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Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"Braiding cultural criticism with a charitable attempt to humanize the 'Other Naomi,' Klein excavates legitimacy beneath sensational fears and exposes the failures of both sides of so many of the world's binaries ..."
"She uses the metaphor of the doppelganger as a way to explore our post-truth political moment ..."
"True to form, Klein's ultimate message is log off and get on to the streets."
"On her highbrow romp through this disturbing underworld, Klein's writing is clear, dynamic, ruthlessly honest, imbued with a rare integrity."
"Klein is clear that this story is not that simple."
"Although the topics she writes about are frightening for those who fear for a future defined by climate disaster, extreme inequality and war, the ways in which she draws connections, backed up with compelling and well-researched and -reasoned evidence, is, in an odd way, reassuring."
"Her preferred move is excavating the kernels of insight from even Wolf's most out-there claims ..."
"Her provocative thought exercise illuminates the myriad ways taken-for-granted balances can be upended and calls for heightened awareness of the dangers of identity erosion on both large and small scales."
"Reading Doppelganger is like being seated next to someone really interesting at a dinner party ."
"However, by articulating such an expansive view of the uncanny, Klein's mesmerizing narrative reflects the unique anxieties and modes of analysis that have come to dominate the online era."
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