Naomi Klein

From the award-winning, bestselling author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything, a revelatory analysis of the collapsed meanings, blurred identities, and uncertain realities of the mirror world. Over the past twenty-five years, Naomi Klein has charted and documented our politics and culture with a series of trenchant bestselling books laying bare the effects of branding, austerity, and climate profiteering on our societies and souls. With Doppelganger, Klein takes a more personal turn, braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, as she dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere. Klein begins this richly nuanced intellectual adventure story by grappling with her own doppelganger—a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, she turns her gaze both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, to name a few—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises. Ultimately seeking to escape the Mirror World and chart a path beyond confusion and despair, Klein delivers a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now.

A Trip into the Mirror World

Doppelganger

Stephen Schenkenberg

This, then, is not a biography of Other Naomi, nor does it offer a psychoanalytic diagnosis of her behaviors. It is an attempt to use my own doppelganger experience—the havoc wreaked and the lessons learned about me, her, and us—as a guide into and through what I have come to understand as our doppelganger culture. A culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgangers--virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. A culture in which many of us have come to think of ourselves as personal brands, forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, a doppelganger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy. And all the while, tech companies use these data troves to train machines to create artificial simulations of human intelligence and human functions, lifelike doubles that carry their own agendas, their own logics, and their own threats. What, I have kept asking myself, is all of this duplication doing to us? How is it steering what we pay attention to and--more critically--what we neglect?

Laura Mei

So have I? Have I stared myself squarely in the eyes and unflinchingly taken in all of my own many flaws, failings, and leaden shoes? What am I still refusing to see about me and mine? About the people I think of when I say "us" and "we"?

Piper Loyd

Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves.  

Karolina

Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for or change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves.

We were not, and never were, self-made. We are made and unmade, by one another.

Jillian Roberts

We are all mine sites now, data mine sites, and despite the intimacy and import of what is being mined, the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable. 

Bastien Vaucher

Speaking of the movements I know something about, I can say this:

On the democratic socialist left, we favor social policies that are inclusive and caring-universal public health care, well-funded public schools, decarceration, and rights for migrants. But left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring. And in contrast to Ban-non's courting of disaffected Democrats, we also don't put enough thought into how to build alliances with people who aren't already in our movements.

“The Mirror World” is Klein’s name for the alternate reality of conspiracy theories and right wing ideology offered by people like Wolf and Bannon

when entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender, and labeled "privileged," there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order, with left-wing movements losing many opportunities for alliances that would make us stronger and more powerful. All of this is highly unstrategic, because whichever groups and individuals we kick to the curb, the Mirror World is there, waiting to catch them, praise their courage, and offer a sympathetic ear.

Rather than attack nurses and teachers, experts in wellness could have joined with them and fought for kids to have more outdoor education and access to nature, and for their parents to have shorter workweeks with better pay and union protections-all of which make it easier to lead an active life, and to choose and prepare healthier food.

None of this, however, is the kind of influence most high-profile wellness influencers have chosen to wield. Instead, it's more promises about the perfect life that awaits if we attain our perfected body double.

In many ways, the most successful influencers in the wellness and fitness worlds— the people who make fortunes from selling idealized versions of themselves and the idea that you, too, can attain nirvana through a project of perpetual self-improvement—are a perfect fit with far-right economic libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, who also fetishize the individual as the only relevant social actor. In neither worldview is there any mention of collective solutions or structural changes that would make a healthy life possible for all.

Doppelganger quotes

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