Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
| |
| Author | Naomi Klein |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | 2023 |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication place | Canada |
| Pages | 350 |
| ISBN | 978-0-374-61032-6 |
| Preceded by | How to change everything |
| Website | naomiklein |
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World is a 2023 memoir and political analysis by Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker, Naomi Klein. In it, Klein examines the current climate of political polarization and conspiracy thinking, by contrasting Klein's worldview with that of Naomi Wolf, for whom Klein is often confused.[1]
.jpg)
Naomi Klein is a Canadian author known for her generally left-leaning political views and analysis.[2] Klein is often confused with Naomi Wolf, an American author who originally rose to prominence as a notable third-wave feminist, with generally center-left views. However, by the time of writing, Wolf had become known for her right-wing political opinions, especially those related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the anti-vaccination movement, and other conspiracy theories.[3][4] The Washington Post's Laura Wagner described the two as both being "White Jewish women" who "published big-idea bestsellers in the '90s" (Wolf wrote The Beauty Myth, Klein No Logo), writing that the two had been casually confused for each other for several years, prior to the publication of Doppelganger.[1] The claim that Wolf and Klein were confused for each other was backed up by other commentators, including those in New York, The New Yorker, and Wired.[5][6][7]
In the early stages of writing the book, Klein kept it secret and used the writing process to make sense of the confusion others experienced.[1] Klein intended the book to be different from her previous works, The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, which were structured like a traditional thesis defense. Instead, Klein structured Doppelganger in a more narrative way.[1][7] Despite several contact attempts by Klein, Wolf was not involved in the writing of the book.[1]
Doppelganger was published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 12 September 2023.[8][9] It was published in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane.[10]
Doppelganger was positively received by critics. Kirkus Reviews described the prose as being "tight and urgent, almost breathless" and praised Klein's blend of cultural criticism and biographical research into Wolf's life.[11] The New Republic published a positive review, describing the story of Klein and Wolf's mistaken identities as being riveting and praising the book for explaining "how so many people have...broken with conventional left-right political affiliations and shared understandings of reality".[12] The Evening Standard was also positive, saying that Klein wrote with lucidity and noting that the book was much more personal than Klein's earlier work.[13]
The Irish Independent praised the book for those personal moments but criticized the book's depth, writing that "the scope is so wide-ranging that, at times, the reader can wonder how everything is linked".[14] The Washington Post criticized the book's argument that leftists ought to reconsider their approaches to conflict, language, and identity politics, writing that "it's the only argument in the book not bolstered by specifics".[1] New York magazine was critical, as well, with Jacob Bacharach writing that the book did not substantially engage with the doppelgänger concept, instead, using it as a jumping-off point to a range of different topics. The result, according to Bacharach, was that too many concepts seemed to fit into Klein's framework, without sufficient analysis to justify their inclusion.[5]
By contrast, the Los Angeles Times praised the book for tying its disparate concepts together, describing it as "both timely and timeless".[3] William Davies, writing in The Guardian, praised Klein's analysis of conspiracy theories and the book's attempt to understand and empathize with conspiracy theorists.[10] The New York Times' Michelle Goldberg wrote that no text "better captures the berserk period we're living through", while Katie Roiphe positively described Klein's hopeful tone.[15][16]
It debuted at number eight on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover nonfiction works.[17]
On June 13, 2024, Doppelganger won Klein the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.[18]
- ^ a b c d e f Wagner, Laura (11 September 2023). "In Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, Naomi Wolf is more than a gimmick". The Washington Post. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ Dobson, Kit (1 September 2023). "Naomi Klein". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 9 August 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ a b Vognar, Chris (5 September 2023). "She followed her 'doppelganger' down the rabbit hole. What Naomi Klein found there". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 10 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ Featherstone, Liza (10 June 2021). "The Madness of Naomi Wolf". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 6 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ a b Bacharach, Jacob (6 September 2023). "Is Naomi Klein's Doppelganger Weird Enough?". New York. Archived from the original on 13 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ Tolentino, Jia (10 September 2023). "Naomi Klein Sees Uncanny Doubles in Our Politics". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 11 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ a b Knibbs, Kate (7 September 2023). "Unhinged Conspiracies, AI Doppelgangers, and the Fractured Reality of Naomi Klein". Wired. Archived from the original on 10 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ "Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World". BookMarks. Archived from the original on 25 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ "Naomi Klein has new, more personal book out in September, Doppelganger". Associated Press. 17 May 2023. Archived from the original on 5 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ a b Davies, William (9 September 2023). "Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein review – a case of mistaken identity". theguardian.com. The Guardian. Archived from the original on 10 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
"The problem in the age of big tech, the climate crisis, Covid lockdowns, online influencers and collapsed trust in "mainstream" politics and media is that everybody has their suspicions that they are being lied to and manipulated – and they're right. Where they disagree is on the identity of the liars and the purpose of the manipulation"
- ^ "Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World". Kirkus Reviews. 26 June 2023. Archived from the original on 23 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ Marsh, Laura (5 September 2023). "Naomi Klein's Journey Into the Unnerving World of Naomi Wolf". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 10 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ Jones, Alexandra (5 September 2023). "Doppelganger by Naomi Klein: a compelling portrait of the apocalyptic mindset". Evening Standard. Archived from the original on 10 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ Barry, Aoife (4 September 2023). "A conspiracy queen? You're confusing me with the other Naomi". Irish Independent. Archived from the original on 8 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ Goldberg, Michelle (4 September 2023). "Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf and the Political Upside Down". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 5 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ Roiphe, Katie (7 September 2023). "A 'Mirror World' Where Leftist Disdain Feeds Right-Wing Paranoia". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 10 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ "Hardcover Nonfiction Books – Best Sellers – Books". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 25 September 2023. Retrieved 21 September 2023.
- ^ Saunders, Emma (13 June 2024). "Naomi Klein wins first Women's Prize for Non-Fiction". bbc.com. BBC News. Retrieved 14 June 2024.
hidevte
Works by Naomi KleinBooks
No Logo (1999)
Fences and Windows (2002)
The Shock Doctrine (2007)
This Changes Everything (2014)
No Is Not Enough (2017)
The Battle for Paradise (2018)
On Fire (2019)
How to Change Everything (2021)
Doppelganger (2023)
The Take (2004)
This Changes Everything (2015)
=
=
==
& Memoirs
›
Leaders & Notable People
Kindle
$16.99
Available instantly
Audiobook
$14.95Available instantly
Hardcover
$44.23
Paperback
$18.75
Other Used and New from $18.75
$44.23$44.23
FREE International delivery Tuesday, 20 August. Order within 15 hrs 20 mins. Details
Deliver to Sejin - Campbelltown 5074
In stock
US imports may differ from local products. Additional terms apply. Learn More.
Quantity:Quantity:1
Add to Cart
Buy Now
Ships from
Amazon US
Sold by
Amazon US
Payment
Secure transaction
Add to Wish List
Add to Baby Wishlist
Other sellers on Amazon
New & Used (23) from $44.23$44.23 
Roll over image to zoom in
Audible sample
Follow the author
Naomi KleinNaomi Klein
Follow
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World Hardcover – 12 September 2023
by Naomi Klein (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,418 ratings
A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Women's Prize for Nonfiction
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER National Indie Bestseller
A New York Times notable book of 2023 Vulture's #1 book of 2023
One of Slate's ten best books of 2023 A Guardian best ideas book of 2023 One of Time's ten best books of 2023 Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award
"I've been raving about Naomi Klein's Doppelganger . . . I can't think of another text that better captures the berserk period we're living through." --Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
"If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one." --Katie Roiphe, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
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.
Read less
Review
=
=
From other countries
Sabrina Gledhill
5.0 out of 5 stars Required readingReviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 July 2024
Verified Purchase
This book opened my eyes to the world while reinforcing things I have already seen, experienced, and witnessed, like sovereign citizens, Q-Anon, anti-vaxxers and autism. It made me think, and now I want to send a copy to all my anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorising relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Phenomenal
Report
Richard II
5.0 out of 5 stars Uma excelente reflexão sobre nosso mundo contemporâneoReviewed in Brazil on 20 October 2023
Verified Purchase
Naomi Klein nos instiga à refletir sobre o que nos tornamos nesses tempos de escuridão da racionalidade, da faltam de empatia, nos colocarmos na posição do outro, nos avaliarmos em nossas decisões, formas de relacionamento.
2 people found this helpfulReport
Translate review to English
inesgaim
5.0 out of 5 stars ContenidoReviewed in Spain on 16 October 2023
Verified Purchase
Muy interesante y actual visto de una persona que la han hecho un doble sin saberlo
Report
Translate review to English
Pockets
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing insights from a renowned investigative journalist.Reviewed in the United States on 12 February 2024
Verified Purchase
Naomi Klein spends much time researching her books and writes in a readable format. I read her book entitled "Shock Doctrine" in 2007 which I found historically enlightening about events in the news during that era. It described a devious strategy that is used by governments to install unpleasant policies. That book sold me on her as an author, and this book was very incisive about occurrences we all experience but do not understand as well as she interprets them.
11 people found this helpfulReport
Reviewer
5.0 out of 5 stars WorthwhileReviewed in Mexico on 2 March 2024
Verified Purchase
The best of Klein's books, self-reflective and at last serious about the psychic and aesthetic dimensions of our global predicament
Report
אליהו
5.0 out of 5 stars ExcellentReviewed in the United States on 27 September 2023
Verified Purchase
This is a very good book, for anyone seeking to have some idea as to the doppelgangers world, which the very word itself can be translated as double walker or shadow. I would suggest reading it along with Naomi Wolf's book: The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human.
I think Naomi Wolf's book is excellent, and ironically speaks in many ways for me about the dark mirror world, or shadow world, in some ways better then Naomi Klein's book. That is why I recommend , that both books be read together.
Also, when Naomi Wolf discusses the Chinese topic that Naomi klein is critical of...Naomi Klein is discussing a real mindset that has been going in the US, all the way from the time from Second World War, and the fear of Asians. I personally think those fears were unjustified back in the day...but it did, and does still factor into how many view the world. A time when America was in some ways described by authors as like a dark carnival of distorting mirrors. Described by books like, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire.
But, Naomi Klein's book is superior in many ways for me such as it comes out and calls a doppelganger for what it is, from the doppleganger point of view, something I found very useful. It's too bad both Naomis had, they not the first same name... that maybe created the doppelganger to begin with....rather they might have written a book together.
I started thinking about the doppelganger in my life, and, the difficulty I had in knowing that my doppelganger actually exists.... and also that it is in many ways quite a dark and ugly satanic doppleganger masked as a fellow double... only gets more violent when it senses that I know of its existence. In other words, the doppelganger I have experienced thrives on violence. while I am peace loving, and wish that all the world would live in peace and love.
I understand how Naomi Klein would feel so threatened by Naomi Wolf's amigos, in the right, perhaps even to the point of Ms. Klein writing a book about it.
My doppelganger is more deep state so to speak, in that it would use any person, group, or thing to further its own ends.
28 people found this helpfulReport
MikeyH
5.0 out of 5 stars thoughtful, transformativeReviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 August 2024
Verified Purchase
A powerful philosophical angle with which to tackle one the most urgent drivers of our increasingly fragmented and divisive politics, in particular the dystopian incentives created by social media
Report
John F. Watson
4.0 out of 5 stars Well written and currentReviewed in Canada on 18 June 2024
Verified Purchase
Very interesting views and very current
Report
Bryan Carey
4.0 out of 5 stars Reflections Can Reveal So MuchReviewed in the United States on 8 February 2024
Verified Purchase
Do you ever feel like you have a double- another person who gets mistaken for you, even though you may have little in common? Do you feel that the recent actions of conspiracy theorists and other peddlers of misinformation often include what seem like contradictory positions and that they often make hypocritical statements? If any of these things intrigue you, then you might want to read Doppelganger.
What this book presents isn’t easy to put into words and once I finished reading, I found that I had a tough time putting together a short summary that accurately described the book’s focus. The reason is because the book shifts and reflects from many angles. It discusses the author’s own doppelganger, someone who happens to be a fellow author with the same first name. The book also discusses historical occurrences, how history repeats itself, and how perpetrators of evil so often defend themselves and criticize their opponents in hypocritical ways. And the book also devotes time, whenever possible, to push the acceptance and support of progressive causes, whether it’s climate change, economic reforms, etc.
The references to the other Naomi, otherwise known to the world as Naomi Wolf, are a constant throughout the read. I am somewhat familiar with ms. Wolf and her zany, conspiratorial stands in recent years. But I now know more about her than before, thanks to this book. In many ways, I came away from this reading knowing more about other Naomi than I did the author herself. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it was good to become more familiar with Wolf and some of the outrageous ideas she supposedly believes.
I like the writing in this book. It is clear, concise, intelligent, and well- edited. I also like how the author, through her examination of other Naomi, came away knowing a little more about herself. Her decision to write this book and the research that went into it was no mere exercise in futility. From cross- examining the tactics used by other Naomi and those like her, the author came away with a better understanding of herself and this helped her grow as a person.
Personally, I don’t have any doppelgangers of my own that come to mind. However, there is much more to this book than discovering your personal double, whether good or evil. This book is about so much more, and it serves as an insightful guide for those who want to know a little more about the mirror world and its place in history and the lessons that can be learned from studying those on the other side. In the meantime, who knows? You may come away from this book discovering new things about yourself. And that alone makes it worth the read.
8 people found this helpfulReport
philip spark
5.0 out of 5 stars important bookReviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2024
Verified Purchase
you should read it.....
One person found this helpfulReport
==
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein review – a case of mistaken identity
This article is more than 10 months old
An insightful and subtle exploration of truth in politics, prompted by constantly being confused with Naomi Wolf
William Davies
Sat 9 Sep 2023 16.30 AEST
Share
Some years ago, I happened to meet a survivalist and conspiracy theorist. He told me he had weapons stashed inside the walls of his house, was ready to use them in defence of “English” women and children, and believed that the BBC was covering up a vast Muslim paedophile ring. It seems uncontroversial to describe this as a “far right” belief system. But the event that first led him to abandon his faith in liberal democracy had nothing to do with the traditional concerns of the right: it was the Iraq war. The internet and Tommy Robinson did the rest.
There is a well-known “horseshoe” theory of political sentiment, which suggests that as ideologies become more polarised along a left-right axis, so they become more alike on a liberal-authoritarian one. This was a useful prop for centrists of the mid-20th century, who sought to portray themselves as the first line of defence against the gulag.
Today, things are far more complicated than these simple axes of left-right and liberal-authoritarian imply. The problem in the age of big tech, the climate crisis, Covid lockdowns, online influencers and collapsed trust in “mainstream” politics and media is that everybody has their suspicions that they are being lied to and manipulated – and they’re right. Where they disagree is on the identity of the liars and the purpose of the manipulation. The rhetoric of critique and liberation has become ubiquitous, no longer serving to distinguish left from right, truth from falsehood. Virtually everyone now wants to unmask the elites and decode their messaging in one way or another. For leftist critics such as Naomi Klein, who made their names in a simpler pre-Trump, pre-YouTube age, this provokes an identity crisis.
The premise of Doppelganger is so unlikely as to be almost absurd: Naomi Klein has spent several years being mistaken for the feminist turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, and has chosen to write a book about this. Both Naomis are Jewish women, who rose to fame on the back of unexpected polemical blockbusters, No Logo and The Beauty Myth respectively. Klein offers plenty of examples of how the confusion manifests itself, especially online, and of how it has troubled her at various points in her life, particularly during the pandemic, when Wolf’s celebrity as a lockdown and vaccine sceptic soared.
You may well wonder how such a faintly comical theme can be extended for 350 pages, and what it has to do with Klein’s usual preoccupations of combating corporate capitalism and climate crisis. It is certainly the most introspective and whimsical of Klein’s books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights, unexpected connections and great subtlety. The Klein/Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms of disorientation that afflict the left, in particular the loss of its monopoly (if it ever had one) over the language of political resistance, and how, in the process, that language has lost its grip on the world.
Liberals and leftists like to reassure ourselves that we know when to trust the elites (on vaccine safety or climate science, say) and when not to (if corporate branding or billionaire-owned media are involved). But this same attitude of studied suspicion is at work among vaccine sceptics and online wellness communities, all of whom pride themselves on doing their “own research”. Marxists and sociologists have theories as to how money and power knit modern societies together – but so does Steve Bannon. Precisely how these differ is not always easy to specify, at least not in the kinds of online environments where so much public discourse now takes place.
Wolf is part of a ‘mirror world’, not so very different from ours, only with more histrionic language and online clout
In some cases, Klein confesses, the very fact that conspiracy theorists were energised by something (such as the “lab leak” theory of Covid’s origins, or the privacy consequences of vaccine passports) led her and her comrades to dismiss it, when they had no real grounds to.
The powers of “surveillance capital” and big pharma are real, yet hard to measure. Klein herself has drawn attention to those threats in her own work. But what if the online grifters and paranoid YouTubers speak to everyday anxieties about such things better than the left does? This is a worry that runs throughout Doppelganger. Has the left messed up? Does the right understand people better? Is Naomi Wolf even on “the right” anyway?
In place of horseshoes, Klein prefers the metaphor of mirrors. Wolf is part of a “mirror world”, not so very different from ours, only with more histrionic language and online clout. Our digital avatars and personal brands are mirrors in which we each gaze narcissistically at ourselves, frequently mistaking image for reality, while the shared world burns around us. Doppelganger is really a story of political and psychic confusion. It also manages to encompass lengthy and fascinating reflections on the history of autism, the work of Philip Roth, and the comparability of the holocaust to colonial genocides in a way that chimes with the pervasive experience of “going down rabbit holes”.skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to Inside Saturday
Free weekly newsletter
The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
Enter your email addressSign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion
There’s a debate to be had about how liberals and leftists should relate to those drawn into the ecosystem of Wolf, Bannon and Trump. Doppelganger leans towards understanding more and condemning less, without ever romanticising those beholden to conspiracy theories. What is clear is that facts and critique alone will never be enough to lure anyone over to Klein’s side. The power of the “mirror world” is precisely that it already has facts and critiques galore. This is a book that offers scant optimism for the future, but if there is hope lingering here, it’s that collective self-reflection – through historical knowledge and organising – offers political resources that solitary self-reflection never will. True to form, Klein’s ultimate message is log off and get on to the streets.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Ebook 92 pages 2 hours
Summary of Doppelganger By Naomi Klein: A Trip into the Mirror World
By Willie M. Joseph
About this ebook
This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.
Summary of Doppelganger By Naomi Klein: A Trip into the Mirror World
IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:
Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book
Naomi Klein's book, Doppelganger, explores the concept of a double self, a self that shares many preoccupations but furthers the same causes as the author. Klein's experience with a doppelganger led her to understand the strangeness of AI-generated text, New Age wellness entrepreneurs, and liberal democracies. The book explores the psychic landscapes and possibilities for building hope amid economic, medical, and political crises. Klein uses humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to confront the strange doubles that haunt us, examining what we neglect as we perfect our digital reflections. The book aims to chart a path beyond despair, asking what we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections, and if it is possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication.
https://www.everand.com/read/672015032/Summary-of-Doppelganger-By-Naomi-Klein-A-Trip-into-the-Mirror-World?_gl=1*1n7yjxa*_up*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjw2dG1BhB4EiwA998cqGme8dSouGtyIFtXJaYLbgqMhFBALCt7u4SAUQe59Z0MonxAjDnNHRoCLsEQAvD_BwE
===
===
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Naomi Klein
4.23
16,162 ratings2,610 reviews
Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Nonfiction (2023)
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 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.
Show more
GenresNonfictionPoliticsMemoirAudiobookPsychologySociologyPhilosophy
...more
Book details & editions
4,644 people are currently reading
66.6k people want to read
About the author
Naomi Klein87 books6,918 followers
Follow
Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses; support of ecofeminism, organized labour, and leftism; and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascism and capitalism. As of 2021, she is an associate professor, and professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, co-directing a Centre for Climate Justice.
Klein first became known internationally for her alter-globalization book No Logo (1999). The Take (2004), a documentary film about Argentine workers' self-managed factories, written by her and directed by her husband Avi Lewis, further increased her profile. The Shock Doctrine (2007), a critical analysis of the history of neoliberal economics, solidified her standing as a prominent activist on the international stage and was adapted into a six-minute companion film by Alfonso Cuaron and Jonás Cuarón, as well as a feature-length documentary by Michael Winterbottom. Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) was a New York Times nonfiction bestseller and the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
In 2016, Klein was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her activism on climate justice. Klein frequently appears on global and national lists of top influential thinkers, including the 2014 Thought Leaders ranking compiled by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Prospect magazine's world thinkers 2014 poll, and Maclean's 2014 Power List. She was formerly a member of the board of directors of the climate activist group 350.org.
Show more
Readers also enjoyedPage 1 of 5
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
Madhumita Murgia
4.1
556
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
Kyle Chayka
3.68
2,078
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
Amanda Montell
3.56
12.2k
Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar
4.24
18.5k
All Fours
Miranda July
3.88
17.6k
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
Claire Dederer
3.8
12.1k
Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet
Taylor Lorenz
3.62
2,818
Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat
Derek Beres
4.11
930
Who's Afraid of Gender?
Judith Butler
4.01
1,114
Enter Ghost
Isabella Hammad
4.08
4,701
Prophet Song
Paul Lynch
4.1
41.9k
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State
Kerry Howley
3.82
3,773
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Salman Rushdie
4.13
10.6k
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
John Vaillant
4.36
6,141
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
Vincent Bevins
4.28
1,382
The Fraud
Zadie Smith
3.3
22.8k
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017
Rashid Khalidi
4.5
17.4k
The Bee Sting
Paul Murray
3.96
56.3k
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
Kara Swisher
4
8,304
A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma
Noreen Masud
4.2
820
All similar books
Ratings & Reviews
What do you think?
Rate this book
Write a Review
Friends & Following
No one you know has read this book. Recommend it to a friend!
Community Reviews
4.23
16,162 ratings2,610 reviews
5 stars
7,559 (46%)
4 stars
5,709 (35%)
3 stars
2,126 (13%)
2 stars
557 (3%)
1 star
211 (1%)
Search review text
Filters
Displaying 1 - 10 of 2,613 reviews
Emily May
2,077 reviews313k followers
Follow
September 27, 2023
Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be?
What a fascinating, hard-to-define book. It's a cultural critique, I guess, but quite unlike any I've read before.
Klein begins her descent into the Mirror World-- the dark side of today's culture where climate deniers, antivaxxers and QAnon devotees invent "facts" and the Internet propels them around the globe-- with the story of her own personal doppelganger. The one time feminist writer, now conspiracy theorist, Naomi Wolf.
Klein has been getting confused with Wolf online for many years now, to the point where she has received countless hate messages aimed at Wolf. What's interesting, for Klein, is that she kind of understands it. Both writers, both dark-haired women, both writing about society and culture. Wolf is a conspiracy theorist, but then you could argue that there was an underlying element of that to Klein's The Shock Doctrine.
This premise opens up the floor for an in-depth look at modern society, predominantly in the United States and Canada. The difference between the real Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf is a bit like looking in a funhouse mirror-- almost the same, yet a distorted, slightly wrong version of oneself --and Klein likens that to the way rational skepticism and activism has been morphed into wild conspiracy theories in today's world.
This, Klein explains, is why so many of us have lost friends and family down the "rabbit hole" of online radicalism in recent years, and especially during COVID. A healthy skepticism of the government and medical industry turns into belief in outlandish claims.
Because here is the inherent problem: the state and government, the laws and medical industry, are indeed flawed and we should be able to question and challenge this… but what happens when that gets distorted beyond all reason? What happens when “maybe we should question the overprescription of drugs in a for-profit industry” becomes “doctors are in collusion with the government to install tracking devices in our arms”?
The notion of the doppelganger, the other, our mirror self, comes up repeatedly throughout. Klein deconstructs various examples of the doppelganger in media, from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Operation Shylock, and likens this doubling to many aspects of life today. We each create a kind of doppelganger in our online presence-- an avatar, a brand, that is us but also not fully us at the same time. This Klein describes as:
a doppelganger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy.
She also laments a “mass unraveling of meaning”. This refers to all kinds of things like regurgitating slogans to show political alignment regardless of whether one agrees with-- or has even thought about --what it says, the right-wing appropriation of terms like "racism" and "enslavement", and the way small tweaks to the truth can result in outright falsehoods. Whoever can scream "fake news" first and loudest is right.
One area of this book I found especially interesting was one that explained to me something I did not understand until now. In the past, if someone mentioned New Age body fanatics, I thought of hippies... so left-wingers, basically. I lived in left-wing hotspot Los Angeles for close to seven years, and wellness-obsessed, holistic yoga moms who know the colour of their auras were the norm. It was very odd for me to see, especially in the wake of COVID, these women fleeing into the arms of Steve Bannon and embracing conspiracies. I had thought they were kooky, but I also thought they were solidly on the left. But here Klein explores the long history of the fascist/New Age alliance, including the Nazi Party obsession with health fads in their pursuit of a pure race.
Far from the unlikely bedfellows they first seemed to be, large parts of the modern wellness industry are proving to be all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority, and disposable people.
I guess it makes sense in an awful way.
This review is getting long, but that's because I made so many notes about it. I'll try to wrap it up now.
I'm not sure all the sections were relevant to the doppelganger idea; some worked better, and were more interesting, than others, but it was an overall really engaging read. It looks at the train wreck that certain parts of the Internet have made of modern politics and the ability to have open discussions and apply reason. It's so crazy it's almost funny at times, until you remember it isn't.
In Klein's own words: "It all would be so ridiculous— if it weren’t so serious."
Show more2023 arc memoirs-or-bios
...more
275 likes
12 comments
Like
Comment
Nina (ninjasbooks)
1,215 reviews907 followers
Follow
May 20, 2024
I’m in awe of Naomi klein. She draws from an enormous knowledge base and pens it down for the readers benefit. The result is a masterfully crafted deep-dive into uncharted water, exploring concepts and phenomena I hadn’t thought much about, but now feel drawn towards.
241 likes
6 comments
Like
Comment
Nathan Shuherk
311 reviews3,422 followers
Follow
February 15, 2024
One of my favorite books of the year
152 likes
Like
Comment
Jessica Woodbury
1,767 reviews2,613 followers
Follow
November 29, 2023
I kept hearing about how great this book was but I couldn't bring myself to read it. After the last few years, did I really need to know any more about how awful things are getting on the far right, and did I really want to get any of that through the lens of the strange relationship between Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf? (I am online enough that I have confused them myself AND I have seen them confused many times AND I have also seen the little rhyme to help differentiate them shared many times.) But it turns out that somehow this book was just the thing I needed to help make me feel a little bit better about the world.
I find some of the negative reviews funny. Just the same thing over and over they say. Well yes. She is taking this idea of the doppelganger, centering it on this one relationship, but then imposing it on all these other things in the world, these things that feel out of our control, these things that are about, underneath everything how we relate to each other. The doppelganger is both familiar and terrifying because of its familiarity, there is so much about what makes us human in the idea. But also this summary makes it sound like a boring book, which it really isn't. I wanted to listen to it all the time, which is exactly the opposite of what I thought would happen.
Somehow I felt more sane as I listened. A lot of things made more sense. Klein really does go for it, she dives in so deeply to the far right that she is able to find the sense that lies underneath the nonsense. This is, for me, reassuring. I admit that it's bleakly reassuring, it's not like it fixes the problem, but understanding the problem is so much better than having a problem that feels incomprehensible.
At one point, I had to take a break for a week or so because I couldn't bear to listen to Klein's chapters on her Jewish faith and heritage, Zionism, and the conflict with Palestine while we watch it all play out in front of us. But this was again because Klein was so astute, so clear, made sense of something that had felt overwhelming and impossible. That clarity made the disaster even more overwhelming for me, even more emotionally difficult to process. Although it turned out that when I started again I only had five minutes left in the section. Ah well.
The thing is, I shouldn't have really enjoyed this book. This year I have really struggled to get into anything. I haven't given a book five stars in so long I don't remember when the last time was. But this book really gave me something, it opened up a part of me, it calmed me. It made me feel in a way that most books haven't been able to do in a very long time. It is a rare and precious thing, so I will give it those five stars happily.
Klein reads the audio and is a very good and engaging narrator.
audiobooks best-2023-arcs memoir
...more
116 likes
6 comments
Like
Comment
Ian Payton
91 reviews14 followers
Follow
September 16, 2023
For me, this is a difficult book to review. The author has some important, insightful and well researched observations about the behaviour of significant sections of the population that I have previously found bewildering and difficult to comprehend: conspiracy theorists, deniers of various kinds, and those that would liken minor lifestyle inconveniences with the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. However, the book felt in places like a disjointed ragbag of ideas that were loosely (sometimes very loosely) tied together by the Doppelgänger theme - a theme that often felt slightly forced, or crowbarred in to justify talking about a particular topic in the context of the book.
Given the disjoint nature of the book, I was also left unsatisfied regarding any overall conclusion. The suggestion that we should work together, rather than as individuals, to address many of the problems we are currently facing seems shallow and weak - especially compared to the depth and strength of some of the issues covered, and the detail with which they have clearly been researched.
After reading this book, I do feel like I have more insight behind what might be driving some mass behaviours that I otherwise found incomprehensible - but I don’t know where that leaves me. I certainly don’t feel any better equipped, nor more hopeful - so I feel I may have missed something.
Thank you #NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for the free review copy of #Doppelganger in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
arc non-fiction read-books-2023
105 likes
4 comments
Like
Comment
Kevin
330 reviews1,424 followers
Follow
July 22, 2024
1 Rule for Neo-Fascism: A Parody of Crisis and Populism:
Preamble:
--Here I was, with a mounting pile of increasingly-dense tomes on structural crises (climate/ecology/geopolitical economy) which I want to unpack/make accessible, yet somehow only finding time to stare at my notes for reviewing “chaos” (ex. “Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male”).
…Yes, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
…I tried to convince myself it was a worthy case study because of Peterson’s reach here in Canada, where some circles which I can reach consider him synonymous with “public intellectual” and “dissident” (for contrast, I associated these terms with Chomsky when I was learning to apply critical thinking to politics: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky).
…This dragged on for a year and a review finally manifested as “1 Rule for Reactionism: An Anesthesia to Chaos”, with a punchline of “Numb yourselves to the pain of others, for you can still rise above them…”, which did help me iron out a few ideas in addition to unpacking Peterson vs. Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and playing with fascism from below and fascism from above.
--Now a touch of serendipity: it turns out Naomi Klein, another of my early “public intellectual”/“dissident” influences (who has recently joined my favourite department at my local university) has emerged from her own rabbit-hole [emphases added]:
In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book. […] Not now—not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet.
[…] I told myself it was “research.” That if I was going to understand her [Naomi Klein’s doppelganger: Naomi Wolf] and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows with names like QAnon Anonymous and Conspirituality that unpack and deconstruct the commingling worlds of conspiracy theories, wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with Covid-19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism. This on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson, on whose shows Other Naomi had become a regular guest.
The Missing:
1) Contextualizing Klein’s readership:
--There was certainly an initial relief in reading a familiar voice (and climate/anti-capitalist activist) detail her own misadventures researching the reactionary rabbit-hole, enough for me to consider this as my favourite Klein book.
--My longstanding critique of Klein has been contradictory:
a) Her reach:
--Since the success of her 2000 No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein’s audience has expanded into the Western bubble of default liberals (with some vague Leftish sentiments, who read books… we can debate how mainstream this actually is). When you live in North America (esp. the more apolitical Canada), this is the default ideology of public education; Leftists (esp. structural critiques of capitalism) still struggle to find traction here.
--If you search for accessible critiques of “capitalism” here, Klein’s 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism often appears at the top. From the context of the target audience, this is surely a success, as they would never read and contextualize something like Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1.
b) The impossibility of full Leftist representation:
--Of course, reading reviews from comrades remind me of how those not needing Klein’s bridge (i.e. “self-respecting” oppressed groups, Leftists already reading Klein’s sources) put pressure on Klein (as one of the few bridges to more mainstream audiences). Friction can help us learn.
--But of course there is no way a single person can (or should) represent all the diverse, radical views. And of course the messaging will be diluted and framed (yes, marketed) in the context for default liberals which seems inappropriate to radicals. Ex. radicals may approach this topic by centering works like black radical W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double-consciousness” (The Souls of Black Folk), which Klein mentions briefly in Ch.14.
--This latest book may polarize this contradiction even more with its memoir format, given how these different groups relate to Klein’s context. Reviewing this contradiction just reminds me that my goal is synthesis. Those who already relate to Klein will of course love her writing style applied to personal details [emphasis added]:
What made it worse for me was that, with [Naomi] Wolf’s new focus on abuses of corporate and political power during states of emergency, something she touched on only briefly in The End of America, I felt like I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, one with all facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And while I was not yet confused with my doppelganger all that often, I knew that some people would credit me with Wolf’s theories. It was an out-of-body feeling. I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-wear arrest, and a line in The Guardian jumped out at me: “Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
“What the actual fuck?” he asked.
2) “Conspiracy” in the Western Bubble:
--Before we continue, “What is Politics?” reminds me to be extra careful with political terms (“Left”, “Right”, “capitalism”, “socialism”, etc.). I define how I use “reactionary” (right-wing reaction to status quo crisis), “conservative” (conserving hierarchical traditions), “liberal” (cosmopolitan capitalism, current status quo), etc. in my Jordan Peterson review; I did not use “neo-fascism” in that review, which I’ll distinguish as follows:
a) Peterson: “reactionary” to status quo (cosmopolitan capitalism) crisis, with vague hand-waving regarding “suffering” and women-chaos vs. men-order. Hence, an anesthesia to chaos.
b) Steve Bannon: also “reactionary” to status quo crisis, but his right-wing nationalism is buttressed by concrete geopolitical economic/military strategy (with the historical precedence of Mussolini/Hitler), hence a new fascism (“neo-fascism”).
--“conspiracy without the theory”: conspiracies (secret plots usually by the powerful to do something bad/illegal) are normal and expected given our material conditions of concentrated private powers amidst great inequality. Global capitalism’s most significant planning are all done behind closed doors of power (capitalist class of financiers/industrialists and their lobbyists; military, etc., with all their contradictions), and the public relations for their conspiracies become our political theater. What is illegality when you write the law? However, this occurs within the logic of capitalism’s structural absurdities, which need to be carefully theorized.
--I’ll highlight how Klein unpacks reactionary “conspiracy theories” later. Let’s start with “conspiracy theories” in general. One check I find helpful is to take a step back and consider if the hype is from the echo-chamber of the Western/US bubble.
[…] but I laughed at America's fear
Of a New World Order controllin' the hemisphere
'Cause my people been livin' that for the past 500 years
[-Immortal Technique (R.A. the Rugged Man “Who Do We Trust?”)]--Ex. “JFK assassination conspiracy theories”: is a conspiracy possible here? Of course, but does this deserve so much attention where, if proven, will lead to some paradigm shift? I think this is mostly for those still stuck in the US political theatre, which does not represent the global community despite its oversized influence. JFK’s administration featured technocrats like Robert McNamara, who later escalated the genocidal war on Vietnam under LBJ (which included an actual false-flag conspiracy, the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”) and after became president of the World Bank to derail Global South decolonization/industrialization and get them to export cash crops and starve.
--Ex. “911 Inside Job”: possible? Of course, but how much is the emphasis on the geopolitical ties with Saudi Arabia monarchy? See Paul Jay interviewing Senator Bob Graham. How much would proving an inside job actually affect the global “War on Terror”, the endless US interventions and military bases around the world, etc.?
--Ex. “COVID-19 plandemic”: possible? Well, lab leak certainly, as scientific research is distorted by anti-social incentives (military industrial complex, patenting monopolization, cost-cutting outsourcing, publication bias, etc.). But “Why Vaccine Passports Equal Slavery Forever” sounds rather Hollywood (despite exploiting historical truths like the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) when the Global South is protesting against vaccine apartheid (i.e. Global North hoarding vaccines) because of capitalist patent monopolization (a longstanding issue with the global reach of “Big Pharma”). Even academics from liberalism have warned of contradictions promoting pandemics (ex. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance). Of course Leftists take deeper dives: Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19.
The Good:
1) Wolf’s liberal contradictions and crisis:
--In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein explores how global capitalism’s structural crises (note: from structural contradictions more than deliberately manufactured by individual elites) in the late 1960’s brought a state of shock which opportunists (“free market” economics of “Neoliberalism”) could exploit to dismantle the status quo (New Deal’s welfare state compromise).
--Note: Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy) and Hudson (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) focus on the geopolitical material conditions (materialism) behind the crises that drove even New Dealers in power (ex. Paul Volcker, who advised Nixon on the Nixon Shock 1971 and later committed the Volcker Shocks as chairman of the Federal Reserve 1979-87) to dismantle the New Deal/unleash Wall Street’s volatility to preserve the US empire, whereas “free market” economists were more of an ideological cover.
…Meanwhile, Klein’s framing focuses on the battle of ideas (idealism) where some opportunist economists (“free market” fundamentalists like Milton Friedman) took over. One constructive takeaway seems to be learning from the Right’s tactics: the Left needs to prepare ready-to-go constructive alternatives (not just deconstructive critiques) to present during opportunities. However, this requires careful analysis of the material structures/conditions of the crisis.
--With the 1960’s youth radicalism being neutralized by “Neoliberalism”, we see the first appearance of Naomi Wolf in her 1990 The Beauty Myth as part of “Third-wave Feminism”. Klein notes how Wolf’s framing was to help individualist middle-class (professional/educated/“white”) women better compete with men in liberal meritocracy, thus neglecting the ongoing intersectionality critiques (intersections of class/race/gender) by Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, etc.
…This only escalated with Wolf’s 2nd book, 1993’s Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century, a “lean in” approach to power which saw Wolf connect with the Democratic Party (Clinton/Gore).
--In 2014, Wolf stepped out-of-line of the liberal status quo by speaking against Israel’s latest violence against Gaza (“1,462 Palestinian civilians were killed that summer, compared with 6 Israeli civilians; 789 Palestinian fighters were killed, compared with 67 Israeli soldiers.”), which led to “anti-Semitism” smears in mainstream media, losing her university position and getting online threats. Later, Klein examines the mirroring of the Holocaust/Israel apartheid.
For the rest of the review, see the comment section below…
“2) A Vacuum for reactionary populism”
“3) Bannon’s embrace and Neo-fascist strategy”
“4) “Socialism or Barbarism””
critique-propaganda theory-culture-religion theory-education
...more
82 likes
2 comments
Like
Comment
Michelle Boley
1 review7 followers
Follow
September 1, 2023
I am shocked that anyone actually published this book. How is a person with a completely different name to Ms Klien her doppelganger exactly?
Ironically I think I first heard about Klein by confusing her with the superior author Naomi Prins. Klein's books used to be okay... Her book on disaster capitalism was very informative but apparently when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry she just can't or won't see the big picture. The delusion she is harboring while defending people like Anthony Fauci - the very faces of extractive capital and the pharmaceutical industry under the guise of government - are the exact problems she pretends she is identifying which she is now propping up.
I'm sure she means well, but in reality she is confusing her own desire to believe in the validity of a vaccine that was not properly tested and does not work by any metric we would have used to term something an effective vaccine, with the reality around the completely interconnected roles of Fauci and big pharma and a profit scheme that continues to pay out for big business while providing questionable benefits to citizens. Fauci in reality was one of the biggest profiteers off the pandemic and spreaders of vaccine disinformation - consistently repeating the lie that it stopped the spread of the disease and giving false security to many people who behaved according to his lies and made the people around them very ill. He spread misinformation about the efficacy of cloth masks and disinformation about the origin of the virus to cover his own ass on the funding of his gain of function research project that more than likely caused the pandemic leak in Wuhan. If she really cared about public health she would not defend the people involved in these lies. It's tragic that she doesn't see that what she's actually doing is merely protecting power that has behaved unconscionably and to the detriment of the world.
Even today a billion-dollar contract was signed for a new vaccine on the same day that the CDC announced that the new strain of Covid is more likely to infect those who have been vaccinated. Yikes. This book will not age well. She really should have waited before she rolled out her poorly conceptualized "conspiracy theory" that everyone who disagreed with her worldview is wrong. I have not seen much on Wolf and I don't have any particular concern around what issues she is right or wrong on, but the promotions I've seen of Klien's book and her own proclamations for what is true and why she made it are deeply disturbing. We are going to end up in a very dangerous place when people like Klein continue to ignore science while claiming they "believe science" as though it is some kind of religious dogma that is indisputable, not a series of credentialed scientists and doctors who have conflicting opinions and studies and data points in an environment where one side is being silenced and censored to the detriment of the American people.
The video I watched promoting her book - which could not have been more of a dystopian AI modeled video straight out of science fiction - literally has videos of the JFK assassination being used to convey the idea that some people don't "believe in reality", when in REALITY Kennedy's assassination is the best case to look at to understand America's authoritarian impulse to lie about what it represents and deny truth about its history to its people. There could not be more well-documented resources to understand the Kennedy assassination. Many of the people slandered as "conspiracy theorists" were credentialed principled legal experts and journalists who worked with thousands of incredibly dedicated researchers who have read through hundreds of thousands of documents for no pay in the hopes of eventually bringing the truth and justice to the American people.
The work they've done has put together a story far more plausible and based in fact than the delusions of the Warren Commission that repeated a completely unsourced declaration of one man's guilt by the FBI in the hours after the assassination with absolutely no investigation completed and ignoring the testimony of hundreds of witnesses and whistleblowers testimony to the contrary. And all of those factual interviews and witnesses and even the coverup identified by the House Select Committee on Assassinations that have completely discredited the only official narrative that has ever been conveyed to Americans should tell her that this is not the example to use when trying to lay down your take on what is "reality".
For someone who thinks they are "seeing through" a mirror... It might do her some good to actually look into one and realize she is propping up some very dangerous lies in the name of fighting disinformation. It's a shame to see. And you have to hope the people reading these books have actually done their homework enough to understand what the debates are and read her proclamations on disinformation with the skepticism they deserve - For some reason I have a feeling we will not be that lucky. The sooner people realize that this fight is not about a ruling elite telling the truth and a world of delusion that is getting in the way, but rather a slipping Empire's desperate grasp to control a narrative in order to protect themselves from accountability and consequences based on truths that they are desperate to cover up the better off we will all be. Sad to see someone who could have contributed to that fight on the wrong side of history.
73 likes
28 comments
Like
Comment
Dr. Cat in the Brain
157 reviews50 followers
Follow
October 2, 2023
This is one of the best, strangest and hardest to define books I've read in recent memory.
Doppelganger is the latest from Naomi Klein author of the Shock Doctrine, No Logo and This Changes Everything.
Compared to her previous works it's a much more personal discussion of her own sense of dread hunting a political shadow twin as they descend into the realms of quackery and grifting buffoonery. But it also encompasses a cultural analysis of the last 3 years and a greater over-all look at how power structures in general work and how the nature of those systems create doubling cultures.
Worlds built upon shadow worlds like sedimentary layers in a rock.
Naomi takes you into the dizzying mirror-land of her own Doppelganger, a former feminist turned rabid anti-vaxxer.
Naomi is so often confused for her twin, that she even gets consistent hate mail from people believing they are one and the same. The effect feels like a combination of political nightmare, emotional turmoil, social media's most toxic elements and trauma combining to create an intense sense of dissociation.
The Doppelganger is a feeling that you're seeing somebody else living your life, twisting it and corrupting it. The name comes from a mythological creature that's found in literally hundreds of cultures that can either take your place, represent your own hubris and comeuppance or even embody a sense of self-loathing.
Or all of the above.
Much like the fairy Changelings, the Doppelganger can also be a figure that's deeply seated in
discrimination of people with mental illness or autism or disabilities. "The evil twin" was a convenient a way to explain children that were neurodivergent and to justify hatred and ostracization of people with behavioural differences. It was easier to say "my loved one was replaced by an evil duplicate" rather than face the reality that your child was different.
And a lot of discrimination of autism and disabilities and conspiracy theories surrounding mental illness in the modern era are still deeply seated in this ancient and superstitious form of demonisation.
By invoking the myth of the Doppelganger to define modern culture, Klein perfectly describes the almost otherworldly sense of horror of seeing people you know get captured in the online cult factory that is social media. Where more and more professional outrage merchants and grifter parasites latch onto political movements like zebra mussels and capsize important issues and discussions with frenzied conspiracies and bloated semantic pollution.
But I think this discussion of the Doppelganger is even more useful in this book to describe a person's personal struggles with their own sense of identity in the face of a world where identity itself has become a commodity.
Where every person is being 'twinned' by the design of social media, seeing their identity as potential brands and trying to control the value of those brands. Where people have become so entangled in media, it's now become a part of them like a new growth, or tumor, which was predicted in David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Where being a teenager online is now a dizzying combination of growing up and trying to find your place in the world, while at the same time being your own PR and HR department trying to negotiate for every mistake you make.
A culture where billionaires demand you pay them money to confirm you exist, so you can create free content on their social media platforms. Making a sense of self into a luxury.
This particular brand of hell was predicted by the late anime filmmaker Satoshi Kon and his films Perfect Blue (which deals with seeing your own identity/celebrity become a dangerous Doppelganger) and Paprika (where technology allows a woman to live as her own artistic expression and where corporations move towards the commodification of dreams and internal psyche). A large part of the isolation of modern identity also was predicted in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's horror film PULSE where the rise and overvalued state of online identity becomes like a tomb, where people cut themselves off from the real world and exist only through representation so much, they become living ghosts.
There's also the continuing rippling effect covid has had on identity (both online and off).
For a lot of wealthy people covid was a disturbing time stuck in their large houses and large apartments when they had to order food.
It was a period where podcasters and comedians wanted to have 'debates' about the value of science and vaccination while not knowing the difference between adverse effects and side effects. Where people who did not know the difference between aerosols and gases told everybody that masks don't work. Which is a lot like that one episode of Friends where Joey claims to be fluent in French while being unable to say anything but "Loop-de-boop!".
For these people covid was a joke. And discussing it was a hobby. But while these entitled people sat around debating how to stop the plague? Many workers, disabled people and their families were fed to the plague.
The poor, the disabled, the front-line workers were shoved into the SARS equivalent of a Wicker Man.
A mass ritual sacrifice that people felt 'must happen' so the culture can return to a sense of normalcy. But like the actual Wicker Man, that sacrifice was a symbolic gesture. So many people who lost loved ones for 'the greater good' have come to realise those sacrifices were publicity stunts. Promotional ads.
This created its own mirror-land where one half of the culture saw covid as not a big deal, because they were protected, insulated, while the other half has been cut to pieces, enraged, decimated and are looking for one outlet or another to vent their anger.
Being disabled I can tell you there is a massive sense of betrayal in my community towards every single political party, not just due to how the disabled have been abandoned by everybody (and even justified being put on 'no revive' lists) during covid but who abandoned them.
I know many people in my community who seethe about discussions of possible mass slaughter of minority groups and the potential rise of fascism, when in their eyes, that mass slaughter and that rise has already happened.
Three years running. In fact.
Those death tolls aren't a possible reality, they are a significant reality that have already effected millions of people. That didn't need to happen. And many of the people who claim to want to fight back against that kind of systematic decimation of the underprivileged on both the right and the left, have already proven they will do absolutely nothing when it arrives.
Because it arrived and they did nothing.
If anything, they cheered it on from the sidelines.
Klein herself notes how she had discussions with people who once voted NPD (the more left-wing party in Canadian politics) who openly expressed how disabled people and people who are immunocompromised (like myself) should die.
This opinion wasn't rare, if anything it was mainstream. All over podcasts and social media. Radio personalities went on-air to demand that people like me should step into the strike zone and take one for the team.
And the disabled and the immunocompromised and the poor did die. They did sacrifice. They were culled. And they continue to die to this day.
How many millions are gone? And to what end?
Did all of those sacrifices bring a close to Covid? No. Did they bring back everybody's normal life? No. Did they bring about a great herd immunity? No. Did they save anybody's small business? No. Did they lower the price of food or make housing more affordable? No.
All for nothing.
Meanwhile the professional outrage merchants, the podcaster class, the protected and spoiled social media celebrities fiddled, and mastur-debated and dismissed our deaths with casual, uncaring and unimpressed hand waves.
"Let the poor and disabled fall. We have bigger political problems like cancel culture and bathroom discussions and endless, meandering conversations about JK Rowling's hot-takes and whether Martin Scorsese should like Marvel superheroes."
It is no wonder that such a current cultural divide has given rise to so much anger. And there are so many people looking to take advantage of it.
There are three horsemen of the personal apocalypse: The Guru, The Conspiracy Addict and the Self-Styled Truth-Seeker. And all of them have been hungrily feeding off the rage of the victims of covid.
People not looking to fix any social ill, but looking to inflame hatred for their own benefit. Validating people's fears and insecurities and anger when nobody else will. Listening to their feelings that nobody wants to hear. Because trauma burns bridges and isolates. And just like with disaster capitalism, what is personally devastating for some is always opportunity for others.
They see broken lives excluded and alone as a resource to be exploited.
An animal that is abused enough will learn to fear the whole world and then along comes the huckster saying the whole world is actually out to get them. And like *that* the job is already done. The grifter just needs to point them in the right direction to funnel their anger and rage for the grifter's own profit.
Bingo-bango: Instant cult.
Cults say: "Everybody outside the in-group is bad and accepting them is treason". And then people who internalise that message and spread it begin to wonder why they start feeling even more excluded from their families and society.
So they run to the in-group. Because it's all they have left.
That's not coincidence. It's social engineering. It's by design.
Certain figures on social media want you tribal, they want you separated and afraid. They'll get people repeating angry hot takes about women and LGBT that will distance friends and loved ones from those people. And then get those people to blame their loved ones for their own isolation.
This is why I call it a cult machine. Because a cult will use the exact same type of social pressure to exploit and prey on people. It isolates you and then offers you a kind hand and then convinces you that kind hand is the only hand that matters.
Abusive people follow the exact same type of behaviour.
And so we're seeing the rise of the new age conspiracy guru. Not theorists, not anymore, because they don't really have theories. You see, theories can be disproved. That's why we call them a THEORY. Conspiracy gurus can never be disproved. They have tangential connections and vague accusations to justify every contradiction in their beliefs, every fault in their ideals, every mistake in their reporting. They have conjecture to hand-wave away all their wrong-doing while painting their enemies as ever-growing impossible armies of all-powerful shadows.
And this is all just a part of our Doppelganger culture. We have met the enemy and it is us.
The war on terror is over and the terror has won.
After I finished reading this book, I naturally wanted to check out how the conspiracy factory has responded to Klein's work.
It should be noted that the harshest criticisms I've found regarding this book come from discussions by people who clearly didn't read it at all.
They spent the majority of their critique talking about Klein being okay with big pharma when she openly criticises these companies in the first half of the book. She even criticises the desire to turn every discussion of vaccines and the origins of the covid virus into a binary discussion of "if you have any doubts you must be in bed with Steve Bannon".
But a lot of the people that 'just want to ask questions' don't want anybody asking questions about them or their ideas. How convenient.
They have completely embraced their own reflexive, reactionary argument where any challenge to their beliefs and bias (moderate or otherwise) becomes a wholesale endorsement of the Illuminati and Satanism and any other wild accusation they can whip out of their ass.
And this reflects Klein's own criticism of this kind of weird Doppelganger culture where online outrage merchants appropriate arguments and discussions on important topics, omit a large part of the context of those discussions and then twist them to justify bizarre accusations and their own mirror world logic.
Usually at the expense of the real victims.
And at the very whiff of dissent the Doppelganger culture has raced online to prove Klein one hundred percent correct.
10/10
73 likes
2 comments
Like
Comment
Thomas
1,664 reviews10.4k followers
Follow
May 6, 2024
This book was quite chaotic tbh. I agreed with Naomi Klein on a lot of her leftist politics and appreciate her critical thinking, though the organization of this book was a mess. To me, Doppelganger felt like a bunch of disjointed musings about politics, meandering psychology takes, and reflections about COVID-19 thrown together into a book. She bases this book on how she is often mistaken for Naomi Wolf, a writer who’s also a white Jewish woman, though Wolf has leaned into right wing conspiracy theories and Klein has stayed on the political left. Unfortunately, the observations about Wolf didn’t seem like a strong enough logical or emotional foundation – sometimes it felt like an analysis of Wolf, sometimes it felt like an exploration of right wing beliefs in general, but neither avenue impressed me too much.
Three stars because even though the structure of this book was mid to me, Klein did raise some great points/experiences, like her critique of Zionism and her experience of getting the message from a publisher that they wanted to publish women’s stories about their eating disorders/bodies but not women’s takes on political issues. I think I prefer Klein’s other work more.
biography-or-memoir nonfiction
73 likes
6 comments
Like
Comment
Maxwell
1,281 reviews10.3k followers
Follow
April 27, 2024
This should be required reading. Too many good points to try and summarize in a review. All I'll say is that I really appreciated her rigorous attention to detail and facts, blended with her personal examination and willingness to call out herself to showcase how we might move forward and change as a collective.
non-fiction
=
==
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein review – across the great divide
This article is more than 10 months old
The writer’s enjoyable obsession with the ‘other Naomi’ (Wolf), a conspiracy theorist, becomes a deeply insightful inquiry into the way technology fuels the polarisation of society
Tim AdamsSun 17 Sep 2023 18.00 AEST
Share
The first time it happened, Naomi Klein was in a public lavatory just off Wall Street in Manhattan. She heard two women discussing something she had said about the Occupy movement, which was then camped outside. Klein emerged from her cubicle to put the women right: it wasn’t her who had said those things, but she knew straight away who had. It must have been the “other Naomi” – Naomi Wolf. After that, the misunderstanding started happening more and more, particularly online.
It was true the pair of them had things in common, beyond the name. They had both written generation-defining bestselling polemics. In 1991, Wolf’s The Beauty Myth promoted the idea that eating disorders were by-products of the cosmetics and fashion industries; while Naomi Klein’s No Logo, nearly a decade later, had become a global rallying cry against the exploitative working practices of multinationals and their billionaire owners. They both (for the purposes of author photos at least) had big hair and broad smiles. They both were children of Jewish parents with alternative lifestyles. They both even had partners called Avi.
Her quest is not only the roots of Wolf’s journey to the ‘other side’ but for the blind spots in her own self-awareness
But while these similarities persisted, over the past 20 years the political journeys of the Naomis could hardly have been more distinct. Naomi Klein developed her original anti-corporate message into a critique of the environmental catastrophe of global capitalism that argues for a green New Deal. Naomi Wolf, meanwhile, made a strange journey from beauty myths to a full diet of conspiracy theory, pro-Trump activism and anti-vaccine extremism.
Even so, during the pandemic, the confusion became so pointed that one Twitter user even came up with a handy rhyme, to tell the two women apart:
If the Naomi be Klein
You’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.
This book begins as an enjoyably obsessive investigation into that doppelganger relationship, touching on famous precedents: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator; Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. It broadens into a deeply insightful inquiry into the ways in which the technology that drives our lives increasingly demands mirror-image doubles, tribal combatants to fuel a divided culture. This process, Klein argues, was accelerated by the restrictions and anxieties of the pandemic when “the [real] world was disappearing and so was I”.
In that enforced isolation, the activist-author found herself spending more and more time following her accidental nemesis down internet rabbit holes. Wolf, banned from Twitter for her crazy views, had by now become a star turn in the mirror world of “alt-right” YouTube and podcasts. Klein describes how she would occasionally emerge from this “doomscrolling” to inform her baffled husband of the latest outrage she had discovered: “She just wrote that ‘vaccinated people’s urine/faeces needs to be separated from general sewage supplies/waterways until its impact on unvaccinated people’s drinking water is established’.” By now Klein did not have to identify the “she” in question.
That proposition for an alternative water system might stand as a useful metaphor to describe the extremes of contemporary “us and them” that the story of Klein and Wolf comes to illustrate. Friends with a knowledge of her project keep asking Klein to explain exactly how Wolf came to “fall off a cliff” from liberal and scientific orthodoxy; but Klein is too good a writer to fall for that diagnosis. She is appalled and fascinated by her shadow principally because she wants to understand the motivations behind Wolf’s world view if not its unhinged conclusions. Wolf’s “Covid rollercoaster ride…” is, Klein comes to argue, if nothing else, a response to “what it increasingly feels like to be at the mercy of omnipresent technologies that are governed according to opaque algorithms… outside of existing laws”. The problem, she suggests, is that the explanation for that feeling is ascribed to “the wrong c”: conspiracy not capitalism.
Her quest in all of this is not only the roots of Wolf’s journey to the “other side” but for the blind spots in her own self-awareness. Like a rival general, Klein listens hard to Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room – on which Wolf has become a fixture with her own mass following (the “Wolf Pack”) – and identifies exactly the strategic political ground they seek to colonise; that new coalition between “the far right and the far out”. The unlikely crossover, for example, between the “wellness industry” and gun-loving libertarians, around the issue of vaccination. Campaigning with her husband, who is running as a New Democratic party candidate in Canada, she confronts insistent evidence of this on the doorstep – women with telltale “internet eyes”, one-time liberals who now spout received nonsense about global elites and casually suggest that the pandemic was sent to cull the weaker members of society.
Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality
Read more
Klein’s instinct is not only to condemn. She makes the important case that the very nature of polarity now means that crucial journalistic questions go unanswered. There should, for example, have been legitimate scepticism about the UN acceptance of China’s story of the origins of the Covid virus, or about Bill Gates’s defence of the drug companies’ insistence on patents for their vaccines. But the mere fact that the conspiracists on Wolf’s side amplified those issues meant that such arguments were ignored or under-investigated. “Once an issue is touched by ‘them’ it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else,” Klein observes of what is a growing and dangerous trend.
Her book is a powerful antidote to such instincts. In articulating and examining some of the darker forces of the world her “double” inhabits, Klein never forgets that the primary purpose of mirrors is actually self-reflection; to understand the other, you first have to know yourself.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
No comments:
Post a Comment