Rastin Mehr

What is fascism? Is someone who disagrees with your progressive values a fascist or far-right? Jason Stanley’s book “How Fascism Works” provides a solid checklist to identify fascist narratives by conservative-leaning and right-wing governments and political parties. Some come directly from Hitler’s Mein Kampf book and are repackaged in charming and inviting coded language such as “family values,” “protecting the children,” and “personal responsibility.”

The book provides examples of how far-right leaders and conservative political parties use these narratives in different countries worldwide, specifically the United States, and how they create a politics of Us vs. Them, in which the “us” are the members of a chosen group that are superior and more deserving than “other” groups.

Some of the ideas were references to a mythic past when things were better, such as the MAGA slogan, the use of propaganda to widen the urban and rural conflicts, anti-intellectualism targeted towards scientists and journalists, vilifying the journalists and creating an alternate reality of alternative facts, having a hierarchical point of view of society and the world in general, victimhood and claiming that their values and livelihoods are under attack by the “other” groups, claiming that the members of “us” group believe in “Law and Order,” and having constant sexual anxieties and wanting to restrict rights and autonomy of women and LGBTQ+ communities while enforcing traditional heteronormative and gender binary ideas as family values and protection for children.

The book is a little over 193 pages; it is fluid, if not emotionally heavy. It is suitable for all ages, and I strongly encourage you to read it; you won’t be disappointed! I even bought more than one copy for friends and family members.

A case of mistaken identity and misattribution inspired Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. A prominent feminist figure turned conspiracy theorist and anti-waxer, Naomi Wolf had been spreading misinformation on her social media posts, and the general public mistakenly attributed those quotes to Naomi Klien, who at first tried to ignore it but later had to defend her name by writing a book about it.

Doppelganger also represents the mirror universe of misinformation and conspiracy theories that grow parallel to our objective reality. Klien goes down the rabbit hole of mainstream conspiracy theories and hate groups such as QAnon, Diagolon, COVID Conspiracies, The Freedom Convoy insurrection in Canada, and the January 6th insurrection in the US.

Doppelganger is about 350 pages long and is a fluid and addictive book. It was one of the best books I have read this year.

Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine is the story of the Luddite movement in 19th-century England. Luddites were groups of English textile workers displaced by automation technologies and struggled to protect their livelihoods.

In contemporary English, we refer to people who oppose new technologies as Luddites, but Luddites were neither against new technologies nor technological automation. They wanted income, food, and housing security; they wanted a share of the fruits of their labour that helped textile entrepreneurs maximize the performance of their technologies and minimize their reliance on human labour to the point that industrialists were hiring children as machine operators.

In some gruesome accounts, many of these children ended up crushed to death inside these factory machines. Sometimes, their employers wouldn’t stop the machines to save a child caught in the machine because stopping the machines could hurt productivity. Workers had to continue to work while their co-worker’s bodies were being crushed and mangled in the gears of industrial machines. A common form of punishment was to force unproductive children to stand near dangerous areas of industrial machines for hours, where a slight movement could result in severe injuries and amputations. The Tory governments heavily supported textile industrialists and entrepreneurs at the time, which eventually crushed the Luddite movement by arresting and publicly “un-aliving” the Luddite leaders and members.

Throughout the book, the author frequently connects modern-day AI and cloud automation technologies that could or will make jobs vanish faster than we can recreate them in new domains. The book has many interesting historical references and facts to keep you curious.

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” by Dr. Shoshana Zuboff is perhaps the most quoted book on surveillance capitalism. It is about big tech companies that give us free apps and online tools while mining and collecting behavioural surplus data about our demographics, locations, and behaviours and selling it for insane profits or even manipulating public opinions and rigging our democratic establishments.

It took me half a year to finish reading this book. It’s over 500 pages long, and the pages are wordy and dense. It’s a commitment, but this book has valuable historical information and stories about how well-known search engines, social media, Smart devices and IoT platform companies stayed ahead of the legal system while mining our data, made us believe that opting out of their idea of “Future” wasn’t an option, and how they hid their unethical practices behind the barriers of intellectual properties protections.