Name: nahis's review of Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
Item: Doppelganger
Rating: 4.5
Author: nahis

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

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. 

Karolina

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

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.

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.  

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"?

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?

Gemma Copeland

i'm so glad authors like naomi klein exist to share their work with us. it's surreal and fascinating, it managed to expand my poor little social observations into full fledged political views. she's a masterful writer and addresses most of our current issues with such great insight, i don't even know how she can be so smart with it, from philosophy to history,  literary references and social media brainrot. it's a must read i'm so serious! 

nahis

Fred Rocha

The criticims about the scope being to large are absolutely correct but still an extremely insightful and thought provoking read

Jordan Chan 

fascinating and frustrating read. was assigned the first and last five chapters for class, and understand why the middle section wasn’t prioritised. there’s a sense of prophecy in reading this in 2025, but it’s all the ‘natural’ unfolding of our refusals to face the mirror world. reactive/oppositional identities don’t hold up. chapters 12 onwards i think are most pressing for our time.

covers a great deal of disciplines, and has an expansive bibliography in the back and am excited to explore the rest of the reads…

read for media and the uncanny with lana lin

aisha

fascinating and frustrating read. was assigned the first and last five chapters for class, and understand why the middle section wasn’t prioritised. there’s a sense of prophecy in reading this in 2025, but it’s all the ‘natural’ unfolding of our refusals to face the mirror world. reactive/oppositional identities don’t hold up. chapters 12 onwards i think are most pressing for our time.

covers a great deal of disciplines, and has an expansive bibliography in the back and am excited to explore the rest of the reads…

read for media and the uncanny with lana lin

Did I at some point confuse Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf? Yes. Has this book not been what I expected? Yes. Has it been absolutely phenomenal? Also yes.

Interesting ideas explored but sometimes felt like i was reading a very long article in the guardian 

Marion

An interesting read. Frustrating at times bc I just want ppl to not be dumb and believe everything on the internet, but Naomi was so eloquent in explaining how people become chronically online & manipulated by those who lead in the dark crevices of the internet. 

Kyra Cracchiola

Contender (already) for my fav book of the year

Sarah Erle

Lots of interesting ideas about digital doubles, personal branding and the weekend industry. But the book is overly long and too often resorts to bashing productivity and capitalism without recognising the counter-factual. 

Daniel Bower

Elamin Abdelmahmoud

Hope, accessibility, what I'm ashamed of in myself, the naivite, put into such a powerful concept. The infinite doubling that hurts the head because how paradoxical we are with our words and our worlds. And such brave kindness

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

Hope, accessibility, what I'm ashamed of in myself, the naivite, put into such a powerful concept. The infinite doubling that hurts the head because how paradoxical we are with our words and our worlds. And such brave kindness

I want to give this more stars but I wish that Klein spent more time in the second half of the book rather than the first half. I found myself wondering what the point of her book was until I reached the end and that's when I started to understand her perspective.

Gemma Copeland &
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

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Gemma Copeland &Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

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Gemma Copeland &
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein