Far-right vaccine-passport fears draw on real surveillance infrastructure

Evidence

Remembering this helps me to understand Other Naomi, and the sudden power she has found in terrifying large numbers of people with claims of “tyrannical” vaccine passports with a “CCP-style social credit score system.” She is tapping into these barely submerged fears, which are rooted not in fantasy, but reality. Vaccine passports aren’t a social credit system, but social media itself kind of is. Those QR codes on our phones aren’t putting our lives under constant surveillance, but as all those clever jokes suggest, our phones themselves and many other smart devices are, or at least could. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 280

Categorization

• XREF: This is the analytic heart of the doubling device: Klein uses her doppelganger’s claims, which she dismissed as fantasy, to see that real surveillance exists — just installed elsewhere. Textbook example of the method.
• DEEPTHINKING: The resolution that the fears are ‘rooted not in fantasy, but reality’ — while redirecting the reality to social media rather than vaccine passports — shows the device’s payoff: the Mirror World metabolizing a real grievance. This is the crux of how the book holds together.