The mirror world

Liked Pluralistic: Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

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.

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… Your own brand – something we’re increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

Another place I saw it was in Pete Brown’s reflection on an interview about masking with a public health official: “I think that something has gone seriously wrong with our public discourse if we find epidemiologists and public health professionals questioning whether community masking during the height of the worst pandemic of our lifetimes was a good idea.”

We start to anticipate their warped complaints, giving them more credence than they deserve. Their perspective becomes the de facto framing for society’s conversations and seeps into how people think, a corrosive ideology centered on self-interest and rejection of the collective.

As Doctorow asks:

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“?

See also:

They’re so close to right

Why others get upset when you mask

Free speech distortion, cancel culture confusion

Distortion and distraction