What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left …
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?
Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us—and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.
Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now—and an intellectual adventure story for our times.
Naomi Klein is one of the most important thinkers of our time, whether she is applying her talents to film, journalism, or long-form writing. Her ability to pull together often seemingly disparate threads of analysis into a coherent, fluid whole is as erudite as it is insightful. Doppelganger covers a wide array of sociopolitical issues that threaten life as we know it in North America, weaving it all together through introspection on the concept of having a personal double. She has done a tremendous lot of study and legwork following what once was the far right, which has over the last decade become its new center. Klein's approachable synthesis of all that she's gleaned in that process is a gift to those of us who cannot stomach, say, hundreds of hours of Steve Bannon's War Room. Along the way the reader is offered new or reframed mental models that help …
Naomi Klein is one of the most important thinkers of our time, whether she is applying her talents to film, journalism, or long-form writing. Her ability to pull together often seemingly disparate threads of analysis into a coherent, fluid whole is as erudite as it is insightful. Doppelganger covers a wide array of sociopolitical issues that threaten life as we know it in North America, weaving it all together through introspection on the concept of having a personal double. She has done a tremendous lot of study and legwork following what once was the far right, which has over the last decade become its new center. Klein's approachable synthesis of all that she's gleaned in that process is a gift to those of us who cannot stomach, say, hundreds of hours of Steve Bannon's War Room. Along the way the reader is offered new or reframed mental models that help make sense of the terrifying chaos taking place around us—for example, the "Mirror World", and her boosting of Calliston and Slobodian's concept of Diagonalism (or Querdenken) to provide a realistic alternative to horseshoe theory.
Klein states that a goal she's pursued through all her work is to spread awareness and make sense of systems and events that can easily spark outrage, but to do so in a way that creates a sense of calm in naming such things and conveying actionable means of opposition. For me at least, Doppelganger achieves this goal, a lofty one considering the poignant reality of rapidly advancing fascism in our time. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in intersectional leftist perspectives on everything from current events to the ways technology has reshaped daily life in the 21st century.
Klein uses the public's conflation of herself and Naomi Wolf as a jumping off point for an extremely insightful analysis of social media and the internet. Absolute must read for anyone interested in sociology of the web
