Life if you want something by an opportunistic hack and political lunatic, but I don’t and I don’t. Viral Justice gives a guideline for making small changes to create opportunities for others, provide for peoples’ needs, and develop new systems. It makes the idea of change manageable and thus offers an optimistic outlook for the world. In short, it embodies that phrase: “Think globally, act locally.” It’s the small actions that matter.         I admit that between finishing Viral Justice and writing this review, I’ve started reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and some of the core concepts are getting jumbled in my head. That in itself is illustrative of Benjamin’s point: we are all connected. These texts are connected. No one is in isolation, for better and for worse.         In this case, I’d really like to think that it’s for the better.               Happy reading!

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

The very premise of Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is the kind of absurdity that validates the idiom that truth is stranger than fiction. Naomi Klein, who I am ashamed to admit I last read about twenty years ago (Fences and Windows), has been continually conflated with Naomi Wolf, an ex-feminist who has become an alt-right figurehead largely associated with the likes of Steve Bannon. There’s a number of peculiar surprises in that sentence alone. The fact that a prolific feminist has gone to what appears to be the opposite extreme is strange enough, but the fact that Naomi Klein and her have taken on the same identity to casual observers is even stranger.

Thus we find ourselves in Doppelganger: A Trip to the Mirror World. Taking on a largely narratological approach that I tend not to associate with political non-fiction and not with Naomi Klein in particular, Klein leverages the identity confusion imposed upon her as a compelling angle for exploring political phenomena: namely, why politics so often resembles its own grotesque double. Klein traces this effect through a range of sub-topics, starting with an exploration of literary history and criticism with double-narratives, then discussing the transition of ex-leftist figures finding home in the alt-right, then into more precise topics like our collective treatment of autism, the Covid-19 pandemic, and even the Israel-Palestine conflict.

It’s interesting to see a crossover of literary and political interests, namely Klein’s exploration of Dostoyevski’s The Double and Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock—I feel like it’s pretty rare to see people actually turning to literature as an appropriate resource for political discussion, so it was a refreshing approach running opposite fact-based infodumps. Further, Klein’s discussion of her own double reads like a novel. There are all kinds of moments that stand out as a twist in a would-be novel. For instance, after a confusing interaction on Twitter, another user apologizes that Twitter autocompleted Naomi Wolf’s name: “Autocomplete?” Klein writes, “I felt blood rush to my face.” She notes that “the confusion was now so frequent that Twitter’s algorithm was prompting it, helpfully filling in the mistake for its users to save them precious time.” While the moment has an impact at the personal level, Klein then expands to the political layer in discussing how machine learning works:

the algorithm imitates, learning from patterns. So if my name is repeatedly mixed up with Wolf’s, even in jokes, then my name would start being suggested instead of hers, leading to even more mix ups, which also meant that anything I did to correct the record or state my own position on what had become her pet topics, would just train the algorithm to confuse us even more. This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate text platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us, but were always about extracting from us.

This bridge between the personal and the political serves as an effective anchor for the text, making each moment feel as impactful as it is enlightening. It also serves as a nice supplement to the recently-reviewed Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Our Culture. In both texts, we see that machine learning serves to flatten identity, in this case with the extreme example of two people literally being fused into one. In Klein’s case, this renders her into speechlessness. Parallel to Dostoyevski’s double novel, “the double replaces the original, while the “original fades away or worse.” In fearing to become the other, to have your identity usurped from under you, Klein notes a trajectory towards speechlessness and silence, not wanting to be confused or to fuel the conflation any further. Essentially, even when we don’t act against our doubles, it affects us.

There are two notable instances where Klein withdraws from offering comment, recognizing the capacity for her position to be co-opted by the right or recognizing that the position has been preemptively tainted. In one case, Klein (a climate activist herself), wants to offer comment on an ecofascist future “in which ecological fears are harnessed to rationalize violent security crackdowns against those deemed “lesser humans”, often immigrants and the poor.” Klein says that “Ecofascism is a real threat and it is becoming more explicit on parts of the right” and yet in writing her piece she sanitizes “ecofascism” into “ecoauthoritarianism.” She makes the change knowing that “throwing the term fascism around is what other Naomi does—and hadn’t she helped make the very word absurd?” Klein recognizes that the right has co-opted the term “fascism” and through imprecise use has rendered it less meaningful. Yet, “ecofascism is the accurate term to describe the threat. And how convenient it is for coalescing fascist forces if the term has been so abused and pippicked that anti-fascists are loath to use it to accurately describe events in the real world?” It’s a fascinating phenomenon and Klein helps to give language to something I noticed throughout the rise of Donald Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic. So many of the valid critiques of the left have been distorted through imprecise application—more on this momentarily.

Another example of the limitations on Klein’s discourse emerge when she is asked to review Bill Gates’ book about climate change. She “made some notes about Gates’ interference on Covid-19 health policy, how he had shown his bias towards protecting corporate profits over human safety, and that we shouldn’t let him do the same to our climate responses.” All of this is valid critique, of course, “But then, [she] remembered that anything [she] wrote about Gates would likely fuel my “other Naomi” problem. In the speed-glossing of the Internet Age, wouldn’t it all blend and blur together, sound like one big conspiracy?” I find the moment to be chilling in its implications. My context for understanding the phenomenon emerges from being a part of the 90s and early 2000s punk scene. So much of the leftist discourse revolved around questioning authority, being distrustful of government officials, refusing to conform to standards, not trusting mass media, and so on. I saw each of those get co-opted by far right discourse, as if they recognize the truth in certain of those claims, but steal the kernel and twist it into something less nuanced. Wearing a mask, for example, suddenly came to be “conformity” to a government plot. (What’s that line from Ginsberg…“I saw the best minds of my generation appropriated by madness, starving hysterical naked”?).

Klein recognizes this, herself. She discusses the response of conservatives to “technofetishism” that largely goes unquestioned by mainstream liberals. Steve Bannon “recognized a similar neglect happening with regard to Big Pharma.” Klein notes that “drug company price gouging and profiteering have traditionally been the purview of the left. They’re the kind of thing Bernie Sanders rails against.” During the pandemic, though, “there was weak resistance among progressives to the way vaccine manufacturers were profiteering [...] and so Bannon became the one taking on Big Pharma’s greed, but once again via unfounded conspiracy theories rather than real scandals.” Klein offers a surprisingly moderate position on Covid-19 protocols, recognizing that perhaps they were overblown—or at least manipulated—to serve larger interests. But, isn’t that exactly what the conspiracy theorists said? Klein even notes that Bannon would play clips from major news outlets like MSNBC and CNN with “the clear implication being that they cannot be trusted because they are in the pay of [pharmaceutical] companies.” She notes that “he sounds like Noam Chomsky or Chris Smalls, the Amazon labour union leader known for his Eat the Rich jacket, or for that matter, [Klein herself].” I recognize the exact phenomena, especially with respect to Chomsky. Having read his discussion of how the media industry works and its structural composition which inevitably produces a conservative bias, it’s hard to disagree with his lack of trust in mass media. Yet, I feel like the election of Trump and the subsequent pandemic galvanized more rigid divisions. Suddenly, I had to trust CNN more because my enemies were against it. The same is true of Trudeau—sure, he’s a disappointment, but I can’t criticize him as much as I’d like, lest I be perceived as being pro-Polièvre or fuelling a conservative alternative.

Klein offers a passage that I think summarizes the issue incredibly effectively. I’ll present it here in its entirety as worthy of deep consideration: 

we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time. No, these camps are not morally equivalent, but the more people like Wolf and Bannon focus on very real fears of big tech, its power to unilaterally remove speech, to abscond with our data, to make digital doubles of us, the more liberals seem to shrug and sneer and treat the whole package of worries like “crazy people stuff”. Once an issue is touched by them, it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else. And what mainstream liberals ignore and neglect, this emerging alliance lavishes with attention. All of this helps me to understand my doppelganger, but not in a way I find at all reassuring, because it means she represents a larger and more dangerous form of mirroring: a mimicking of beliefs and concerns that feeds off progressive failures and silences.

I have been pretty critical of conservatives for having no other platform than “liberals bad,” but Doppelganger makes me consider if we’re substantially different in our approach. I’m glad that, despite recognizing the failures of the left, Klein still notes that there is not a moral equivalent (even if that moral high ground is sometimes what makes us falter in the double-standards of politics). I, too, recognize in myself the aversion to any issue that I perceive as “crazy people stuff” and the untouchability of certain discourses. I see a lot of truth in this passage and a lot that is worth striving to fix.

I think one of the main benefits in reading Doppelganger is seeing how that process works. Conservatives “follow a similar playbook” to Bannon. They capitalize on real fears, but through a strange backward rationale. In effect, it plays into the double-standard we’ve seen time and time again. For instance, Klein talks about the press conference Trump held  a few hours before his debate with Hillary Clinton where he paraded a lineup of women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual crimes. Klein notes that Bannon was “smirking on the sidelines as if thoroughly enjoying the show.” We’re placed in a position where on principle we have to agree with Trump—we believe victims and believe we should hold Bill Clinton to account. Meanwhile, he doesn’t care about his own sexual assaults, which he himself described in that famous audio recording. We care about the principle and he does not: it puts us in a disadvantageous no-win position. Klein describes the approach as “mirroring, deflecting, and projection” and notes that they work well “especially when you’ve got a point.” The mechanics of conservatives appropriating leftist values for their own use, making our values imprison us to certain forms of action, is actually a pretty genius move, as much as I hate to admit it.

The other side of the coin is that the right fabricates outrage over the things it itself is doing. Klein refers to Putin in particular, whom “throughout Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, [...] would accuse the Ukrainian government of the precise crimes he was busily committing or considering committing himself.” If you operate with no shame and skirt any issues of internally contradictory ideology, it’s a very effective strategy. Plus, the context allows us to believe it:

if Putin was able to sell these upside-down claims to many, it’s partly because the U.S. government consistently does this kind of mirror-imaging itself, feigning outrage over Russian interference in U.S. elections with no concern for the irony that its intelligence operatives have meddled in elections and helped overthrow democratically elected governments the world over since the 1950s, from Iran to Chile to Honduras.

So, two big takeaways so far: 1) conservatives are able to capitalize on issues under-addressed by the left and 2) by appropriating the thoughts and tactics of the left, conservatives can garner support and undermine us by our own principles.

There’s a third tactic: acceptance (kind of ). Klein persuasively outlines just why Naomi Wolf went from prolific feminist to alt-right conspiracy nut. When Wolf started questioning Covid protocols or started offering other objectionable views, the left that had once supported her dropped her. People became increasingly critical. I can only help but imagine her inner monologue: So much for the tolerant left. Yet, Bannon welcomes the outcasts to his show, actually modelling the supposed principle of inclusion that governs the left. The implicit conclusion is that we have to do better when our fellow leftists disappoint us or hold questionable stances.

In fact, one of the other big takeaways from the book is a quotation Klein includes from civil rights scholar John A. Powell: “We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people.” The left, admittedly, is not always soft on people—going for personal attacks (a failed attempt to co-opt the tactics of the right) rather than acting from a spirit of love and support. So, while Klein focuses on the divisiveness of our world, the need for strategic alignment emerges as the solution. There are essentially two steps to this process: 1) to unself and 2) to find strategic alliance, even when we find groups unpalatable.

We are often wrapped up in ourselves. In one insightfully amusing moment, Klein challenges the practice of self-citing (now commonplace in discourse): ““Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time. As I wrote here, see my earlier Tweet, just bumping this up. We have to do it, or so many of us believe.” There’s a sense that we need to continually update our identities and push our way to the front. We double ourselves as a tactic: “We are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don’t remind people of what we’ve said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus.”

Yet, this desire to protect our identities is counterproductive for genuine change. Instead, Klein encourages us to go through the process of “unselfing.” For instance, when talking about what was once known as multiple personality disorder, she notes that “the capacity to have internal discussion [...] is healthy and human.” Moreover, she cites how for Hannah Arendt, “it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes that great evil occurs. So too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or, as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics”: ‘Making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.’” It’s funny how often the solution to issues is to be less dogmatic and rigid about them. How, exactly, to cultivate a capacity for considering others, is more likely a more challenging matter. It appears that we need to challenge the rigidity of our own identities and become multiple — i.e. less individualistic and more multifaceted in our being. The discussion about Hannah Arendt continues that, “ In that state of literal thoughtlessness, i.e. an absence of thoughts of one’s own, totalitarianism takes hold. Put differently, we should not fear having voices in our heads, we should fear their absence.” When we are able to create a more permeable boundary of self, we resist the impulse for the oversimplification of reality.

The discussion occurs within the discourse of branding, including the fact that our identities are all brands now. Klein points to the “deepest danger of our era of branded humans” by noting that “Brands are not built to contain our multitudes. They demand fixedness, stasis, one singular self per person. Human statues. The form of doubling that branding demands of us is antithetical to the healthy form of doubling, or tripling, or quadrupling that is thinking and adapting to changing circumstances.” 

This bridges into a discussion of bell hooks, who refers to “amnesiac habits” that we tend to hold. bell hooks is ever an inspiration, and no less so when Klein draws on her work. As noted above, we need to be soft on people and hard on systems. Drawing on hooks, Klein notes that the process “starts with naming [...] the systems that have carved out the shadowlands, deemed them erasable, disposable: capitalism, imperialism, White supremacy, patriarchy.” She continues, “It requires teaching those words and their true meanings to the people in our lives so that the next time someone tells them that their suffering and burdens are the fault of child-stealing globalists, or job-stealing immigrants, or well-meaning teachers, or the Jews, or the Chinese, or the drag queens at the library, they will know better. And they will be able to fight better.” Once again we return to language and its ability to render experience more precisely. There is always the risk, though, as Klein discusses in an earlier chapter, of the language being co-opted: the right using the word fascism to the point of absurdity, for example. In this I experience some concern, too, for leftist discourse online and TikTok in particular. Certainly, most of the world’s problems emerge from a White supremacist, capitalist system, but when the discourse is so vaguely defined it might render the terms less meaningful and less pragmatic when we’re trying to combat their effects.

Klein notes that as things are today, we are “hard on people and far too soft on structures.” In order to push back at systems, the issue becomes once again an issue of “unselfing.” We cannot do the work alone as individuals. Capitalism thrives on individualism and convinces us that we can “solve climate change with an electric car, transcend your ego with a meditation app” and so on. We can “fix massive crises on our own through self-improvement.” While Klein acknowledges that some of these actions can help, the “truth is that nothing of much consequence in the face of our rigged systems can be accomplished on our own, whether by our own small selves, or even by our own identity groups. Change requires collaboration and coalition, even, especially, uncomfortable coalition.”

I think that’s the biggest challenge with the highest yield that Klein offers in the book. I’m thinking about strategic alliance over common issues and setting aside other particular views. For instance, I think the trucker convoy in Ottawa was a ridiculous and morally reprehensible movement. Yet, perhaps we could find strategic alliance and protest together over something like the cost of groceries (surely that is as harmful to the common man!). There are a number of examples that Klein offers towards decentering of the self. She recounts, for example, the story of a man who lost his daughter to drowning prematurely and then dissolved himself into the reef he studies to “feel like coral, or a fish.” There’s a sort of escapism here, but also potential for connection. Klein discusses Iris Murdoch’s “description of observing something beautiful, whether a bird or a painting, as ‘an occasion for unselfing.’” Rather than being something passive and contemplative, though, Klein sees this as something urgent—”people who are the exploiters of this planet are people who put themselves first, unable to unself even for a moment” and the climate change crisis is as much about a “surplus of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere” as it is “a surplus of self.”

As you can see, Klein connects the deeply personal to the more broadly political. This happens in the case of climate change, of course, but she links it to a range of politicized phenomena. The weakest part of the book, in my mind, is when she links explores the treatment of autism through this framework. She discusses the symptoms of autism and draws on the historical co-optation of autism treatment and diagnosis by the Nazis. The section feels insufficiently connected to the rest of the book and somewhat superfluous.

One of the other major issues that Klein draws on which seems more immediately relevant is the conflict in Israel and Palestine. Throughout the book, Klein draws on her own Jewishness as a framework for talking about issues. It was particularly interesting to hear her discussion of being educated about the Holocaust as a young Jewish woman. She talked about how its aim was “re-traumatization” and how “re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state.” It’s a perceptive commentary on the instrumentalization of the Holocaust for unjustified ends. She describes her Holocaust education as “a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible” and continues, “Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others and to figure out how to resist them.” Instead, she says, “It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us and to stay in that state.” In reflecting on the experience, she says that the purpose of this mode of education was to freeze the pupils because “the Holocaust was a plot-point in a larger, pre-written story we were not only being told but also were trapped inside: a phoenix-from-the-flames narrative that begins in the gas chambers of Nazi-controlled Europe and ends on the hilltops around Jerusalem.”

I think the most relevant comment in terms of current discourse is that “for the most part, the goal of these teachings was not to turn us into people who would fight the next genocide, wherever it occurred. The goal was to turn us into Zionists.” Thus, when Klein talks about the contemporary issues in Israel-Palestine, she sees the separate sides of the issue and has a clear moral stance. Again, she focuses on the language of the issue and Palestinians referring to Israel as an “entity.” She describes how Israel’s leaders demand Palestinians to answer whether Israel has a right to exist. In this narrative, Palestinians often refuse to answer the question, “knowing that conceding Israel’s right to exist would change nothing about its actions and would uphold an idea of an exclusively Jewish homeland that they contest on principle.” Klein notes that she understands their refusal because “it is one of the few tools available to an occupied and vastly outgunned people.” By the same token, though, she says that for Jewish people, “who have been treated as inhuman for so much of our history, being called an ‘entity’ is a wounding thing, and wounding in a way that may not be particularly constructive.” Klein again calls for a kind of de-personalization of the issue. She advocates for greater contextualization, like, for instance, that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were refugees who had survived a genocide but simultaneously settler colonists who “participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people” or that they were victims of White supremacy but became White in Palestine. She notes that “contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer-colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (White-racialized).” Ultimately, she explains that binary thinking “will never get us beyond partitioned selves or partitioned nations.” That said, she is clearly against the practice of Israeli settler-colonialism but is attempting “to go into the mindset of Zionism without blocking the exit.” Again, decentering ourselves becomes an imperative to better consider context and attempt to move forward productively.

All things told, as you may guess from the length of this review, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger proves an illuminating piece of work. It’s non-fiction that exists in a strange literary-political scope that I rarely see enacted by contemporary scholars. I gleaned a lot of benefit from this book and find myself thinking about it often when seeing news reportage, social media discourse, and when engaged in interactions with others. Some books can change what you think, but it’s rare for a book to change how you think, and I think that’s pretty darn commendable.

Now, let’s go save the planet. Collectively.