#no logo

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

Tomorrow (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

I learned this rhyme in Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's indescribable semi-memoir that is (more or less) about the way that people confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and how that fact has taken on a new urgency as Wolf descended into conspiratorial politics, becoming a far-right darling and frequent Steve Bannon guest:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the two Naomis' divergence – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjcwVhFhTA

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf's politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to "empower" individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

The past forty years have seen the rise and rise of a right wing politics that started out extreme (think of Reagan and Thatcher's support for Pinochet's death-squads) and only got worse. Liberals and leftists forged an uneasy alliance, with liberals in the lead (literally, in Canada, where today, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party governs in partnership with the nominally left NDP).

But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot.

Lacking any kind of transformational agenda, the liberal answer to capitalism's problems always comes down to minor tweaks ("making sure half of our rulers are women, queers and people of color") rather than meaningful, structural shifts. This leaves liberals in the increasingly absurd position of defending the indefensible: insisting that the FDA shouldn't be questioned despite its ghastly failures during the opioid epidemic; claiming that the voting machine companies whose defective products have been the source of increasingly urgent technical criticism are without flaw; embracing the "intelligence community" as the guardians of the best version of America; cheerleading for deindustrialization while telling the workers it harmed with "learn to code"; demanding more intervention in speech by our monopolistic tech companies; and so on.

It's not like leftists ever stopped talking about the importance of transformation and not just reform. But as the junior partners in the progressive coalition, leftists have been drowned out by liberal reformers. In most of the world, if you are worried about falling wages, corporate capture of government, and scientific failures due to weak regulators, the "progressive" answer was to tell you it was all in your head, that you were an unhinged conspiratorialist:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2

For Klein, it's this failure that the faux-populist right has exploited, redirecting legitimate anger and fear into racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist and transphobic rage. The deep-pocketed backers of the conservative movement didn't just find a method to get turkeys to vote for Christmas – progressives created the conditions that made that method possible.

If progressives answer pregnant peoples' concerns about vaccine risks – concerns rooted in the absolute failure of prenatal care – with dismissals, while conservatives accept those concerns and funnel them into conspiratorialism, then progressives' message becomes, "We are the movement of keeping things as they are," while conservatives become the movement of "things have to change." Think here of the 2016 liberal slogan, "America was already great," as an answer to the faux-populist rallying cry, "Make America great again."

When liberals get to define what it means to be "progressive," the fundamental, systemic critique is swept away. Conservatives – conservatives! – get to claim the revolutionary mantle, to insist that they alone are interested in root-and-branch transformation of society.

Like the two Naomis, conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. Progressives cede anti-surveillance to conservatives, defending reverse warrants when they're used to enumerate Jan 6 insurrectionists (nevermind that these warrants are mostly used to round up BLM demonstrators). Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

These issues are transformed in the mirror world: from grave concerns about real things, into unhinged conspiracies about imaginary things. Urgent environmental concerns are turned into a pretense to ban offshore wind turbines ("to protect the birds"). Worry about gender equality is transformed into seminars about women's representation in US drone-killing squads.

For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and "clean eating" to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and "natural" living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on "personal choices," leads inexorably to eugenics.

Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn't a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we're increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

The mirror world's overwhelming motif is "I know you are, but what am I?" As in, "Oh, you're a socialist? Well, you know that 'Nazi' stands for 'National Socialist, right?" (and inevitably, this comes from someone who obsesses over the 'Great Replacement' and considers themself a 'race realist').

This isn't serious politics, but it is seriously important. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," its obsession with "international bankers" the mirror-world version of the real and present danger from big finance and private equity wreckers. And, as Klein discusses with great nuance and power, the antisemitism discussion is eroded from both sides: both by antisemites, and by doctrinaire Zionists who insist that any criticism of Israel is always and ever antisemetic.

As a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians, I found this section of the book especially good – thoughtful and vigorous, pulling no punches and still capturing the discomfort aroused by this deliberately poisoned debate.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

I'll be Klein's interlocutor tomorrow night (Sept 6) at the LA launch for Doppelganger. We'll be appearing at 7PM at the @LAPublicLibrary:

https://lafl.org/ALOUD

Livestreaming at:

https://youtube.com/live/jIoAh-jxb2k

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

#naomi klein #naomi wolf #conspiratorialism #climate #shock doctrine #race #antisemitism #gender #feminism #books #reviews #no logo #corporatism #heel turns #realignment #power #leftism vs liberalism #gift guide #rabbit holes #memoir #israel #zionism #pluralistic

[walrusmagazine]

What Naomi Klein Learned about Herself from Naomi Wolf

A Q&A on doppelgangers, celebrity, and searching for answers

One of the reasons that I wanted to write this book is that I wanted to find my way back to some of the material I wrote about in my first book, No Logo. The landscape has changed so much since I first started writing about personal branding in the ’90s. There are threads in the book around the doubling of the self and the self taking up too much space. Even having kids is a form of doubling the self. I think this has such a deep impact on how we relate to each other, how we’re able to trust social movements. I really believe that we are not going to get out of any of the messes we’re in until we can find ways to work more robustly with others and in collective spaces. Anything that softens the icy edges of identity, melts them a little bit, is going to be helpful in that. Doppelgangers do that. They force you to reckon with the fact that maybe we aren’t as unique as we might believe. Being confused with someone else can be liberating.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

#Books #Naomi Klein #Naomi Wolf #Doppelganger #No Logo #Illustration #Fall Books #Sean Michaels

[tik-tok-ify-the-tumblbeast]

#amaury guichon #the chocolate guy #love that little logo

[hell0mega]

people are drawing Steamboat Willie Mickey doing all this crazy shit and whatnot, but you could always do that. you can do that now, with current Mickey, just fine. it's fanart and it's legally protected. hell you could take Disney-drawn Mickey and put a caption about unions or whatever on it and it would still be protected under free speech and sometimes even parody law.

what is special about public domain is that you can SELL him. you could take a screenshot and sell it on a tshirt. you can use him to advertise your plumbing business. people have already uploaded and monetized the original film.

you could always have Mickey say what you want, but now you can profit off it.

#steamboat willie #Mickey mouse #Disney #public domain #you can't trademark him as like a logo or mascot of your plumbing business i just mean like #you can slap him in your commercial or side of the van #i just have seen soooo many people make ORIGINAL art of him and I'm like #no that's not the point!! you can already do that!!! #(obvs if it's a comic or something talking about him being free or whatever then yeah like i get it) #(but those people who put him as a fighter in their game?? Quinton reviews uploading the original video?? boss shit) #(THAT'S what it's about)

[thoughtsandstripes]

No Logo

#no logo

[skellydun]

I don't think I'm meant to be employed. It really cuts into my goofy silly haha time. and it makes it nearly impossible to have any wow life is beautiful let me take it in time.

#guess what our employee appreciation gift was. a chair. 100+ dollars on a camping chair for each HQ employee? why not just... #i was just like gee. glad u appreciate me. u ever heard of how companies can shower u with free swag but it doesnt distract from the #horrible culture??? #like yes dont give us that 100 dollars but give me an ugly chair with our company logo that i had to lug up a hill. #im just tired of this aspect of HR i think. need me some new scenery

[joaniejustwokeup]

I’ll admit, I’m going to miss the little wizard guy. However I do like this thing where they completely change their logo randomly every few months.

I’ve started a collection:

#tumblr #tumblr icons #tumblr logo

[pianokantzart]

A little obsessed with the "utterly burnt out & can't quite figure out how to make it work in this economy" depiction of Mario in the concept art.

Look at him. He's so tired.

#You just want to give him a hug and a crisp 20$ #Makes me wonder if they were planning on having Mario with a lot less self confidence at the beginning #which explains the ''Super Luigi Bros'' logo #It would've been a lil weird but I'm also kinda here for it #I'm rolling this around in my mind as an AU #Super Mario Bros #Mario Movie #Mario movie concept art

[redsray]

i love the idea of the batfam wearing each other's merch cause like. i know they'd be petty about it. usually they'd wear their siblings merch in (kinda) equal rotations, but they'd change it up depending on sibling squabbles or sibling favours. Tim, walking into the kitchen in a Red Hood shirt: Dick: TIM!? Tim: what Dick: it's Tuesday. you always wear Nightwing merch on Tuesdays. Tim: oh. Tim: you stole my last granola bar, last week. Steph, looking for something in Jason's room: JASON WHY DO YOU HAVE EVERYONE'S MERCH BUT MINE?! Jason, peeking into the room: i have your merch. in the trash. Steph: WHY Jason: you hit me with a blue shell in mario kart last game night. i'm never forgiving you. Damian, sporting a full-on Red Robin hoodie: Tim: woah. what brought this on? you usually only exclusively wear Batman or Nightwing merch Damian: you helped me take that splinter out of Alfred's paw yesterday. Richard on the other hand has recently messed up my painting palette. Dick, from the other room: IT WAS AN ACCIDENT! Damian: he'll get over it. Cass, wearing Nightwing merch for the 5th day in a row: Jason: goddamn. what did Dickie do to get in your good graces like this? Cass, smiling: he made me a flower crown Jason: ... that's it? Cass: it was a very nice flower crown. Dick, buying seven Signal shirts: One for everyone. Duke, behind him: Dick, you really don't-- Dick: shhhh, sunshine. everyone will love your new merch. (they all wore exclusively Signal merch for a week straight) Bruce isn't allowed to change up his rotation or not wear someone's merch because he immediately gets accused of playing favourites. He'd rather keep some of his sanity, thank you.

#batfam #batman #cassandra cain #damian wayne #dc comics #dick grayson #duke thomas #jason todd #stephanie brown #tim drake #bruce wore a black bat shirt twice in a row once #cause he mistook it for his own merch #and got flamed by the whole family for playing favourites #he never made the mistake again #they all have mugs with their logos on them btw #source? trust me bro

[notesmuseum]

The iconic LIFE magazine, now mostly an online only entity, was established in 1883. In 1936, publisher Henry Luce, the owner of Time Inc., purchased the company for $92,000, transforming its focus to visual storytelling. Its popularity exceeded all expectations, with circulation peaking at over 13.5 million copies per week during its heyday. The cover of the 26 April 1937 edition, featuring Torkel Korling's photograph of a white leghorn rooster with a beautifully detailed cockscomb, is particularly memorable for its absence of the signature red and white 'LIFE' masthead. Luce had tasked Al Zingaro, a layout artist working the nightshift, to create a cover showcasing Korling's rooster photo. Zingaro quickly obliged but something wasn't right. Luce felt the masthead and cockscomb clashed. As the clock ticked past midnight, and despite Zingaro's redrafts, they couldn't agree on the LIFE logo's placement. Zingaro recalled the pivotal moment: 'I said, “Mr. Luce, we are at an impasse.” He was silent for all of 30 seconds then the thunderclap! “Let us omit the logo entirely. This fine photo must not be tampered with,” he said. “We’ll put LIFE in the red banner below in small type."'

Luce's resolve to temporarily demote his fledgling magazine's branding, driven by his concern for preserving the artistic integrity of a photograph of a rooster, is truly admirable. By removing the masthead, the cover gains a timeless quality and aesthetic durability that allows it to resonate both in the 1930s and nearly a century later in the 2020s.

#LIFE #magazine #magazine cover #design #graphic design #artistic integrity #photography #logo #logo design #masthead #life magazine #visual storytelling #no logo #layout #aesthetic layouts #graphics #header #1930s #1937 #timeless #timelessness

[berlinauslander]

Secondary Boycotts

There are, however, ways around this obstacle, as the Lubicon Cree discovered when the Japanese pulp-and-paper giant Daishowa Marubeni-International unveiled plans for a major logging and mill operation on land that the Cree claimed was rightfully theirs. The area in Northern Alberta has been the subject of a fierce land-claim dispute in which the Canadian government has managed to avoid negotiating a settlement for sixty-five years. In the mean-time, logging and mining have caused massive damage to the ecosystem and to the Lubicon way of life. So when Daishowa refused to withdraw its $500 million logging operation until the land claim was settled, the Lubicon saw it as the final straw. If neither the government nor the company would listen, they would have to go after Daishowa directly. But how? Daishowa is hardly a household name - it cuts down trees and turns them into paper goods that it then sells in bulk to other large corporations.

#boycotts #capitalism #daishowa #no logo #naomi klein

[ashtonderoy]

Review of Naomi Klein's No Logo.

Written by Ashton Deroy Some of this I knew, but I will give any author a 5-star review if they teach me something. I did not know about Free Trade Zones. I was already pretty anti-Libertarian but I am glad I heard about this. I can use this source to show that Small Government is merely corporate tyranny. We are past the days when Small Government is realistic & will bring dignity or prosperity…

View On WordPress

#Anti-Trust #Ashton Deroy #Autism #Belleville Ontario #Big government #Blogging #Business Diploma #Business student #Diversity #Economics #Google Play #Kingston Ontario #Loyalist College #Marxism #Naomi Klein #Nike #No Logo #Seneca #Shell #Social Democrat #Socialism #Socialist #St. Lawrence College #Toronto

[cryptidjeepers]

I hope random brands turn their logo rainbow for no goddamn reason. I hope they do it even if its a desperate bid to seem supportive. I dont fucking care if its shallow. Bud light made a limited edition rainbow can and white men with big trucks took machine guns on them. Target runs a line of admittedly cringe rainbow merchandise and is the subject of domestic terrorism. A random company going rainbow for a month is shallow but its showing the people that want to kill us that they can't win. The pride flag will be everywhere and itll piss them off and theres nothing they can do about it. No matter how much violence and hatred they dish out, they'll be too many goddamn companies to boycott, to threaten. You dont have to buy shit from them, just use rainbow capitalism against them.

#pride month #sorry this is a bit stream of conscious i am just angry #and laughing at how many pissed off people are going to wake up tomorrow to their favourite brand having a rainbow logo

[staffs-secret-blog]

So that's where they're getting all their designs

#These designs are really nice #competition to design the tumblr logo

[darcyolsson]

look i dislike the corporate artstyle book cover trend as much as the next person but we cant pretend every book looking the same is something new. if you stepped into a bookstore in 2013 there would be approximately 57 books whose cover art consisted of a girl in a ballgown with her back half-turned to the camera photoshopped into a vaguely fantasy-like landscape. i was 11 years old fighting for my life to find the right maximalistic girl and her single-adjective book title we cannot forget the horrors i went through please be respectful of my experiences

#and after that every book had a logo on it and a title like an x of y and z #and now its minimalism and titles like the hating kiss game #publishing trends are forever.... #personal

[deer-butch]

hey instead of bullying or scaring you into switching to firefox, let me tell you why i LOVE firefox and how my online life has improved significantly since installing it

- the setup process is easy, and even fun! if you’re using tumblr rn, you can handle it, and if you’re the kind of tumblr user who likes customizing your blog or tinkering with xkit, you can have a lot of fun personalizing really granular settings and picking themes and extensions and everything, it’s very customizable and i happily spent like 2 hours getting everything perfect.

- you can use a command line entry tool to change specific settings right from the search bar! i did this to make firefox stop auto filling my email information since i use a different password locker (which you should too! try bitwarden!), and it was easier than digging through a bunch of submenus for a setting i wasn’t sure existed. you can just turn shit off!

- there’s a preset theme called aurora that’s purple and VERY pretty

- once you get ublock origin and as many other blockers as you’d like set up, no ads, anywhere, ever! streaming sites, youtube, all the basics, totally no stress and no compatibility issues for me

- in browser screenshot and picture in picture functions!! holy shit i use these every day, the PiP is especially helpful, it replaced an extension i used to use on chrome and it’s leagues better and works on all video content pretty much

- overall better downloads management imo, it’s a lot easier to get to your downloads and find them later

- better bookmark system, with the ability to organize your bookmarks with searchable tags and assign them a shortcut you can type into the search bar to go to

- containers! you can have two accounts to the same website open in two different tabs and switch between them without having to switch accounts. also gives firefox the ability to contain facebook and their trackers, so you can click that party invite link without feeling like you just let mark zuckerberg into your house

these were just off the top of my head, i love firefox a lot and actively enjoy using it, which i never felt with chrome! please download firefox!! you will not regret it!!! where’s your fucking rage!!!!!! go!!!!!!!!!

#buck speaks #firefox #i’m also going to make an extensions starter pack post because with like #10 extensions firefox becomes the best browser ever #i constantly just forget that ads exist #and get confused and annoyed when i have to look at them on other peoples computers #HALF OF YOUTUBES HOMEPAGE IS ADS? #crazy #anyway i’d get the firefox logo tatted i love her sm