A few months after that piece came out, I started to see examples of these same trends being cast in far more conspiratorial ways: maybe the tech companies had planned the whole thing. Maybe it was the World Economic Forum and its plan for the Great Reset; maybe the whole pandemic wasn't real and the death toll numbers were an elaborate hoax. Maybe, as my doppelganger seemed to suggest, it was all a ploy to get us to accept a CCP-style social credit police state.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on conspiracy theories as meaning-making in uncertain times, and how legitimate commentary can be co-opted or mutated into conspiratorial frames.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 481