Identity Politics is an Obsession Over Labels - How Technology Destroys Identities, and The Philosophy of Black Mirror

 

I: ESSENTIALIST IDENTITY POLITICS IS AN OBSESSION OVER LABELS

 

            With the risk of sounding like a 2010 “don’t put me in a box” Tumblr girl, identity politics is an obsession over labels. IdPol on both the left and right is more concerned with defining who someone is rather than on practical (materialist) measures.

            Identity is important, we all need to know who we are, but a certain distance should be kept from it. No identity is set in stone and permanent. This is because difference precedes identity. The difference between two “things” precedes their existence.

            Let us take a simple example: the identities of adult and child. If this became a politicized topic, the ideology of identity politics would guide us to believe that we first need to understand what an adult and what a child essentially is and only after we do that, we can understand the difference between an adult and a child. The situation is the opposite: the difference between an adult and a child precedes the existence of the identities of adult and child.

            In most countries, 18 is the legal age in which you become and adult and you start being legally allowed to drink, to drive and to vote. Like all laws involving some sort of quantity of time, it is not perfect. There are people below 18 who should do those things and people above who shouldn’t. If you’re 17 and 364 days old, you’re not allowed to vote, but if you’re 18, you now are. Nothing magically happens the day you turn 18, but there has to be a cutoff. This law is imperfect and excludes a bunch of people and there is nothing wrong with that because there is no perfect solution. It is the same with the age of driving, drinking, age of consent, etc.

            Essentialism is the philosophical view that every thing has an essence without which it wouldn’t be that thing anymore. Aristotle is the king of essentialism: for him, all apples had something in common without which they wouldn’t be apples. For Plato, instead, every object in reality was an imperfect copy of an ideal form that had no representation in reality. There is an idea of a perfect apple and no apple in reality was fully 100% its equal to itself, instead each apple being an imperfect representation of the idea of “apple”. This is why in their famous painting; Plato is viewed as pointing to the sky while Aristotle is viewed as pointing towards the ground:

 

            Plato had a more acceptable form of essentialism, but it is still an essentialism. We can see from the adult-child example that one transitions into another and yet there is no perfect cut-off that can define them. There is no thing that all adults have without which they wouldn’t be an adult, but we can still use this label for practical purposes. This is because the difference between and within those identities precedes the identities themselves. Identities are a fiction, a freezing of a snapshot in time of a constantly changing and chaotic process. Plato still argued about essential definitions: when he remarked that “man is a featherless biped”, Diogenes mockingly brought a chicken without feathers and shouted “Behold, a man!”. In today’s world, strong identity politics are marked by a sort of Aristotelianism while weak identity politics are marked by a sort of Platonism, even if the ones who practice them are unaware of these philosophers.

 

II: THE STUPIDEST DEBATE OF OUR TIME

 

            Everyone has some sort of imaginary identification to sexual difference. Debates about sexual identity are important insofar as everyone has one. This does not mean that the way most people hold this debate has any relevance. There is no magical point at which one turns into an adult, nothing magically happens on your 18^th birthday, but we still put a cutoff in the law for practical reasons. Similarly enough, sex cannot be reduced to chromosomes or genital organs, like a lot of conservative identity politics argue. Sex is a complex identity composed of primary sex organs (genitals), secondary sex organs (ex: breasts), difference in levels of estrogen and testosterone which ultimately affect the distribution of fat around the body and the way one’s face looks, difference in the structure of one’s skeleton, differences in psychological characteristics and all sorts of complex psychological identifications. A lot of these biological characteristics can be changed by the recent developments in medicine.

Conservative identity politics are more concerned with defining what a woman is than with finding some practical solution to the problems they’re bringing up. But this is a task doomed to fail, since all definitions of real-world objects or phenomena allow for exception. They will say that men have a penis and women have a vagina, but if a cisgender man loses his penis in an accident, he’s somehow still a man. They also unconsciously believe that all transgender people are men, even if they directly say that trans men are not “real men”, because they almost all would love for female-to-male transgender people to go into men’s spaces and will only make a fuss about male-to-female individuals. Their belief in biology or “reality” is a fake. It is more important for identity politics to assert some “traditional” identity that was never based on a substantial essence to begin with than to find some materialist analysis of the situation.

“Politically correct” left-wing identity politics share the same obsession over labels, but with labels one imposes on oneself rather than on labels imposed on society. For this group, transgender women are “real” women and transgender men are “real” men, whatever this may mean, and any statement that would imply the opposite is automatically transphobic. Again, just like any identity politics, the assertion of an identity and the protection of the emotional attachment associated with those identities is more important than anything else. If conservatives oversimplify the issue by reducing sexual identity to genital organs then left-liberals oversimplify the issue by reducing sexual identity to a reference of how one ‘feels inside’.

This is why leftists today are wrong when they say that Slavoj Zizek has adopted “conservative talking points” on this issue, similar to people like Peterson or Shapiro. Zizek is not interested in affirming any sort of identity, in his article “Wokeness Is Here To Stay”, he explicitly states:

 

“The point here is that there is no easy solution, because sexual identity is in itself not a simple form of identity, but a complex dimension, full of inconsistencies and unconscious features—something that in no way can be established by a direct reference to how we feel.”¹

 

In his latest article, “Confessions of a radioactive mind”, he says:

 

“The reason is that “feminine” and “masculine” don’t stand for a fixed set of properties: They both name a certain deadlock that can only be articulated in a series of inconsistent and even self-contradictory features in which the repressed truth returns.”²

 

Zizek knows that there is no way of saying “I am ...” without contradicting yourself at least one bit, which separates him from your usual conservative critique of “gender ideology”, who call for a return to a mythical pre-existing past that never existed (“back when we knew what men and women were”).

Just like with the identities of “adult” and “child”, there is no perfect or even ‘good’ solution here. When someone transitions from child to adult, the transition is not abrupt, nothing magically happens the day you turn 18. It is not even gradual or smooth. It is full of unexpected twists and turns of events, moving not in one direction, not only forward, but in all directions (forward, backward, up, down, left, right…), since an identity like “adult” is a whole composed of multiple unrelated or even contradictory parts. The transgender bathroom/sports/etc. debate is the stupidest debate of our days not because of its debated topic, but because of the way we have the debate. Just like with the age of driving/drinking/voting, there should be a cutoff at a certain number of months in which you need to be on estrogen/testosterone, when most people will pass as the gender they identify as. At that cutoff, we can legally change someone’s gender in their documents, without worrying about a strict definition of the labels we use. Maybe we can even have a different number of months for different activities. Nothing magically happens the day you have been 6 months on estrogen that suddenly allows you to be a woman, but any laws involving some quantity have an abrupt cutoff because law is imperfect. The details are a lot to discuss, but it is clearly a complicated issue that can in no way be determined by reference towards who someone “is”.

Political difference works in the same way as sexual difference, we don’t need to first understand what “left-wing” and “right-wing” mean in order to understand the difference between them. Quite the opposite: the difference/division between left and right precedes their definitions. The opposition between difference and identity can be understood as the opposition between “problems” and “solutions” or “questions” and “answers”. There is no neutral, objective or ‘apolitical’ way to define what left-wing and right-wing mean. The definition of left and right varies depending on whether you ask a left-winger or a right-winger. A right-wing libertarian, for instance, would say that left-wingers are for more state intervention in the economy while right-wingers are for less intervention in the economy. But if you ask a left-winger, they will disagree, not because they disagree with their solution (“We don’t need less state intervention”), nor because they disagree with the identity they were given in that difference-of-identities (“I am not for state intervention”), but because they disagree with the very difference they propose (“The division between less state intervention and more state intervention does not make sense”). The proper left-wing stance to take here is that when, for instance, the state cuts taxes, they are intervening in the economy just as much as when they are raising taxes, so the division between “more vs. less state intervention” does not make sense in the first place. They don’t have a different answer to the right-winger’s question, they have a different question.

Coming back to sexual difference, does this mean that we should simply ignore the transgender debate, pass it off as an American culture war that we’ll forget about in 5 years when we’ll be distracted by something else, and move on? Not fully. The fact that everyone is having this debate in this way is still indicative of something going on in society. We should investigate why it is such a heated debate and why at this time.

Some people claim that “the transgender issue is the front-line of the fundamental philosophical dispute between the religious right and the atheist progressive left”³, because the American right believes in an objective truth given by either God or reality while the American left believes in a relative “your truth vs. my truth”. Therefore, the argument is that the issue of defining what a man and a woman are is indicative of the larger philosophical worldview of each political camp’s view on what reality and being are in general.

This is mostly untrue. In the American culture wars, everyone believes in objective truth whenever it is personally convenient to them. The cultural left presents facts as objective and undisputable whenever they want to have government fact-checkers and a trust in science or “the experts”. The cultural right brings in relativist arguments whenever they start talking about individualism and how capitalism is good because everyone has needs that are unique and different. And beyond that, truth actually is relative, it is first and foremost relative to the context in which it is said. The answer to most questions one can ask is not “true” or “false” but “it depends”. When people insist that their facts are objectively correct and objectively representing reality, more often than not, they are taking out of context a fact that is “technically true” and yet still misleading (malformation).

If the debate was really about objectivism vs. relativism, then the issue of intersex people would be just as politicized. But no one debates about what to do with intersex people because they also stand for sexual difference-in-itself, just like transgender people, but they do not stand for becoming in the same way. They also challenge the sexual binary, but by birth. So the debate was never about binaries being challenged by minor exceptions.

Instead, the real philosophical debate polarizing the culture wars is transhumanism. This is why the issue of transgenderism can’t be separated from issues like abortion or vaccines, because all of them are about using medicine and technology in order to alter our bodies. Both intersex and transgender people challenge our binary definitions, but only the latter have been politicized because only the latter issue represents transhumanism. This rapidly-shifting sense of self and lack of stable and clear identities are caused by technology, which is the real unconscious concern for most people. This is why Marxists are right when they say that identity politics is caused by the material conditions which people live in. Material conditions include technological development, such as social media or the internet, which alter our identities and the image of ourselves. Unlimited technological development and economic growth is caused by our current system known as capitalism. It is capitalism which tears down boundaries and destroys identities, a constant process of decoding and deterritorialization through excessive technological development. The excessive emotional attachment to labels like “woman” and “man” on both the cultural left and right are a symptom of the underlying, unconscious worry over the way in which social media and the rapid developments in artificial intelligence deep fakes and chatbots alter our sense of self and increase social alienation. Which leads me to my next section:

 

III: JOAN IS AWFUL

 

The day I’m writing this is the same day in which a new season of Black Mirror appeared. The first episode, “Joan Is Awful”, approaches the philosophical topics of AI deep fakes, simulation and simulacra, identity crises and the persona, the question of free will, the lack of privacy in surveillance capitalism and the dangers of letting capitalists monopolize AI. I hugely recommend watching this episode right now before reading this section. I will attempt a short summary below, so spoilers ahead:

The episode starts with an average woman, Joan, who is unsatisfied with her ordinary, normal, boring life. She is not necessarily unhappy, but she is not fully satisfied either – having a fiancé and a nice house, she still feels like there is something missing in her life that would make her complete. She tells her therapist that she does not feel like the “main character” in her story. Later in the day, she meets up with her ex for the first time in a long time and cheats on her fiancé. Immersed in guilt, she goes home, trying to forget about what happened.

While home with her fiancé, she sees a new TV show appeared on Netflix called “Joan Is Awful”. It’s a TV show starring Salma Hayek, an actress supposed to role-play as Joan, who dressed up looking extremely similar to how Joan looks in real life. They watch the TV show which shows an exaggerated portrayal of her as well as all the other people in her life who she interacted with that day. Somehow, this TV show knew everything that happened to her the day of watching it, in a creepy manner. It felt exactly like a recording of that day’s events, but one in which each character’s traits were accentuated compared to how they were in real life.

Everyday, a new episode of “Joan is awful” appears that summarizes her day that day. Very shortly, this ends up destroying her life, she loses her job and her fiancé, because everyone was able to see this TV show. Talking to her lawyer, she finds out that this TV show was generated by an AI owned by the streaming-service company. The apps she used on her phone as well as the cameras installed in the city and other technologies of mass surveillance allowed the company unlimited access to data in order to record every conversation that every person on the planet ever has. With this data, a deep fake of the real-life interactions could be generated by the AI which was able to fill in the gaps with enough accuracy. That’s why Salma Hayek didn’t actually play Joan, but an AI generated a hyper-realistic CGI movie of one person roleplaying as another person, with Salma Hayek starring Joan.

Consulting with her lawyer, she finds out that there is nothing she can do in order to sue the company owning the AI, because she agreed in the terms and conditions of using that streaming service that she gives them the right to use her identity as they please. She conjures up a plan of getting Salma Hayek’s attention by defecating in a church, which would appear on the TV show that everyone sees. Her logic was this: even if the TV show expressed a recording of what Joan did that day, the character in the movie looked more similar to Salma Hayek, and thus, everyone at home would see Hayek, not Joan, doing something embarrassing, despite it being Joan who did it in real life. Joan’s hope would be that Salma Hayek would be disturbed by this and thus pressured to pressure her lawyers into suing the company. However, this only ends up annoying Hayek, but she was not able to do anything about the problem either, because she also signed those same terms and conditions.

Towards the end of the episode, Joan and Hayek break into the multinational corporation’s HQ, to find the quantum computer that generated this TV show and attempt to destroy it. Joan picks up an axe and is ready to destroy the computer. Before this, the CEO of the company along with other employees enter the room and warn her not to do it. They explain to her that she is actually not the real Joan, but instead a representation of an actor (Annie Murphy) roleplaying as Joan in a simulation. Hence, she finds out that there are multiple layers to this simulation of reality. There is the base “level 1” in which the real Joan is the real Joan. In the second level, we have an AI simulation of Annie Murphy’s real body copying Joan’s actions. In the third level, we have an AI simulation of Salma Hayek’s real body copying Joan’s actions, this third level being watched on TV by the characters on the second level and so on. In other words, this Joan that we’ve been watching for the entire episode was not the original, she was the first copy. They were already living in a simulation. These characters were role-playing as themselves from the very beginning.

Thus, the CEO warns Joan that if she kills that computer, she will kill all the higher-order simulations that think and feel they are real. “Do you really want all that blood on your hands?”, she asks. Joan replies “Define blood”. The CEO tells her “It’s a quantum computer, we’re still not sure how it works, it’s a bit like magic. But [if you destroy it] the reality we’re in will cease to exist”.

When told by everyone to put the axe down and not destroy the quantum computer, Joan replies “I can’t. ‘Cause… the fact that I’m standing here right now means that source Joan already stood in reality, so it doesn’t matter what I want because the events that this is based on have already happened. It’s not my decision. It’s Joan’s. Joan’s doing it!”.

After this realization of her lack of free will (that she’s a simulation simply repeating what the real Joan from the previous level is doing), she destroys the computer. Reality goes on however – all characters now end up looking different, a slightly less physically attractive and “perfect” versions of themselves. Their life goes on as usual, before this entire madness started, but in a slightly different form – she no longer has a fiancé, but she is actively dating, and still content. She still has a house and a job, but a cheaper house and not such a high-paying job. Joan quite literally regresses into a “less perfect” version of herself and her life, by killing all simulations, keeping alive only the “real” base-level. The episode ends as it begins – Joan is in her therapy session, but now says that she does feel like her main character in her story, despite her job not being “as corporate”, she feels content and satisfied. “You know, there’s good days, and there’s bad days”.

 

IV: JOAN IS AWFUL – ANALYSIS

 

Jean Baudrillard used to distinguish between four stages of a sign. In its first stage, the sign is a representation of reality. In its second stage, the sign is a misrepresentation, a distortion of reality. It its third stage, the sign masks the absence of reality (it is a veil of nothing). It its fourth stage, the sign has no relationship to reality whatsoever⁴.

We should challenge Baudrillard’s notion here – there is no fourth stage, or if there is, there has to be a fifth stage in which the sign is a better representation of the original than the original. What is so uncanny about simulation and referentiality is how this very fiction of reality can be “more real than reality itself”. We see this very well represented in the TV show. First off, each layer of simulation was not simply a copy of the previous layer, but the body of a different person repeating the actions of the body of the previous layer of simulation. In reality, Joan was Joan, and was doing her thing and being surveilled. In the first layer of simulation, the body of Annie Murphy from reality was repeating Joan’s actions. In the second layer of simulation, the body of Salma Hayek from the first layer was copying the actions of Joan from the first layer (and so on…). With each level of simulation, the bodies and the lives of the characters were getting more and more perfect, while their behavior and personality were caricatured to the point where they were unappealing. The further they went into the simulation, the more the lifestyle of the characters approached a rich person who is morally flawed. A gay coworker in the first simulation acted “even more gayly” in the second. The way Joan was cold at work in the first simulation was represented as even more cruel and harsh in the second-order simulation, and so on. When the characters in any level of simulation were watching their representation in the higher level on TV, they saw how that character is “more me than myself”.

Deleuze’s philosophy is more helpful than Baudrillard’s here. Deleuze knew very well that each time we repeat an act, we never repeat it in the same way again: “If exchange is the criterion of generality, theft and gift are those of repetition. To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an 'unrepeatable'. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power.”⁵.

This is why, in order to truly repeat a philosopher, one must stay true to the spirit of his thought, not to his letter. Zizek, for example, seeks to be “more Hegelian than Hegel himself”. The real task is not like Plato thought, that there is a real ideal-form that we do not have access to and each real-life object is the imperfect copy of that ideal form. Quite the reversed: as difference precedes identity, Zizek’s task (for instance) is to be so Hegelian that the real Hegel himself looks like someone who tried to copy Zizek, to be so Marxist that the real Marx himself looks like someone who tried to copy Zizek, etc.

This is the uncanny feeling of someone summarizing your own theory: when Adrian Johnston wrote the book “Zizek’s ontology”, Zizek read this book and remarked how at times, it feels like Johnston was able to be more Zizekian than Zizek himself in a way: “What if he’s the real Zizek and I’m a copy?”.

So the real threat posing AI is not that deep fakes might represent reality so well that we won’t be able to distinguish ourselves from it. The bigger question is whether AI might be more real than reality itself in a way – staying true to the spirit of reality while abandoning its letter. To give another example: what makes us human is the ability to state the quite paradoxical statement “I am not myself right now” while it also being true. I am “myself” only insofar as I engage in an act that repeats all my previous acts in a way that abandons them and raises them to the “nth power”, as Deleuze says. In other words, sometimes I say some things that make you go “This is such a Lastrevio thing, only Lastrevio could have said that”. I say those things that “make me be me”. However, I don’t always say such a thing, these acts are interrupted by breaks in which I am not “truly myself”, in which I say something that anyone could have said. Hence, with each new iteration of me doing a “typical Lastrevio thing”, I repeat all the previous times in which I did that, but I repeat them in a new way, I never do the exact same thing twice.

That’s why human identity is in a constant process of becoming. When thinkers like Deleuze say that “being is becoming”, they don’t only say that things are in constant change. If that was the only point, there would only be becoming, without being. But to say that “being is becoming” means that the very things which we associate with being are actually in a constant process of evolution. Whenever I refer to things that “make me be me”, I am not referring to a static and constant state of affairs that I repeat in the same way each time, instead I am referring to certain qualities, unique quirks or personality traits which I always repeat in a slightly different way each time such as to raise the previous time to one higher power. For Deleuze, you are only being yourself by virtue of being “more than your previous self” everyday.

Hence, the real question is not whether an AI chatbot can imitate, for instance, my writing style so well that it’s indistinguishable from my real writing style. The scarier question is whether an AI can imitate me so well that every sentence that it outputs is a thing that “only Lastrevio could have written”, an AI that imitates me better than I can imitate myself.

This is why beyond the fiction of reality, there is the much more traumatic reality of fiction:

 

“In his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reports on a dream dreamt by a father who falls asleep while keeping vigil at his son’s coffin. In this dream, his dead son appears to him, pronouncing the terrible appeal, “Father, can’t you see that I am burning?” When the father awakens, he discovers that the cloth on the son’s coffin has caught fire from a falling candle.

So why did the father awaken? Was it because the smell of the smoke got too strong, so that it was no longer possible to prolong the sleep by way of including it into the improvised dream? Lacan proposes a much more interesting reading: it wasn’t the intrusion of the signal from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream. Insofar as “dreaming” means fantasizing in order to avoid confronting the Real, the father literally awakened so that he could go on dreaming. The scenario was the following one: When his sleep was disturbed by the smoke, the father quickly constructed a dream which incorporated the disturbing element (smoke-fire) in order to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the Real….”¹

 

Therefore, a copy of my “real self” can be more real than the original in many ways. There is a dilemma here: the better this repetition becomes; will the identity just turn bland? This Black Mirror episode may indicate that it would. If I enjoy texting my loved one, it is because my loved one says “typical them things” only at certain irregular intervals. If I had a wife and an AI chatbot could imitate my wife’s writing style such that every sentence would be a sentence that “only my wife could have said”, it would not be more pleasant than texting my real wife, it could just be bland.

This is the paradox of perfection. Jacques Lacan had a term for this: the object-cause of desire – this imperfection that makes us think “Ah, only if it weren’t for this small thing, things would be perfect! But with this imperfection, things are only almost perfect!”. The problem is that things wouldn’t be perfect without it, they would just be boring. Slavoj Zizek says how he was talking to a woman that told him that if she only lost 2 or 3 pounds, her body would be perfect. He told her: “Just don’t lose 2 or 3 pounds!”. That’s also why we don’t really want to obtain whatever we think we want:

 

“Typical male chauvinist scenario: I am married with a wife, relations with her are cold and I have a mistress. And every night I dream ‘Oh my God, only if my wife were to somehow disappear, this would start up a new wonderful life with the mistress!’. You know what every psychoanalyst will tell you often happens? If something happens to your wife, she dies or whatever, you lose the mistress also. You thought ‘this is all I want’, but once you obtain it, you realize that what you really wanted was not really to live with the mistress, but to keep her as an unattainable object of desire that you ‘almost have’ but never quite fully obtain.”6

 

This object-cause of desire is central to our very identity as well. To keep us constantly unsatisfied with our often times okay-ish life, we are constantly striving for more perfection, but it is never quite enough – like Joan in the Black Mirror episode.

 

You take a piece of stone,

chisel it with blood,

grind it with Homer’s eye,

burnish it with beams

until the cube comes out perfect.

Next you endlessly kiss the cube with your mouth,

with others’ mouths, and, most important,

with the infant's mouth.

Then you take a hammer and suddenly knock a corner off.

All, indeed absolutely all will say

“what a perfect cube this would have been

if not for the broken corner.”

(Nichita Stănescu, Lecture About The Cube)

 

Every statement of “I am” is partially a lie. In those interruptions that make me imperfect and not fully “real”, not fully whatever I identify as, in those moments in which “I am not myself today”, precisely in those moments in which I lose whatever I thought “made me really me”, only then I can understand the reasons why I’ve lost my identity, and thus the reasons why I had it in the first place. And then, I can become “myself” again, being reborn not under something completely new, but under an upgrade of my previous version, a version that is not perfect, but that makes use of those previous imperfections in a new way, those previous failures to fully be whoever I think I am. It is not enough to naively make a reality/fiction distinction, that behind the mask I wear in public, there is my “real, true self”. Nor is it useful to engage in what Nietzsche would’ve called the “passive nihilism of Buddhism”, that everything is an illusion and there is no substantial reality behind appearances, thus to rest on the first negation: “there is not anything behind the mask I wear in public”. We have to negate the negation, not to say “there isn’t anything behind the mask”, but to say, “there is nothing behind the mask”. What makes me really me is not my true self behind appearances, but the fact that there is nothing behind whoever I appear to be, and everyone has a different kind of nothingness behind whoever they think they are in public – this void at the center of subjectivity expressing itself in different iterations under a public appearance, each time raising itself to the nth power.

Change is painful. Beyond the superficial Buddhist change of “constant becoming”, there is a much more radical change that feels like death. To transition from man to woman, from child to adult, from an identity to any other identity, means to kill your current self. The ending of the Black Mirror episode shows us the resolution to this paradox: my current self has a selfish interest to keep itself alive, and therefore, would never willfully kill themselves in order to let my “future self” inhabit my body. The solution, then, is to realize that “my current self” has no free will already, because my decision has already-been-made by my future self for my current (previous-to-it) self. A truly free choice is an unconscious choice and it is retroactively perceived as fate, a moment of reinterpreting your entire past under a new paradigm of thought: this paradox of “necessary contingency” is when, after I make the choice, I can justify it as fate, with the statement “I had no choice but to”.

 

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NOTES:

1: Slavoj Zizek – Wokeness is here to stay: https://compactmag.com/article/wokeness-is-here-to-stay

2: Slavoj Zizek – Confessions of a radioactive mind: https://compactmag.com/article/confessions-of-a-radioactive-mind?fbclid=IwAR3KM8cvcYB7oi5NDAyhRDRXUhuLKkXqv_KC0b2hqfDZiw05-3EZr-sGq2U

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub98nPD4OFI

4: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Chapter 1: The Precession of Simulacra

5: Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Introduction

6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w