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.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

  Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Our Culture isn’t exactly revolutionary or controversial in its central claim that online algorithms are diminishing the possibilities for meaningful culture and engagement. While people may disagree on the particulars of the scope of the problem or the significance, I think it’s widely accepted (at least in my own filter bubble) that people don’t really take AI art as a serious contribution to culture, or think that a Tweet is of equal value to Anna Karenina, or that the next random song your Spotify DJ sends you is the same as discovering a new artist by diving into a genre rabbit hole.

To comment briefly on the style and structure of Filterworld before delving into its content, I have just a few brief remarks. Chayka’s writing style is generally accessible. His sentence structure is often succinct and offers the necessary context for claims to help guide the audience. Even when dealing with more complex topics or making more esoteric references, Chayka helpfully invites the audience into the discussion. At a more structural level, Chayka gives a balance of theoretical discussion as well as personal anecdote to demonstrate the central claims. For instance, he has a section about going offline and what it was like learning about music curation by listening to the radio, or the way he found obscure manga and anime and music by following a particular thread in something he had experienced before. If I have a complaint about his style it’s that almost all of his chapters sound like they’re bringing the book to a close, a kind of perpetual conclusion.

In terms of his argumentation, I think there are a few premises that we could put in plain terms:

1. Developing culture requires time.

2. Developing culture requires surprise, conflict, or contradiction.

3. Culture progresses by a series of touchstones that can be identified and traced through the work of various artists over time.

4. Algorithms are designed to reduce the amount of processing time and conflict to drive engagement with content.

5. Algorithms are not able to replicate the human curatorial processes that inspire a sense of surprise.

If I were a better philosopher, I would point you toward one central premise that, if successfully challenged, could make Chayka’s entire argument collapse. Drawing on Montesquieu, Chayka notes that crucial to a sense of taste and culture is “surprise, which can be alienating or challenging.” He cites Montesquieu, noting that “Something can surprise us because it excites wonder or because it is new or unexpected [...] It exists outside the realm of what we already know we like.” Then, he notes that we experience pleasure when we feel something we cannot analyze. Crucial to this experience is the notion of time. Feeling surprise requires time and “taste is not necessarily instantaneous and changes as you consider and digest the experience of an artwork.” Essentially, great beauty inspires us with surprise and then continues, increases, and “finally turns into admiration.” 

We see the very opposite of this at work with algorithms. Particularly when engaging with social media, “trend cycles have accelerated into microtrends that come and go in a matter of weeks” and produce “the anxiety of not keeping up with the algorithm.” Algorithms flatten time and flatten diversity. Yet, “If taste indeed must be deeply felt, requires time to engage with, and benefits from the surprise that comes from the unfamiliar, then it seems that technology could not possibly replicate it because algorithmic feeds run counter to these fundamental qualities.” Chayka’s central premise is that culture is inherently challenging and thus requires time. I think you could push back on that claim. I myself wouldn’t, because I am more inclined towards Adorno’s idea that culture that doesn’t continually challenge itself is hegemony. However, I think that people could say that culture is best when it is representative (i.e. uncontroversial). If that’s the case, then those posts and media which fail to challenge us would demand the most attention. For our purposes, I’m willing to accept the idea that challenging art holds the most power to create a deep impact.

Thus, when Chayka outlines the ways that we are exposed to content,  you can start to see why there is less potential for culture to develop. He notes first the “significant drawbacks” of “content-based filtering.” Content-based filtering needs “to be translated into data that the machine can understand” and so it “lacks serendipity because it can filter only by the terms that the user inputs and it does not measure inherent quality.” Essentially, we can’t possibly account for the indelible, indefinable quality of art that touches us deeply. If you know me, you know that AI writing is the bane of my existence. Chayka notes that if there is a well-written and a badly-written article, the two articles are reduced to being of equal value and cannot be evaluated in terms of quality by artificial intelligence. He notes, “New tools like ChatGPT seem to be able to understand and generate meaningful language, but really they only repeat patterns inherent in their preexisting dating they are trained on.” Hence, AI serves to reduce the possibilities of thoughtful and meaningful expression: “Quality is subjective. Data alone, in the absence of human judgement, can go only so far in gauging it.”

The other form of curation that Chayka notes is not much better, really. When content is driven by social-based filtering, it is driven by the action of human users, “who evaluate content on their own using judgments both quantitative and qualitative.” However, what we end up seeing is items recommended to us by people who are already similar to us. Algorithms push things that are likely to be successful, so when it gets hold of social-based filtering, we really just end up restricted again. 

The alternative is presented much later in the book, where Chayka presents alternatives to mass-media as it currently exists. For instance, he talks about the homogenizing force of Facebook to make everyone’s pages look the same (hey, am I about to make a defence for the chaos of Myspace?). Essentially, Facebook wants to be the internet, and Chayka offers a swansong for Geocities blogs. In addition, he praises platforms that offer more curated content. He gives the example of the music streaming platform Idagio, which is an extensive classic music collection—and nothing else. These hyperfocused and individualized services may offer a resistance to the flattening impulse of online streaming.

Besides, culture itself has “a kind of algorithm to follow, as each artist influences and inspires others, referencing and building on history.” Chayka describes a more human-organized method of curation. In fact, in reading the book it reminded me of an excellent art gallery in Montreal whose curator clearly worked in terms of juxtapositions rather than rigid boundaries of time period or style. Finding those unlikely or surprising connections was, in fact, very engaging. In talking about Igadio, Chayka notes that to maintain a culture, it isn’t simply making sure that all music is available, but “that it must be presented in a coherent fashion, in a way that allows for education beyond passive consumption.” It places a greater demand on consumers to actually explore. There’s a “tone of caring and caretaking” that Chayka found among curators that was missing from huge digital platforms, “which treat all culture like content to be funnelled indiscriminately at high volume, and which encourage consumers to stay constantly on the surface.” There are clear market forces that drive us towards passive consumption, and so the idea of engaging in a more thoughtful and active exploration becomes a kind of resistance in an attention-economy (which become one in the same). In Chayka’s words, “we turn to art to seek connection, yet algorithm feeds give us pure consumption. Truly connecting requires slowing down, too much, to the point of falling out of the feed’s grip.” I think this is well-put, especially because I’m such a slowpoke to engage with any new content and find myself perplexed by the newest trends.

Essentially, algorithms “are less capable of providing the kind of surprise that might not be immediately pleasurable that Montesquieu described” and they encourage you to not spend too much time with any one piece of content — we gotta get those clicks, get that ad money! Chayka describes the algorithmic curation as a superficial where “no sense of admiration can develop.” Even when algorithms “work” — like that of the Netflix recommendation system, “it can become limiting.” The feedback loop creates a situation where a “user’s preexisting preferences” are crucial and it is “diminishing their exposure to a diverse range of cultural offerings and denying art, aesthetics, and culture of its confrontational role.” Again, we have to accept the confrontational role as crucial to culture to make the rest of the argument work. Chayka shows concern about the lack of confrontation and states that “it’s not that great art needs to be inherently offensive. Rather, when everything conforms to established expectations, we miss out on culture that is truly progressive and uncomfortable that might subvert categories rather than fit neatly into them.” 

Even when people actively try to scam algorithms into curating for them, there are flaws in the programming. Chayka gives an example of another researcher who was trying to get Spotify to make country music playlists and for the first several attempts, all of the recommendations were men. It took a lot to break into something new. Thus, when we rely on algorithmic recommendations rather than actively researching, we stand to lose ourselves to the reductive (Chayka says “predfined”) identities that algorithms set out for us—but we also lose out on diversity and find ourselves in a culture that simply reinforces biases.

Thus, we need to navigate the process of curation more actively—whether that be curating our identities “in the sense of selecting which pieces of content best represent us on a profile page” or selecting what is most important to us. Interestingly, Chayka cites the artist Jonathan Harris as saying that “Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression.” I find the phrase politically curious. It’s only one step away from the idea that our consumption makes us who we are, which I find deeply concerning, if something that I have no valid argument against. My concern, too, is that when I speak to teenagers, I’m not sure either creation or curation is happening. When I ask students for their interests, I’m often met with a shrug and “nothing really.” What shows do you watch? “I don’t really watch TV.” What books do you like? “I don’t really read.” How do you spend your free time? “I dunno. Napping. Sleeping.” If curation is the new creation, it doesn’t do much to alleviate my concerns. Chayka suggests that curation requires active engagement and when algorithmic recommendations are described as “curating a feed”, it’s a misnomer since “there is no consciousness behind it.” I’m just increasingly concerned about how to cultivate a consciousness that is curious and wants to pursue new ideas.

Even when we want to actively curate, we bump up against industry. Social media platforms, for example, decide how we present information (whether linear, time-bound, affinity-bound, etc.). Since “digital platforms lack the kind of stability that is vital for the longevity of culture,” we have less power to decide how we present ourselves. If another format seems more market-friendly, all our hard work can be erased: “context is swept away as the companies change priorities. Not only are things changing in the moment, but because all of this is digital, it could be changed retroactively because we don’t own the thing, we have no control over how it’s presented or used at all.” Again I find myself contemplating Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” — how do we speak in a language we don’t create? Even beyond creating ourselves, what we own is not our own. We pay for Netflix or pay for video games that can be removed from the library with very little notice. Our curated collections are subject to the whims of others.

Nonetheless, Chayka notes that “the slow process of curation works against the contextlessness, speed, and ephemerality that characterizes the internet.” All of the productive “curated juxtapositions” we might find (I love when I find connections between books!) are erased and it becomes “that much harder to interpret the broad swath of culture, to figure out which themes join things together, and which aspects set them apart.” Rather than experiencing things sequential, it’s all an “indistinguishable morass.” Chayka suggests how difficult it is to learn via feeds and that learning only really happens when you step away and take time to think for yourself. 

This takes time, of course, and I think it’s nowhere more apparent when talking about literature. It’s compelling to me that Chayka draws on different forms of culture, but literature and music are of particular interest to me, of course. There are two literary case studies that I find particularly compelling in that respect, perhaps because Chayka is being contrarian (though this descriptor is debatable). In one example, Chayka discusses the massive success of Rupi Kaur. In describing the success of Instapoetry, Chayka discusses how poems online have to be “relatable and shareable, speaking less to an individualized experience or perspective and more to universal, recognizable themes.” He notes that Rupi Kaur has been made “somewhat unfairly [...] both the face and the scapegoat of the movement, when the platform itself may be more to blame for Instapoetry’s vapid aesthetics.” Given that I have historically been pretty harsh on Rupi Kaur and other Instapoets, it’s an important reminder that the “medium is the message” and that writing for Instagram is going to demand particular modes of production. Chayka then describes how Kaur self-published Milk and Honey and then that it got re-re-released as a professional publisher. The response from critics, “long the sole arbiters of the niche art form of poetry” is that they hated it. I’ve had this same response myself: “They liked it to greeting-card copy and bemoaned its literalness. It didn’t bear thinking about for any length of time.” Chayka describes Kaur’s poetry as “obvious, mildly interesting stream-of-consciousness shower thoughts in visually appealing ways” while another critic says her poems are “expected, obvious, and vacuous, painting an illusion of depth where there is none.” All of these descriptions ring true to me. There is thus a contradiction: critics see her work as trash and yet she is the highest grossing and wildly successful. The way that algorithms fuel poetry like Kaur’s is clearly outlined, and there may be some positive impact. Chayka notes that each of Kaur’s “poem images [...] rack up hundred of thousands of likes”, that millions engage with her work and buy her book, and then links that to the idea that poetry worldwide has sold at a higher rate following this boom of Instapoets: traffic to poets.org went up 25% from 2020-2021, poetry sales in the UK increased 12% from 2018-2019. Chayka suggests that it may be “how the internet has encouraged the consumption of fragments of text” or that it “could equally be the chaos of the last several years inciting a desire for spiritual contemplation.” Maybe there’s cause for optimism where more literary poetry will be brought into the forefront, but even Chayka notes that literary poetry consistently has lower sales figures. The easiness of Kaur’s poetry garners responses, which maximize its value to algorithms, which shows audiences more of her style, which inspires others to do it…essentially, a whole culture emerges from that which is algorithmic. We write for the algorithm, as Chayka notes for other mediums as well.

There’s a different literary angle that Chayka identifies which I actually find far more surprising and controversial. He discusses the autofiction of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Of those three, I only have experience with Rachel Cusk, but the way that Chayka characterizes her work seems contrary to my own reading. He suggests that the their work is “connected by a close but ambiguous relationship between author and narrator.” He accurately says asks, “Is the ‘I’ of Cusk’s Outline trilogy of novels [...] really Cusk herself, like a memoir? Or are the narrator and the events within pure fiction?” That’s true, that is a component of the text that drives its narrative. However, Chayka then suggests that “The appeal comes from the voyeuristic tension of guessing which is which.” I think this is somewhat of a misrepresentation. To me, the distinction is irrelevant: she exists as both fiction and not, as do her interlocutors and their philosophical discussions. He implies that “readers are intimately familiar with this dynamic from social media, where other people present their lives and selves with varying degrees of truthfulness” and posits that “Autofiction is a bit like an influencer’s Instagram account: fragmented, non-narrative, and often deceptive.” Each of those descriptors are true of Cusk’s work, but the impact is, I think, quite different. Cusk, to me, runs contrary to social media. Cusk lingers on moments and delves into the interiority of others, and so much of her work is rooted in dialogue. All of these, in my mind, resist the easy scrolling of social media. You’re forced to listen to a stranger’s story for upwards of fifteen pages, with all of the messy and contradictory emotions that go along with it. Moreover, there’s a more genuine responsiveness that emerges in the dialogue-driven format of Cusk’s work that models the opposite of the quick “click like” and move on. So, I think Chayka can at least be pushed back on this particular reading.

Chayka makes a statement on the section about Rupi Kaur that bridges these readings. He describes how readers can be “attracted to the accessibility of the figure of the artist online, the artist-as-influencer.” He also cites Kate Eichhorn’s “Content”, where she argues that “one’s ability to engage in work as an artist or a writer is increasingly contingent on one’s content capital, that is, on one’s ability to produce content not about one’s work, but about one’s status as an artist, writer, or performer.” I think that claim is pretty uncontroversial; years ago, I remember a wave of writers having to do Book Preview videos and things like that. Now, we can easily see people posting photos of their artworks in progress, giving over-hyped updates of partly written novels, and so on. I think there’s a difference between positioning oneself as an artist i.e. performing as an artist online and creating artwork about artists (like in the work of Rachel Cusk).

Where I agree with Chayka, and Eichhorn for that matter, is that we now have a culture where “the emphasis is not on the thing itself, but the aura that surrounds it, the ancillary material that one produces because of living the lifestyle of a creator. [...] It all builds an audience for the person, who remains a separate entity from the thing they make.” Chayka suggests that this is a reversal of Roland Barthes’ “the death of the author”, and that “the author’s personal brand is now all that matters: it’s the work itself that is dead.” It’s a controversial claim, but maybe it’s true.

We can really see this in the world of BookTok. I have my own reasons for being uninspired by BookTok and why I think it’s never going to thrive the way it should. 1) Reading takes time and to drive attention, content-creation needs to happen quickly. 2) Content-creation cannot be nuanced lest it be scrolled past. 3) Readers are, generally, thoughtful people that don’t rely on others interpreting works for them. Anyway, Filterworld highlights some of the BookTok authors that have achieved extraordinary success due to the algorithm: Colleen Hoover and Madeline Miller, whose Song of Achilles and Crice “mingle the grandeur of ancient archetypes with the very millennial sensibility of love and relationships: Ulysses as marooned fuckboy.” Chayka’s description of BookTok (and TikTok in general) is accurate: TikTok “popularity tends to be all-or-nothing and when one book or topic becomes popular, it drives copycats who want to get in on the traffic.” He notes that

The problems of homogeneity are not just that it is boring; the most or least offensive stuff rises to the top because that gets clicks [...] This is the issue about whoever is succeeding on TikTok this week: people who have never read the book are going to make a video about it because that’s the trending topic. Things start out with genuine interest, but by the thousandth video about it, it has nothing to do with the thing itself. The algorithmic feed alienates the superficial symbol of the book from its actual value as literature. 

I think I find this particular example so representative of the central problem that Chayka explores because literature necessarily demands time. Certainly, music and art demand time, but literature all the more so, and it becomes pretty obvious that people are not reading the books they talk about. A pretty common form of content out there is that people are excited to read a book, not that they’ve actually read it or have anything meaningful to say about it. Alternatively, you have a thousand people reading a book that made them cry and the extent of the conversation is that the book was sad. Nuanced discussion of artistry is not on the table.

Of course, as in all things, Filterworld is intrinsically linked to politics. Information is political. Access to information and presentation of information is political. For one, algorithms change the way that we are allowed to have conversations. I think first of all of community guidelines as a way of filtering content. Recently, I was on Facebook and reported about 30 comments where people encouraged a trans woman to commit suicide. None of the comments were taken down, I suspect because of how the algorithm is not capable of understanding context. Meanwhile, language changes on TikTok to evade the algorithm (I personally don’t believe it actually does anything—how can such an effective algorithm not adapt or recognize the new terms?) so we end up saying things like, as Chayka notes, “unalive for kill, SA for sexual assault, spicy eggplant instead of vibrator.” The idea of “algospeak, speech moulded in the image of the algorithm” is pretty concerning because it limits what can be said. Thus, when journalists “optimized content for the metrics of the algorithm”, Chayka notes that it “feels manipulative and Kafkaesque.” At every turn, journalists contend with “an unseen, incomprehensible, ever-changing opponent.” Essentially, it’s a new form of censorship that becomes more and more difficult to evade to speak the truth.

And speaking of truth, Chayka discusses the political implications for news organizations and publishers more broadly. As the publication industry faces hardship and has to do more with less, traditional media companies are still responsible for every piece of content they publish. Yet, non-traditional media companies and platforms shirk responsibility by hiding under Section 230, where they can claim “they [are] not media companies at all.” If they can deflect responsibility to the creators rather than taking ownership for what is published on their platform, it facilitates a system of fake news and spreading false information and presents a very real danger, as we saw throughout Covid. Chayka offers the critique that “the algorithm’s curatorial actions are akin to a newspaper choosing which stories to put on the front page.” I find this to be a difficult position. On the one hand, the safeguards of traditional media I find very valuable. On the other hand, I can see platforms collapsing rather than trying to mediate, limiting even further what gets published. For some issues, non-traditional media can be extremely effective, but if platforms decide the risk is too great, they may simply fold rather than adjust to the realities of being a media company.

All things considered, Chayka’s book affirms a lot of my preexisting beliefs about social media, the internet, and art. I suspect that it’s not controversial in its claims, but it does provide some sound arguments and angles for discussing the issues meaningfully. Whether it be its reductive effect on identity, its homogenizing impact on art, or the dangerous contextless treatment of politics, Filterworld does seem to have an ongoing negative effect that we need to counteract. I don’t think this book has all of the answers, but it can certainly serve as a jumping off point for trying to address some of the most challenging issues of our day.

And, hopefully, this post on a blog outside of Facebook does its own little part to contribute to a culture of ideas, patient reflection, and active curation.

See you in the galleries.

Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole

 

I arrived at Teju Cole’s work by that mysterious alchemy to which we are sometimes subject. I believe it was a path or perhaps constellation wherein I read Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, which referenced Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, which I went looking for and found this among its similar books. I can’t guarantee that that’s how I found Known and Strange Things, but it seems like an appropriately meandering journey to Cole’s collection of essays, which are themselves such rich explorations of human experience, discussing literature, photography and art, and travel writing. Known and Strange Things compiles essays on these subjects essentially in that order in a series of focused, manageable short (sometimes too short!) chapters. Ultimately, I would say that Cole does the thing that critics should: inspire you to engage with more works, or with works at a deeper level. He’s the kind of appreciator that shares an appraising eye and ignites curiosity towards his subjects, to an especially surprising degree for those topics to which I don’t normally gravitate.

Of course, the section on literature was most consistently engaging to me. In one of the earliest essays, if not the first, Cole references some of James Baldwin’s writing on Blackness, which sets up an interesting framework for his own project here. To paraphrase, Baldwin was deeply engaged by European culture, despite its long-standing racist foundation, and I see a similar disposition in Cole, a Nigerian-American writer, who references this Baldwin anecdote at least three times in this collection and yet who focuses a great deal on white European writers: Joseph Conrad, W.G. Sebald, Tomas Transtromer, and V.S. Naipaul among them.

Cole’s analysis of V.S. Naipaul is of particular interest in this respect, especially because Cole dedicates two chapters to Naipaul. In the first, he offers a riveting reading of A House for Mr. Biswas, a book I’d never heard of but is read with such compelling insight that it inspires me to read it. The fact that Cole gives such a rich reading of the book that it makes the subsequent chapter on V.S. Naipaul more surprising: Cole offers a somewhat critical portrait of the man himself. Cole recounts attending his house for a dinner in celebration of what was likely to be Naipaul’s final book. Like Baldwin, Cole navigates the contradictions of culture and politics. Cole toasts Naipaul but with an edge:

“Your work which has meant so much to an entire generation of post-colonial writers. I don’t agree with all your views, and in fact there are many of them I strongly disagree with [...] but from you I have learned how to be productively disagreeable in my own views. I and others have learned, from you, that it is fine to be independent, that it is fine to go your own way and go against the crowd. You went your own way no matter what it cost you. Thank you for that.”

There’s a distinct critique in the toast. Cole even notes that he hoped that his use of the word “strongly” would come across in a “menacing tone.” It’s really interesting to see such a strong personal objection to an author whose work was praised just the chapter prior. Naipaul’s fondness of using the N word is a particular sticking point, as is Naipaul’s purported “lack of sympathy towards Africa” and his “brutal” treatment of women. Cole sets up such a contradictory portrait of his personal distaste for who was, by then, a feeble old man: “He knew nothing about that. He knew only that he needed help standing up, needed help walking across the grand marble-floored foyer towards the private elevator.”

Towards the end of the essay, Cole admits to Naipaul that the party was not what he had expected. Naipaul asks what he expected with “some new mischief in his eyes.” Cole tells him, “I don’t know. Not this. I thought you’d be surly, and that I’d be rude” and Naipaul says how good that is and how he must write it down “so that others know.” Cole suggests that “the combination of ego, tenderness, and sly provocation was typical.” It’s certainly an interesting portrait of such a literary force. There’s a kind of sympathy for the old racist that seems to channel Baldwin in a way that I think Cole himself must recognize.

Of course, other literary discussions are less ambiguous. Cole offers quite a bit of unequivocal praise of Derek Walcott’s poetry and presents some beautiful readings of his work. Similarly, Cole engages with W.G. Sebald in a truly meaningful way. The entire chapter on Sebald discusses his literary style in his literary style. Cole speaks to strangers and the narrative meanders through the back alleys of historical memory, leaving me to think that Sebald most certainly would have appreciated the stylistic homage. Similarly, Cole’s discussion of Tomas Transtromer’s poetry and Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative spark that exploratory interest that can get us so far in life.

The second section of the book is essays on art and photography. Being a photographer and novelist by trade, Cole offers some compelling readings of the artform. Admittedly, this section of the book was somewhat less compelling (of course not uninteresting), but I account for that with two issues in my own reading. First, I am far more familiar with literature than photography, so the first part of the book naturally was more engaging. Second, I purchased Known and Strange Things as an audiobook, which meant that I had to do supplemental searching if I wanted to look at the images, which I believe are reproduced in the physical copy of the novel. All that said, there were some really interesting notes, particularly about colour and light in the work of various photographers and the political implications that has, especially for Black bodies.

Under the surface of Cole’s essays, occasionally made explicit, is a commitment to politics. Cole discusses, for example, the way photography developed and how it was developed with White bodies in mind, failing to capture certain tones of Black bodies. Some essays are provided with brief examples of political commentary—like when the NYPD cracked down on subway dancers. Who are the subway dancers? Predominantly Black people practicing an art form on public transit. Surely, the implication runs, there must be better ways of spending resources.

Some of the chapters are more explicitly political, especially in the travel writing section of the book. The political discussion cuts any number of ways. There was some excellent discussion of the ambivalence in Barrack Obama’s elections. Cole offers some commentary on Obama’s first election and the peculiarity of the United States where electing a Black president is not the normal state of affairs. There’s a sly remark, too, about how electing a Black president allows for White complacency towards the daily acts of racism and its infusion into our most common institutions. 

Cole offers a fair amount of criticism towards Obama, too. I’d be interested to see how Cole responded to the subsequent election of Donald Trump, but he brings up valid points of critique. For instance, under Obama, there was increased targeting of Mexican-Americans (including the expunging of Mexican-American studies from American high schools) and Cole notes that Obama had a huge deportation rate—higher than almost all other presidents, even while touting the importance of the Dreamers Act. Moreover, Obama’s use of drone strikes was frequent and indiscriminate, which finds critique in several essays of this book. In one essay, Cole considers the supposed benefits of having a reader-president like Obama. Literature is supposed to increase our empathy and capacity for nuance, is it not? In noting the failure of such a philosophy, Cole rewrites the famous first lines of several books, but including drone strikes. It’s a poignant commentary that I won’t tarnish with my own notes. I’ll merely offer some of Cole’s examples:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity, a signature strike levelled the florist’s.

Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me. 

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a predator drone.

Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

The thoughtfulness of Cole’s commentary is not limited to American politics, though. In another compelling essay, Cole considers justice in Nigeria. He outlines the mob-mentality of what they refer to as “jungle justice,” where someone accused of theft (if they react without sufficient anger at the accusation), might be beaten to within inches of life by a mob in the street. Cole thoughtfully considers the mitigating impact of more formal law, often seen as being “too slow” for the Nigerian public and the tension that necessarily produces in terms of cultural norms. It’s difficult not to feel surprise at some of the details from that essay—for instance that Nigerian men frequently have dreams in which their penises are stolen and that you can accuse others of stealing it, subjecting the accused to attacks on their lives. It’s a fascinating historical-cultural-judicial exploration (seriously: go read up on Nigerian Penis Theft). Cole’s essay offers this snapshot into customs that seem distant from our own, but it truly becomes a human story when he considers the victims of mob justice, like the Aluu Four, who were lynched for being accused of theft. Videos of these executions go up online and the comments are purportedly often in favour of those enacting “justice.” Cole ends the essay by examining Tweets by one of the victims, which come to be seen as prophetic retroactively. It has the impact of a documentary, and Cole accomplishes it through words alone.

Overall, I feel really glad to have stumbled upon Known and Strange Things. The subject matter Cole touches on and his voice offer new angles for engaging with the world, and it’s hard to turn up your nose to something like that.

Happy reading!