Co-opted revolutionary iconography normalized the disassociation of words from reality.

Evidence

But there was a bigger picture that I didn’t quite see, and that was the all-out war on meaning that this new stage of progressive-cloaked capitalism represented. In the end, what mattered most about those campaigns was the boldness with which they were broadcasting that, from here on out, nothing means anything anymore: if MLK and Gandhi and Bob Dylan can all be conscripted as neoliberal shills, then absolutely anything and anyone can be severed from their contexts and made to mean their precise opposite. The story beneath the story was the normalization of the disassociation between words from reality, which could only usher in the era of irony and flat detachment, because those seemed like the only self-respecting postures to adopt in a world in which everyone was lying all the time. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 505

Categorization

• XREF: Direct precursor to the Mirror World thesis and diagonalism — this is Klein establishing the ‘war on meaning’ that the doppelganger device will later track. Also echoes Max Horkheimer/Adorno’s culture-industry critique. — connects to: Revolutionary ideology was routinized into beauty product copywriting
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that co-optation’s deeper function is not hiding exploitation but normalizing ‘nothing means anything anymore’ — a mechanism that actively produces irony and detachment as the only self-respecting postures — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how late capitalism seeded its own epistemic collapse.