Doppelgänger — The Antlers
#365Songs: December 27th
“What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.”
— Naomi Klein
I will end this year on a positive note, I promise, but first I’d be remiss not to round out my political rants. When I started the 365 Songs project — and yes, it should’ve been called 366 Songs, but whatever — I set out to write across a few themes: AI’s haunting promise and the sociopaths who control the algorithms, how to survive as a flawed human in a broken world, and America’s rapid decline into Fascism. There’s a red thread that ties the themes all together, or at least I’m going to attempt to convince you of that.
Ready? Let’s go.
Modern history is often marked by major events. WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, 9/11, Trump pt 1., COVID, Trump pt 2. These events are massive earthquakes, shaking the foundation out from under us.
I’m late-stage Gen X, so I was too young to understand the Cold War, and, if you notice, there was no major event in the ’90s, so I made it through high school and college before I experienced firsthand how fast and destructive a major event can be. That changed during 9/11, a moment that introduced me to existential crisis, severe anxiety, and thus I developed an even more critical eye for the power players who take advantage of mass chaos.
Can you hear me when I’m trapped behind the mirror?
A doppelgänger roaring from my silent kind of furor?
I’m going to lean on the incomparable journalist and activist, Naomi Klein, who has published three of the most important and context-setting books ever written. First, No Logo taught me to distrust brands and their overlord leaders, that they’ll paint an idyllic lifestyle attainable only if you buy their products — which are made by pillaging the Earth, exploiting labor, and, now, capitalizing on our biggest weaknesses while damaging our mental health through lethal algorithms and job-killing technology.
Next, the Shock Doctrine, which introduced the concept of “disaster capitalism,” the ways in which free-market Capitalists exploit disasters to privatize and monetize public institutions while we’re too distracted to notice.
And finally, last year’s Doppelgänger, which explores how right-wing movements have co-opted traditionally left-wing anti-establishment positions, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic — all through Klein’s personal lens of being confused with conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf.
Yeah, okay, I’m a fanboy. I get it. Let’s move on, please.
If you’re quiet, you can hear the monster breathing…
Do you hear that gentle tapping?
My ugly creature’s freezing
But in all seriousness, Klein is the Yo La Tengo of writers, always one step ahead of what comes next, a predictive writer who encapsulates past behaviors to express future movements. I tried this, too, all year through my more personal essays: how can I grow in the future by de-numbing and processing the past, how can I understand the world by contextualizing myself against the backdrop of modern chaos. And, politically, how our current behaviors are exposing newer, more dangerous wounds for chaos-makers to exploit.
If billionaires and business leaders are oil companies, we’re the land they plunge for profit.
This is nothing new, of course. It’s Capitalism, after all, and when your entire society revolves around incremental profit increases — health care, food, education, technology, even our social services — it was only a matter of time before we became the product.
In Shock Doctrine, Klein uses Hurricane Katrina as the example for how profiteering sharks circled the flooded poverty-struck New Orleans streets to privatize the education system when nobody was looking, when political distrust was at its highest. In Doppelgänger, she exposed how pandemic fear unleashed viral misinformation and gaslighting, laying the path for brands to exploit the moment by feeding us algorithmic distractions and seeding our anger and distrust in one another (No Logo, see?). She also predicted Netanyahu’s genocidal entrapment of Gaza months before Hamas’s attack on Israel (again, The Shock Doctrine).
And that paved the path for Trump 2.0, to Elon Musk and RFK Jr., to a forgiven insurrection, to the overturning and undoing of criminal convictions, to what looks, at least on paper, as the end of Democracy and the beginning of Fascism. I don’t love the word “kleptocracy,” as that’s our best case scenario but not all that dissimilar from how it’s always been. This is, and will be, infinitely worse than anything we’ve ever experienced.
And now’s he howling, but I’m muted by the horror
How he’s everywhere and waiting
now he’s just around the corner
That’s the thing about Capitalism. When it works, it’s bad for all but a few. When it breaks, it’s bad for all but a few. See the problem? We might be in uncharted territory now, but there is a recent benchmark that’s gotten lost. In 2008, when the stock market crashed, those of us paying attention discovered that the investment banks were leaning on software engineers to construct algorithms so complex that it particularized money into so many tiny pieces to hedge in all statistically possible ways that when it was time to put the money back together the systems were too complex to understand. Even the engineers who designed the algorithms couldn’t figure it out. So when the banks all began to collapse, the government bailed them out, re-seeding the same nefarious profiteers who created the crisis. We survived that one, but learned absolutely nothing.
Now, as AI companies admit the dangers of their technology while rushing as fast as possible to out-maneuver their competitors, we just elected anti-regulation, money-hungry, tech-savvy billionaires to turn our attention the other way. Watch as Trump declares war on Panama, separates families at the border, arrests his foes, orders tariffs, sends militias into sanctuary cities, bans gender care, and countless other shock treatments (ahem, Shock Doctrine). And let’s be clear: he doesn’t give a shit about any of those things. He cares about money, and by unleashing chaos he’ll feed chum to his base while enraging the rest of us, all working to distract us from the crypto Ponzi schemes and laissez faire’ing us into an AI dystopia.
Paranoia backward whispering on my shoulder
like a wasp is getting nervous, so if I shiver man, it’s over
I read the other day that Trump’s cabinet is worth over $450b. And yet, the majority of America believes that THOSE guys (and yes, all but one is a guy, and that one is Linda McMahon) care about our financial well-being. Goes without saying that none of this ends well, and the grift might very well get exposed in the end, but long after incalculable damages.
So hey, 2025 is shaping up to be a dystopian disaster, filled with fake news and gaslighting, with aggressive algorithms fueling more hatred and mental demise, with shapeshifters and truth-deniers, with criminals and sociopaths leading the charge, but if Naomi Klein has taught us anything it’s that knowledge itself is our best weapon. When you know it’s coming, you can at least prepare your next move. Hurry up, though, we’re running out of time.
The only way we can survive is to recontextualize ourselves for the postmodern world by dissecting our own pasts and the role we each play in how we got here. The only way out is forward, and the only way forward is not repeating our past mistakes. Again.
“People without memory are putty.”
— Naomi Klein
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
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