Bannon’s gaming immersion taught him avatars feel more real than lives

Evidence

Interestingly, one person who is rather cavalier about the possibility of our digital doubles usurping us is Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former campaign manager and chief strategist, now a full-time propagandist for authoritarian and neofascist movements from Italy to Brazil. In the 2000s, way before his Trump days, he worked at a company called Affinity Media (previously Internet Gaming Entertainment) in Hong Kong and got a crash course in multiplayer gaming. He told the documentarian Errol Morris that he was struck by the realization that, for the players, these games felt more real than real life. And the digital doubles they had created online—their avatars—seemed more real than their real, embodied selves. By way of example, he talked about a notional “Dave in Accounting” who leads a dreary, unremarkable life but turns into “Ajax,” a gun-toting evil-slayer, when he is at home with his gaming console. “Now who’s more real,” Bannon asked—Dave or Ajax? You might say Dave, but Bannon saw it differently. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 191

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: Bannon’s Hong Kong gaming-company years as the overlooked biographical origin of the January 6 ‘be your avatar’ strategy.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion—treating the projected self as the real one and the actual self as something to be replaced—is the precise psychological mechanism Klein later maps onto the Capitol rioters and the conspiratorial right.