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At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. the break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

— The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. by Charles Darwin (The works of Charles Darwin ;) (26%)

The flip side of the post-World War II cries of "Never again" was in unspoken "Never before." The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a great cost.

— Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (Page 260)

Doch wel hebben wij het recht om U, Hollanders, de vraag te stellen: indien dan slavernij de grondslag eener cultuur is,welke tempels hebt gij dan in Suriname gebouwd, welke gedichten geschreven, welke verheven gedachten aan het nageslacht overgeleverd? Is het niet waar, dat gij verlegen staan zoudt, indien gij ook slechts één standbeeld in Suriname op moest richten voor Hollanders, die door daden van den geest beroemd zijn geworden?

Gij zoudt slechts de beeltenis van een aantal krijgslieden in brons kunnen gieten, die er in geslaagd zijn de dorpen der Marrons, (de opstandelingen), met hun modernere wapens te vernielen, - een Vaillant, een Mayland, Creutz en Nepveu. Maar zelfs dan zoudt ge moeten erkennen, dat uw bekwaamste gouverneurs en de krijgslieden die u verdedigd hebben, telkens opnieuw uit Europa geïmporteerd moesten worden, omdat de bezittende klasse in Suriname door weelde en overdaad te snel degenereerde, dan dat zij zelf bekwame krachten voort kon brengen.

— Wij slaven van Suriname by Anton de Kom (20%)

Misschien hebt gij, blanke lezer, op school geleerd hoe het Mauritshuis in Den Haag met de kostbaarste Braziliaansche houtsoorten is betimmerd. Wanneer gij dan vol bewondering voor die betimmering stil staat, verzoeken wij u te bedenken hoe het onze moeders waren, die met deze zware last op hun hoofden dag in dag uit (want de Zondag was een instelling, die de Christelijke beschavers verzuimden in Suriname in te voeren) sjouwden over heuvelachtige terreinen, door poelen en moerassen, altijd bedreigd door de zweep die uw voorouders hanteerden.

— Wij slaven van Suriname by Anton de Kom (15%)

De Hollander is ongetwijfeld een goed koopman. En waarom zou hij zijn winst niet verhoogen door te profiteeren van die natuurlijke eigenschappen, die God nu eenmaal ook in de menschen in een zwarte huid gelegd heeft?

Ook de zwarte bezit nu eenmaal een zekere aanhankelijkheid jegens zijn vrouw en kinderen. Wanneer men den zwarte koopt zonder zijn gezin, is de kans niet denkbeeldig dat de kooper schade zal lijden, doordien de ‘vervloekte [n-woord]’ straks wegvlucht, om te trachten zijn gezin weer te vinden. De heeren der Compagnie weten dit,en met opzet houden zij dus bij de verschillende partijen die onder de hamer komen den man en zijn gezin gescheiden,om zoo mogelijk den kooper te bewegen ook nog een tweede partij met vrouw en kinderen voor zijn rekening te nemen.

— Wij slaven van Suriname by Anton de Kom (13%)

In essence, Big Tech has appropriated commonly held tools for private gain, while adopting the discourse of the commons to describe their gated platforms. For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, he described it as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”

He was right about that—why then should it be held hostage to the capricious whims of one man? Like decolonial movements of the last century up until the modern day, we could fight to claim back the vital common assets we have lost. Tarnoff’s recommendations are less a prescriptive checklist of to-dos than an urgent call for experimentation. There is no silver bullet for deprivatizing the information sphere, but, he argues, the internet can be taken back piece by piece, including through internet service providers owned by communities rather than conglomerates. Tarnoff cautions, however, that this is not something the political class, enmeshed and entwined with Silicon Valley at every level, is going to do on its own: “From the edges to the core, from the neighborhoods to the backbones, making a democratic internet must be the work of a movement.”

The trouble, once again, is that the kind of mass movement Tarnoff is describing does not yet exist. And it is inside this vacuum that my doppelganger is currently wreaking havoc. Because Wolf, with her Black Mirror–inspired stories about vaccine apps that can “turn off your life,” not only validates those latent tech fears but also, along with her new partner Steve Bannon, has something progressives lack: a plan for what to do about it, or at least a facsimile of one. The plan is to push “Five Freedoms” and “no mask” laws wherever you live. The plan is to barge into your local school board meeting, accuse its members of being Nazis, and get elected to take their place. The plan is to stick it to Big Tech by subscribing to new right-wing platforms and “stay ahead of the censors,” as Bannon’s tagline declares. The plan is to get you to send them money, to join their wars.

— Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

It is, moreover, extremely dangerous and troubling that corporate platforms can arbitrarily delete users and cut them off from the web of connections they built with their own words, images, and labor over years.

When Wolf says that “they start purging your enemies, then they purge you,” she’s not wrong. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, progressives in North America had been pretty complacent about this threat because it had mostly been their political adversaries getting booted off platforms. But well before Musk started suspending the accounts of Twitter users who displeased him, the same kinds of power abuses had deplatformed Palestinian human rights activists at the behest of the Israeli government, and advocates for the rights of farmers and religious minorities at the behest of India’s Hindu-supremacist government. Yet in North America, raising the alarm about the fact that we have outsourced the management of our critical informational pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies, working hand in glove with governments, somehow became the terrain of the Bannonite political right, which points to a dangerous ceding of ideological territory.

Establishing a democratic, noncorporate media—through public broadcasting and community access to the airwaves—was once a core progressive demand. Though there are civil liberties groups that still stand up against corporate censorship, as well as civil rights groups that fight for net neutrality, progressives today have not, for the most part, made fighting for a democratic and accountable information sphere a cornerstone of their political agenda. On the contrary, many happily cheered corporate deplatformings - until the same dynamics came for them.

— Doppelganger by Naomi Klein