The libs’ sneer about conspiracy theorists misses that their surveillance grievances are real

Evidence

It is a serious mistake to underestimate her, or the movements she now helps to lead. Because here is a non-snide version of the “Wait until they hear about cell phones” quip: They know all about cell phones. They just don’t know what to do about cell phones (or smart speakers or search histories or shadow banning or email and social media metadata…). And neither, it seems, does anyone else, including those in power, who are patently unwilling to rein in what the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism.” And Wolf, with her “Five Freedoms” campaign and her calls for anti-vax civil disobedience, is giving her followers something to do. She is telling them that it’s not too late to get their privacy, and their freedoms, back. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 268

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is Klein’s diagnostic method in miniature: she takes the sneer, de-snides it, and recovers the legitimate core. Worth testing whether this move survives into the Israel/Palestine chapters.
• SEED: The insight that grievance-based movements win by ‘giving followers something to do’ while libs offer only rueful resignation — a possible essay angle on why effective critique requires an affirmative program.
• DEFINE: Invokes Zuboff’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ as the frame for the chapter.
• XREF: connects to: Left and right criticized federal surveillance for opposite reasons — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 374