Brand-building leaders and rage algorithms hollowed out the left’s mass movements from within

Evidence

The greatest cause of my mounting despair, though, was none of this. It was when the mass movements that had grown so rapidly in recent years—staging climate strikes, supporting Sanders and other insurgent candidates, filling the streets with calls for racial justice—started dividing and devouring themselves from the inside, often with people who were clearly building their personal brands at the forefront of the divisions. With online clout too often determining movement leadership, and few ways to hold those leaders accountable, conflict and mistrust easily spread, supercharged by algorithms hooked on rage and egged on by fake accounts and Russian bots that heaped salt on all our open wounds. The predatory corporate logics that earlier iterations of the left recognized as our enemies were clearly deep inside us now: in the arteries that connected us, in our habits of mind, in our very cells. It felt like nothing could be trusted, least of all one another. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1049

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the book’s Mirror World thesis in reverse: the left metabolizing the same corporate/algorithmic logics it opposed, connecting to the diagonalism theme elsewhere in the book. — connects to: Left protest shifted from workplace to spectacle because it lacked embedded organizations. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 156; The MBL misappropriated the left’s protest repertoire and image — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 671; Fear of organizational abuse paralyzed the left into ceding power to enemies — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 905 (+2 more)