YouSaid · the spoken record

Naomi Klein

lines on the record: 55
first: 2023-09-07
most recent: 2023-09-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That I think might be interesting. I'm actually, I just want to get your take on Kara, which is like a lot of people ask why what happened to this person, like what happened to her, what happened to him, you know, fill in the blanks. We've all got people in our heads when we think about people who have dramatically changed and made these new alliances. And my equation is narcissism slash grandiosity multiplied by social media addiction plus midlife crisis divided by public shaming equals right-wing meltdown.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think just from a writing perspective, she's the white rabbit and she leads me down this rabbit hole. And then the book ends up being much more about the rabbit hole and some of the other figures in it than it is about her, but it comes back to her in the end and the story of I'm meeting her as an undergrad and interviewing her for my school newspaper, but she betrayed some characteristics even then, even back then, that I think were a foreshadowing of why she turned into what she turned into. And I'm not going to spoil my own book because I actually want people to read to the end, but I would share one equation.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did try to interview her, and it's interesting because she used to try to engage me and debate a lot online before COVID. She had a whole conspiracy theory about the Green New Deal. And one of its advocates, so she was always trying to tag me. But I think it speaks to the power of the mirror world that now she has no use for people like me or you. I'm sure if you tried to interview her, you'd get the same response I did, which was silence. And it's because I think she's gotten, she has a much larger platform now. And it's a platform that never challenges her, that treats her like a prophet, that treats her, you know, every little bits of informational flotsum she shares is treated like a golden nugget. So what does she need with me?”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A public broadcaster like the BBC or The Guardian to have a nonprofit, non-extractive social media platform that recognized that we just do need these town squares. I also think we need redundancies. I think even though it's wonderfully convenient to all be on the same platform. It's just too vulnerable, whether it's government controlling it or whether it's billionaires controlling it. We just need to have other ways of finding each other.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we're in the middle of this really heavy wildfire season, and Meta is blocking links to a lot of really important news stories in the middle of disasters, and people need this information. So, you know, I really like Ben Turnoff's work. He wrote Internet for the People about the idea of thinking, you know, I think we should be thinking about a lot of this as a public utility worker. I think we should think about them as creative co-ops. I'm disappointed that in the crisis that is X, nobody really stepped in in a serious way. I mean, people who are unmastodon are going to get mad at me for saying this, but like, I think we needed a really big player, like maybe even.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think some of it is guardrails, and that's a good example, but some of it is also just recognizing that this should be a commons, that one of the Silicon Valley plays is using the discourse of the digital town square, right, using the discourse of information wants to be free, you know, of we're creating a commons for all of humanity, but it's the whole point of a commons is that it's not private. It's for everyone. And so that's why it does matter if these platforms were built with our creativity and our labor, because that strengthens, I think, the moral case that we have a right to it. I also think we need these, especially in the context of climate change. Like, you know, I live in Canada.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's also just that we, you know, I think there's a bit of a bait and switch, and this is where I think the. That is the main cost saving is going to be for companies to figure out how to have fewer workers. I mean, the absurdity of Sam Altman saying, oh, you know, like so much of labor is automated is drudgery anyway, right? This is true. Wouldn't you all like it is sure it's true, right? Mark said so as well. But Sam Altman is not actually out there to free the workers from drudgery. He's out there to create a technology that is going to be sold to their bosses in order to lay them off.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exploitation. Yes, we're getting something valuable in that we now have direct access to readers, but I always thought Twitter should have been a workers co-op. Like we built this thing. And why should that have been, why should that be controlled just by a few people or now one guy? I feel like for a lot of people, we didn't understand what was at stake. And now with generative AI, the stakes of it are finally clear.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew I was giving it away for free. We all know that when we're giving our best lines to whether it's Jack Dorsey or now Elon Musk, it's a kind of self-”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big Yeah, and I mean, and I know, you know, I read Shoshana Zubo's book in galleys, and I interviewed her in New York when the book came out and brought my students. And she was trying to also explain to this generation that never had an expectation of privacy, of like why you should be upset that you're being surveilled and watched and tracked. And she said, you. I know you think you can create a finstey. I know you think you can do all these things to subvert it, but you have a right not to hide inside your own life, which I thought was a beautifully poetic way of putting it. But I can tell you from teaching undergrads, they don't entirely get it. Like what is being stolen? Their dad, I didn't need my data anyway, you know what I mean? And so I felt as a writer.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What they're doing in Schmidt has been very good at that. And then he also, you know, he was also working with Cuomo. Yeah, he's working with everybody.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doppelganger is like when I talk about this, I know I sound more like her. Right. But the fact is, you know, I do have a subsection called the Conspiracy as Capitalism. I don't think it is, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think this is just what the system is designed to do, which is maximize profit and growth and create, you know, seize on every single opportunity. And that's”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Except he works a lot with the military. So it's unclear what exactly is benign about it. But yeah, no, he's kind of, it seems to me that his main role is lobbying on behalf of the industry, although he's still invested in alphabet. He's no longer running it. But very early on in the pandemic, just a few months in, started doing interviews about how this was a kind of a crisis opportunity, right? And he was talking about things like remote schooling, telehealth, and dusting off these sort of pre-COVID presentations that were all China fear, right? China is doing this. They're getting ahead of us. They're getting ahead of us on telehealth. They're getting ahead of us on remote teaching. They're getting ahead of us on smart cities. I spent much of my adult life in Toronto, which where we had a failed sidewalk lab. And they just immediately dusted it off.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Servants. Yeah, so the technology is about hiding. And I think we know that, and that's part of the uncanniness of this moment is We know we're implicated in all these crises. That's why it's so hard to look at directly. It's not just that climate change is scary, it's that we know that we are fueling it in our day-to-day activities, right? Because we are all within this system and that creates, I think, a really strong incentive to look away, whether it's through distraction or conspiracy. There are both ways of not looking.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is no such thing as a frictionless economy. There is no such thing as a frictionless product. All there are products that do a better job of hiding the friction, right? Of shoving it deeper into the shadows into the shadow worlds that Jordan Peel was making physical in us, right? So it's the content moderators in the Philippines. And it's the deliveries being put into, I call the technology.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether this isn't about the merits of them or not, it's about the fact that they were using the pandemic very opportunistically to suddenly repackage these technologies that were already in the docket as actually being virus prevention. Right. You use the term frictionless, and they use it all the time, right? And it's so interesting because”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was a sort of a hasty rebranding of a bunch of pre existing technologies that were having trouble getting to market because of things like runover pedestrians, you know, and then suddenly driverless taxis are no touch technology. Like, oh, you don't want to breathe the same air as a taxi driver. This will”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the theory. That's the theory. But it's possible that if we in the media do our jobs a little bit better and we really, there really is a sense that I'm going to get, if I want to find out what is happening, I can go to my newspaper and they will tell me, then I think you're less likely to go down the rabbit hole and try to find answers for yourself.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think the media piece of it is we have to do our jobs, we have to do reporting and not buy into this idea that certain things that we don't, you know, we can't trust readers with something like the fact that there are some adverse reactions to vaccines. It's very rare, but it is real. And if you just kind of create a sort of sense of, oh, no, well, if we report that, and I'm not saying every media outlet is like that, but there is a feeling of like, well, we can't really report that there are some signals that it's been linked to some cardiovascular events, then if somebody is wondering, all they're going to find is the conspiracy stuff.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vaccine diagnoses. And he just leaves it there as a question hanging in the air. Well, there's an answer to that question. They change the definition of autism. But if journalists aren't explaining all of this, then why should people know that? But what should Biden do? I think Biden should take away his best arguments by actually going after big tech and big pharma. I don't think it's about debating him. I think it's about looking at why is this resonating. And you shrink the base.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think when I say we shouldn't ignore him, I think we should look at why he's getting the traction that he's getting. I mean, obviously, some of it is his name. I don't think it's all his name. I've spent a fair bit of time listening to his speeches. And I'd say I agree with a good third of them. He's very persuasive when he talks about regulatory capture. And he knows a lot about it as a trial lawyer and having sued different agencies. He's pretty persuasive when he's talking about militarism and endless wars. He is not persuasive when he's talking about vaccines, but I happen to know a lot about vaccines and the autism myth because I have a child who is on the spectrum and I've done a lot of research about it and I understand that when he says like well why is it in the 90s that all of a sudden there was this huge spike in”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just want to finish this thought, if I can, which is that I mean, all of these kinds of doublings that this rabbit hole brought me to, like the way we create avatars of ourselves online, the way we try to optimize our bodies, the way we try to become these perfected versions of ourselves, the way we try to perfect our kids as extensions of ourselves, and how that can lead to this anti-vaccine mania. There are ways that the self takes up too much room where we think that we can solve collective problems just through our individual self-optimization, right? And that's the Silicon Valley promise, right? You can count your steps, you can sleep better, you can just turn yourself into a superhuman. And I don't think that's how we're going to solve any of the crises that we are desperately averting our gaze from.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we can't do it on our own. And this is where I found the image of the Dobblegang a really useful and challenging, because the Doppelganger novel is always not about the Doppelganger. It's about you. It's about you. It's about what you're not willing to look at, about yourself. It's like that moment in the Jordan Peel movie Us, when the shadow people who, you know, whose lives the people above ground are feeding off of who can only have the comforts because of the people underground. It's obviously a metaphor for racial capitalism. You know, they come up and they wreck havoc and one of the characters says, who are the who are they? Who are these doppelgangers? Who are these doubles? And the answer is we're Americans. We're you. We are part of the system that's more.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but you know what? I think there are lots of ways to not look at reality. And I don't think Steve Bannon is the only one who is distracting people. I think that it's too easy to just say, well, they're the ones who are taking a flight into fantasy. I mean, I went to the Barbie movie. I don't know if you did. I mean, we distract ourselves and numb ourselves and find ways to not look at the hyperobject.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think if we're talking about individuals, it's very bad to cut them off, very bad to tell them that they're stupid, you know, the extent to which you can find out something where there is common ground and build a bridge, I think you should do it, you know, if you agree that drugs should be much more affordable, talk about that. If you think that these vaccines shouldn't have been patented, as I don't, I think that they were funded with public money and they should have been, as Jonah Salk said, would you patent the sun? Maybe you can find some common ground. And if this is somebody who you know and love, who you have a history with, there is much more chance than that they're going to listen to you than they would listen to me.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will find other platforms, as we've seen, and that the best way to counter it is actually to take away their most potent arguments. Like I think, and I think you agree that we really should do something about surveillance capitalism in big tech and big pharma. And so I think we can waste a whole lot of time and energy just saying stop it. Yeah, you're wrong. Don't be a conspiracy theorist. When it's so clear that the skill, the move is to take the issues that are juicy, that are important, that resonate with people that have been left unattended and move them into the mirror world and mix them with all kinds of very, very nefarious agendas.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're talking earlier about it as a kind of counterfeit politics, and I think you see that very clearly with somebody like RFK Jr., where he's tapping into people's, I think, rightful anger at pandemic profiteering, a big pharma praying off their misery, of big tech being unaccountable. He doesn't have any solutions to any of this. Right. But I actually think the way to deal with this is not to be like, you are bad and wrong and counterfeit and should be deplatformed or whatever. I think I'm not saying that people should be free to spread medical misinformation. I don't think they should be, but I do believe that”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really? Yeah. I mean, I actually heard from somebody recently who was physically attacked just a total stranger came up to her and she said he was screaming gibberish at me and because I'm following this stuff I said do you remember what the gibberish was? And she said he kept talking about lizards. And so what really scares me is like we do have We have a mental health crisis. We have a lot of people under a massive amount of stress. And then we have these, you know, jokers, you know, like, I mean that in a very negative sense is in the joker like Steve Bannon who think it's fun to just see the culture with this chaos, but people are taking themselves, taking it seriously and they are very well armed.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at a few places, trans people, this idea that climate change is going to lock you in your house and that it's a cover from the Davos elites to take away your freedom. And some of it is going to this idea that aliens have already taken over the earth, and they're lizard people.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I just mean that there was just the hearings and like I'm interested in where the energy and heat of COVID is going to go now that the mandates are gone, right? Because people got a lot of followers. They were able to monetize that. And now the mandates aren't there. So where is that energy? Where's the next freedom convoy going to come from? Transfer.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no end. I mean, I think the entire Republican Party has really decided that this is where the juice is, the whole quote-unquote freedom caucus. I mean, even the way they're using aliens, I think right now you've got to have kind of a heat-seeking missile where there was so much.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People would like the first person to the microphone at almost every talk was why won't you admit that 9 11 was an inside job and that this whole thing was and I'd say why do you need 9-11 to have been an inside job? Hundreds of thousands of people have already died in Iraq. Why isn't that enough for you to get excited? Why are you trying to get me to admit that I believe in something that is not proven? And so but that I think explains why conspiracy culture is appealing to those who have a lot of power. I mean, what they get out of it is distraction from their real crimes too.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, definitely smarter than Trump. Yeah. I think more strategic, but I think Trump probably has a little bit more of a kind of a visceral. Instinct for what is just going to work on TV, right? But I think what they share is, you know, and they aren't the first people to believe it that they can just create reality. And so, what interests me and their skill at it because they make movies and they do reality television. And conspiracy culture is a way of not looking at what is hard right in front of us, right? You always move the horizon. You know, when I wrote the shock doctrine.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's called Strategy. It's also called political strategy. He also says his goal is to take power for a hundred years, and we should take him at his word.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he also really looks at, I think, the mistakes that we make in. He performs being willing to talk to people who he disagrees with the first time he had RFK Jr. on, for instance, gave him a whole show and talked about how unlike those people on MSNBC, I can talk to you despite the fact that we come from different political parties, things like that. And so that is a really important part of his move, right? It's whatever you are, I'm the opposite. And welcoming the people who've been like...”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so I often feel terrified though because you just have this sort of sense of what is being hidden from us, right? And this is something I write in the book that They get the facts wrong, but the feelings right. You know, this feeling of living in a world where important truths are not being foregrounded. I was listening to your episode about Elon Musk with Ronan Farrow, and it's like, well, no wonder people like Bannon and Musk love conspiracy theories because they deflect attention on the conspiracies in plain view, right? Right. So I think that's a big part of what Bannon is doing is just distraction. It's always been the game. It's the same game as Flood the Zone.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, doubt is our product, right? It's funny, somebody asked me if I was afraid of red pilling myself by listening to so much Bannon. Like, was I afraid that I was going to start agreeing with him? And I wasn't because he contradicts himself all the time. Right. You know, he'll platform anybody who is sowing chaos, right? So one day, you know, COVID is a cold. The next day it's a bioweapon, you know. And there's no attempt to reconcile these ideas, which completely contradict themselves.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, most of my work is focused on the climate crisis, and I've spent a fair bit of time studying how climate change deniers do their dirty work, right? And I've gone to conferences at the Heartland Institute, which is like the annual confab of all the climate change deniers. And their technique is very similar to Bannon's, right? You know, we talk about conspiracy theories, but this is conspiracy without a theory, as it's sometimes referred to in the social science. It's not like there's a coherent worldview that Bannon is putting forward in the same way that there isn't a coherent explanation for why the climate is changing if you go to a heartland conference. They just throw a whole bunch of doubt at the wall.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they've abandoned. You know, he did it in 2016 with free trade and deindustrialization. And he said, come on over here. And now he's doing it with the COVID moms. And now he's taking all the COVID complaints and mixing it with transphobia and mixing it with... Yeah, well, it's interesting.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a simultaneous appropriation and warping. But I also think we mirror, we also do our own mirroring back where when something becomes an issue in what I call the mirror world, in sort of polite, liberal and left circles, it becomes kind of unsayable sometimes. So something like the lab leak theory, right? That was treated very early on as like, well, that's just a conspiracy theory and we won't cover it and we won't talk about it. And now finally, there's some real journalism going on, which is what we need journalism to do, right? Like get to the bottom of it, or even something like the effect of prolonged school closures on kids with special needs. Why didn't we have more coverage of that? Well, because that was a mirror world issue. And then it becomes self-reinforcing because Bannon and the Bannons of the world, but he's particularly good at it, they look, the way they gain power is by looking at what issues are being neglected, traditional issues for the Democrats.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that's where mirrors of my mirrors of a lot of ideas that I care about and I think probably you care about as well get kind of twisted and turned into a warped version of themselves, right? And you see that in the way they appropriate anti-fascist iconography and discourse, right? I mean, the thing that worries me most about Bannon is that he's making common cause with some of the would-be fascists and fascists around the world. palling around with Orban, Bolsonaro, Georgia Miloney in Italy. But if you listen to him, he positions himself as an anti-fascist. Wolf is constantly talking about how people who were unvaccinated were treated like people who having to wear yellow stars during the Holocaust of the racial justice movement. I can't breathe. You have anti-mask protesters saying I can't. Breathe.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, the mirror world is a phrase I'm using to describe where my doppelganger is now, you know, where she hangs out with Carlson and Bannon. And it makes a replica of the world where me and my friends live, right? Where you have these kind of mere social media platforms, as you well know. You know, she got ejected from Twitter now X. You know, she's back. But she went to get her and, you know, just kept going created this kind of mirror politics. Listening to Bannon, you really get, he's very explicit about it. He's like, we need our own publishing, our own social media, our own currency, we need to create replicas so that he says we can never get canceled. We can never get disappeared. Right, create our own.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uncanny, hard to hold in her heads, like kind of wearing a Timothy Morton hyperobject moment doubles shrink things down to size. And I think that Wolf played that role for me as a writer, right? Like I'm overwhelmed by whatever Bannon is building right now. I'm overwhelmed by the way in which political signals are getting crossed and people are changing. And by looking at this double of myself, it helped me make sense of a lot of things.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, originally it did. The first piece of theoretical work about Doppelgangers was published by Otto Rank, who's a student of Freud's in the very first year of the First World War. So Europe is going into this spasm of violence. And he is trying from a psychoanalytic perspective to make sense of why Doppelgangers are everywhere in the arts. And he's looking at films like The Student of Prague And then there's another spasm around the Second World War where Doppelgangers get used to make sense of the fascism within our own societies, with even perhaps within ourselves, most famously by Charlie Chaplin with the great dictator, where he plays both the Hitler-esque dictator and the Jewish barber and then swaps places. So I think when we are in a moment where reality is terrifying.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah, it's been around since the 1700s in German. Originally, it had a very foreboding meaning. You know, if you came face to face with your double, that meant you were going to die. And there is this idea that doubles carry messages. They're kind of ominous. But what's interesting about them, Freud wrote about doppelgangers as an example of the uncanny, in an essay called The Uncanny, where he defines the uncanny as the species of frightening that is frightening because it takes something that was once familiar and makes it strange, right? So when it's yourself that is strange, that's a particularly profound kind of uncanniness, right? And I think in the AI era, more and more people are having that experience of watching somebody who seems to be you who is not you, right? Because you can make Dapplegangers made by others, but then we also make our own doppel gangers. That's what our evidence is.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's interesting about that is that she is sort of a doppelganger of who she used to be, right? She's one of these people who has changed who's become.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I see her as a case study for a phenomenon that is much, much bigger than her. I mean, almost everybody I talk to tells me a story, sometimes, you know, very privately in hushed tones about a sister, a father, you know, somebody who has disappeared down the quote-unquote rabbit hole, who's become a doppelganger of themselves, right? Like not who they used to be. And I think that's what's interesting about having this perennial confusion with Wolf. And it really is very widespread at certain points. It's been like a favorite joke of left Twitter is like.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Track everybody, bring a social credit system, a Chinese style social credit system to the United States was her line. She put out a video that went viral that said that they were going to bring slavery forever to the West.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of many, many people we've seen this happen to, right? And it's a cover, it's a bioweapon, it's, you know, masks are trying to destroy our children. And then she went very, first she went very hard on a vaccine verification apps, which should never have been called vaccine passports, but were called vaccine passports. That's when she started getting deplatformed on social media, like Twitter, but then she got some very big new platforms on Steve Bannon's podcast. At certain points, she was on every single day. She was on Tucker Carlson's old show. She was on other Fox News shows where she would say basically. Not basically literally that these vaccine apps were a kind of CCP, Bill Gates, Fauci plot to bring.”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She got real panicky. Yeah, I mean, she had dabbled in conspiracy theory before. You know, there was stuff about chemtrails and 5G and even like very strange things about ISIS beheading crisis actors. Yeah. But during COVID, it was...”
2023-09-07 · On with Kara Swisher · What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT