DeKALB- On April 2, the Rebuilding Democracy Lecture Series hosted Naomi Klein, an award-winning journalist, bestselling author and activist to discuss democracy in America, the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence and the impact of common cause across divides.

The virtual discussion, co-hosted by Dr. Robert Brinkmann, was followed by a short Q&A section with questions from the audience.

The current state of democracy, especially in the United States, was a common theme throughout the discussion. 

“The countries where we took democracy for granted, like the United States, are looking pretty dubious,” Klein said. “Corporations have grown more and more politically powerful year after year. The line between government and corporation has grown blurrier and blurrier as time has gone on to the point where we have the sort of CEO president famous for being a businessman, not a politician, which is Donald Trump, who outsources most of the government to the richest man in the world on a good day, Elon Musk, who’s not elected, not confirmed, not accountable.”

Klein’s 2007 book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” is a great book for people to read right now, according to Brinkmann. 

“According to what you’ve written, using cataclysmic events to implement significant social, economic and political change has been going on for decades. It feels like it might be waiting, at least in the United States,” Brinkmann said.

Klein expanded on using shock strategies. 

“Ronald Reagan used these sort of shock strategies, firing air traffic controllers in one fell swoop as opposed to letting them strike. It’s been going on for a long time and so many functions of the state have already been privatized,” Klein said. “So when you have Donald Trump, who is a shock machine, we all feel this sense of overwhelm. You can’t possibly keep up with a magnitude of change.

 There’s a signal in the noise, Klein said, referring to the changes being made at the federal level. “It is really eliminating whole limbs of the US government and I think it’s more extreme simply because there’s so much that’s already been privatized, deregulated, now you really are cutting at the very heart of the state.”  

Corporations view science as a threat and are seeking revenge, according to Klein.

“All science does is tell them stuff they can’t do. That they can’t keep spewing carbon, that they can’t keep their businesses open when millions of people are dying,” Klein said. “A lot of these tech companies have been very angry that their workers have been resistant to coming back to work in person.”

Klein said large tech companies are feigning ignorance when the impact of scientific research is lower profits.

“It’s almost like a kid putting their hands over their ears and going, ‘I can’t hear you…If you don’t do the research to say this is happening, then I can pretend that it’s not happening and do whatever I want, which is what I should be able to do because I’m a gazillionaire,’” Klein said. “I think the scientific community might be in a bit of denial about the extent to which research is seen as a direct threat to profit by some of the wealthiest interests in the world.”

Klein’s newest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (2023),” was a pandemic project for her. 

“This is much more about the journey and it uses the fact that I have a doppelganger, another Naomi writer who I get confused with,” Klein said.

The other “Naomi writer” is Naomi Wolf, a feminist who started gaining traction online during the pandemic by posting medical disinformation. The two were often confused in online spaces.

“At first, I would try to correct the record…it was very weird and vertiginous because we all sort of felt like we were losing ourselves during the pandemic. All things that tell us who we are they’re no longer accessible to us,” Klein said. “We’re in our homes, we can’t socialize.” 

Socializing online became problematic for her during the pandemic. 

”When I’d go online to get some simulation of the social that I was missing, I would just get screamed at about things that she has done,” she said “I realized that this was actually an interesting microcosm for the way we were all being deranged and we all have these doubles.”

These “doubles” range from how AI is a double of culture, how our online appearance is a double of who we are, and even extends to politics.

“The idea that facism is the double of our liberal democracies. That we contain the fascist within us, individually and collectively. It can tip nearer than we would like to believe,” Klein said. “We want to believe it is the monstrous other, but it might be a part of us and it might be something that we could tip into if we’re not careful. So it’s an important warning to heed when reality starts doubling in the way that it has.”

Another topic of importance was AI and Klein’s opinion on its widespread usage.

“Ultimately, I think it’s about that we feel the demands on us are impossible,” Klein said. “I have concerns about what it does to creativity, what it does to jobs, but it feels vampiric to me. In the sense that it’s feeding off the creativity, ingenuity, everything that humans have created over time, and then mirroring it back.”

Artificial intelligence is a drain on valuable human resources, Klein said. 

”If we go as far down the road as Silicon Valley would like us to go in inflating this AI bubble, it will drain the life out of our actual world.”

Among other roles, Klein is a climate activist. She has advice for people who want to work in fields surrounding the climate.

“Don’t delude yourself into believing that the problem is that they don’t understand how important your research is. They understand that knowledge is a threat,” Klein said. “It’s not that they don’t know. Instead, there has to be a very broad coalition about investing in this actual realm, this one planet, that we are in. Facism wins when antifascism fractures and doesn’t make common cause, common alliance, across differences.”