“a shock is the gap that opens up between event and existing narratives to explain that event.”
when we don’t have narrative we are unable to process and understand the event
“disaster capitalists” take advantage of the gap to place their biased narrative as the primary one
in moments of collective trauma, gather together and create meaning
“it’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous” Philip Roth operation shylock
The figure of the doppelganger has been used for centuries to warn us of these shadow versions of our collective selves, of these monstrous possible futures.
Yet the feminism Wolf proposed in response was not a throwback to the radical demands of the 1960s and 70s, a time when feminism had been linked with anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and socialism and activists had built their own collectives, movement publications, and insurgent political candidacies that set out to challenge and transform dominant power systems from the outside. On the contrary, just as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair moved their respective parties away from policies that championed universal public services and redistribution of wealth towards a pro-market, pro-militarism “Third Way”, Wolf’s version of feminism charted a path to the center, one that had little to offer working-class women but promised the world to white, middle-class, highly-educated women like her.
“It appeared that Wolf did not want to tear down elite power structures - she wanted to enter them.”
“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. This is 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 mixups. 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 tech platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us but were always about extracting from us. The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations. This goes back to early forms of enclosure, beginning in the middle ages.”
“Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible.”
“So too, with our online activities, where our relationships and conversations are our modern-day yields, designed to harvest ever more data”
“a flattened, reduced version of ourselves is easier to confuse with a flattened, reduced version of someone else”
“their shame, your shame”, “your trail, your shadow”
“I had flunked at one of this most valued activities of contemporary capitalism: developing, maintaining and defending my personal brand.”
“a brand is a promise - of consistency and dependability”
“endeavour to become a better, more distinctive brand, while aggressively defending its edges against all would-be infringers”
“I didn’t want my work to join the dusty books of the left. I wanted to dress up ‘No Logo’ in capitalism’s own shiny clothing. […] I wanted it both ways.”
“The dictates of good branding struck me as antithetical to the dictates of being a good journalist, let alone a trusted political analyst. Those roles rest on a tacit commitment to following one’s research wherever it leads, even if that turns out to be a very different place from what was originally expected.”
“movements that want to grow have to reach across silos and beyond the already converted”
“the process required them to label difficult experiences in specifically marketable ways, and to turn them into something fixed, saleable, and potentially profitable”
“they must project the unwanted parts of themselves onto others (the unenlightened, the problematic, the deplorable, the “not me” that sharpens the borders of the “me”)”
“no desire to make Dave’s life better, to help him lead a life from which he would not need to escape. Rather, his goal seems to be to turn reality into a game played with live ammunition.”
“undone in any number of ways and in an instant—by a disabling accident, by a psychotic break, or, these days, by a hacked account or a deep fake. This is the perennial appeal of doppelgangers in novels and films: the idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity—the painful truth that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control. ” pp98
“our digital avatars were getting mistakenly swapped— the thumbnail-sized photos of us, and the tiny boxes that prescribed the parameters of our speech on those platforms, just as they flattened and blurred so much else. Back then, I saw the problem as more structural than personal. A handful of young men had gotten unfathomably rich designing tech platforms that, in the name of “connection,” not only allowed us to eavesdrop on conversations between strangers but also actively encouraged us to seek out those exchanges that mentioned us by name (a.k.a. our “mentions”). In a way, it was perfect that the first time I heard my name confused with Wolf’s was in an eavesdropped conversation taking place in a public restroom. When I joined Twitter and clicked on the little bell icon signifying my “mentions,” that was my initial thought: I was reading the graffiti written about me on an infinitely scrolling restroom wall. As a frequently graffitied- about girl in high school, this felt both familiar and deeply harrowing. I instantly knew that Twitter was going to be bad for me—and yet, like so” pp105-6
Richard Seymour “the twittering machine”, we think we are interacting with each other but we are passing a message to a machine which passes it for us, its mediated interaction. Zadie Smith “we lose our bodies, our messy feelings”
Bill Gates’ recommendations on climate policy and health policy shows bias towards corporate profit over human safety and disparages critical interventions such as returning energy to public ownership
“As I went speechless, Wolf kept talking” on how we often stall and fear and linger when those misinforming and spreading hatred are LOUD and unconcerned and not stopping. “eventually, the double replaced the original, through sheer energy and tenacity” “Did I need to start screaming more in order not to be deprived of my own identity?”
“Alzheimer’s, another way we humans lose control over our carefully tended selves.”
what a name means vs what it means to you. ‘pleasing’, ‘sweet’, or ‘comforting’
anti-brand branding - this is relevant to me too, in how I want to encourage the less cohesive and more expressive in the digital realm but feel unable to do it due to the pressures of growing and maintaining this personal brand - feeling like until I know more what I want to establish, I’m inclined to abstain by default as far as possible. But the problem discussed here - the other voices shout louder than mine
to change by what you discover is to be a trusted analyst and to stay the same is to be a trusted brand
becoming a badly-managed brand, swearing off ad-campaigns and ‘celebrity activist’
on defying bookstore categorisation - the vital nature of interdisciplinary but a book only occupying one physical space, and the taxonomies that approach this problem, and how the digital realm minimises this problem, cross-tagging etc (but still physical storage considerations)
status update by Alice Warwick, students trained to cultivate a ‘safe for work self’ before they know what they’re building it for, or what kind of work they’re building towards
‘Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness’ Simone Browne, physical branding of enslaved people as “biometric technology” - “recruitment of a permanent part of the body to measure and track” “a measure of slavery’s making, marking and marketing of the black subject as commodity”
branding today as violent erasure of this history
In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”; in the same passage, he worried that individuals were getting stuck in “a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them ”
YouTuber burn-out videos, a competition to be the rawest, but is it real pain or a performance? Likely real pain but they must also find a way to monetise it