Jeska Dzwigalski

“And so the question remains: What aren’t we building when we are building our brands?”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“If you successfully thing-ify yourself, then other people will begin to believe you are a thing and will throw all kinds of hard objects at you, sure that you will not bleed. And then you have to conjure up even more revealing forms of self-exposure —up to and including having a full-blown breakdown in your bedroom with the webcam rolling. Don't come for me, these influencers seem to be pleading to their fans-turned-foes, I'm wounded —can't you see that I'm bleeding here? Forgetting that the pack loves blood and there is nothing bloodier than performative trauma”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

“Many years later, my friend Cecilie Surasky, then one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, observed of these kinds of educational methods: “It’s re-traumatization, not remembering. There is a difference.” When she said it, I knew it was true. Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness. At its best, it allows us to be changed and transmuted by grief and loss. But re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“algorithmic oppression is not just a glitch in the system but, rather, is fundamental to the operating system of the web.”
― Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism