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Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
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.
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.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published September 12, 2023
About the author
Naomi Klein
82 books6,083 followersNaomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, documentary filmmaker and author of the international bestsellers No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. She is a senior correspondent for The Intercept and her writing appears widely in such publications as The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and The Nation, where she is a contributing editor. Klein is a member of the board of directors for climate-action group 350.org and one of the organizers behind Canada’s Leap Manifesto. In November 2016 she was awarded Australia’s prestigious Sydney Peace Prize for, according to the prize jury, “inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality.” Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
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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."
October 18, 2023
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]:
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]:
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.
--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””
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--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.
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. “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””
October 31, 2023
One of my favorite books of the year
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
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
July 7, 2023
Naomi Klein has a doppelganger - one that is an avid pusher of conspiracy theories. Engaging with the idea of the doppelganger in popular culture and academia, Klein uses it to determine why society is experiencing such vicious swings into false narratives, and how the difference between the traumatised and traumatiser has become so muddied. This thoughtful and intimate narrative offers a thorough shakedown of the most surreal parts of modern life, and an explanation of how everyday people have been consumed in insidious ways.
An exciting new insight into our post-pandemic world.
An exciting new insight into our post-pandemic world.
August 31, 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.
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.
October 5, 2023
The most important book I’ve read this year. Articulates the various thoughts and feelings I’ve had throughout the past couple years and expands upon them. It stands as a unique call to action as the government turns into a doppelgänger of itself and the far right threatens to turn whatever is left of this democracy into an authoritarian hellscape.
October 11, 2023
Things were going so well. Klein gave me a smart analysis of post-truth America (and to some extent Canada.) She connected some things and addressed the failure of the Left and Center to honor the real (and justifiable) fears of technology (especially the cooptation and commodification of our identities), the unimaginable profits that drug companies made from Covid, and many other things. That failure left a vacuum that people like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, hundreds of YouTube, Insta, X, and TikTok influencers, and Klein's doppelganger herself the sad sack lunatic Naomi Wolf had the opportunity to fill, and boy did they seize that opportunity. As recently as yesterday I was singing its praises. And then we got where it was always going -- Capitalism is the real villain, and Zionism, and the Patriarchy. Sigh. My disappointment with this is even greater than it was with the last Matthew Desmond book, Poverty By America.
I don't want to get into a rant here, but I am going to say two things. Capitalism is flawed, it leads to all sorts of bad ends. but it is not "failing us on every front that matters" as Klein says. I teach in a graduate program with a lot of foreign students, many of whom come from countries that are not technically capitalist nations. Many come from countries in Europe that are Socialist or Socialist adjacent. These students are always bright, often brilliant, and generally committed to making the world better and they all want to come here for a reason. Capitalism is not a zero-sum game, the bad things it brings do not obviate the good and great things it brings. The second thing is that Zionism is also flawed, the Palestinian people suffer as a result of certain elements of Zionism, but Zionism can be redefined. Like Capitalism, Zionism has led to things bad and good, but none of those obviate the need for a Jewish homeland. Just because we are paranoid does not mean they're not trying to kill us. The support of BDS from a Jew is sheer self-loathing.
Finally, Klein's choice to bring all of the terrible things happening in post-truth America together as an attack on Capitalism ends up sounding like a nonsensical illogical conspiracy theory. The student surpasses her doppelganger. Well, doesn't surpass her, but she joins her.
The first 60% of this is really good. Then it plummets into a lefty conspiracy theory intended to dent a righty conspiracy theory. A 3.5. I am going to go with a 4-star, but I may end up going to a 3-star. (ETA -- time healed me. Time made me angrier about Klein's missed opportunity here. 3 stars it is.)
I don't want to get into a rant here, but I am going to say two things. Capitalism is flawed, it leads to all sorts of bad ends. but it is not "failing us on every front that matters" as Klein says. I teach in a graduate program with a lot of foreign students, many of whom come from countries that are not technically capitalist nations. Many come from countries in Europe that are Socialist or Socialist adjacent. These students are always bright, often brilliant, and generally committed to making the world better and they all want to come here for a reason. Capitalism is not a zero-sum game, the bad things it brings do not obviate the good and great things it brings. The second thing is that Zionism is also flawed, the Palestinian people suffer as a result of certain elements of Zionism, but Zionism can be redefined. Like Capitalism, Zionism has led to things bad and good, but none of those obviate the need for a Jewish homeland. Just because we are paranoid does not mean they're not trying to kill us. The support of BDS from a Jew is sheer self-loathing.
Finally, Klein's choice to bring all of the terrible things happening in post-truth America together as an attack on Capitalism ends up sounding like a nonsensical illogical conspiracy theory. The student surpasses her doppelganger. Well, doesn't surpass her, but she joins her.
The first 60% of this is really good. Then it plummets into a lefty conspiracy theory intended to dent a righty conspiracy theory. A 3.5. I am going to go with a 4-star, but I may end up going to a 3-star. (ETA -- time healed me. Time made me angrier about Klein's missed opportunity here. 3 stars it is.)
September 7, 2023
Fantastic..full review to come
September 15, 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.
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.
October 2, 2023
Those of us who were involved in the US/UK left electoral movements of 2015-2020 knew that if we lost our long shot at power, very bad and very weird things would happen, and so they have, intensified a thousandfold by the pandemic and global warming's increasing obviousness. Few writers on the left have been able to zoom out of our failure and its consequences with any kind of perspective, and have mostly either dropped out altogether (ahem) or have opted for hepcat sectarianism. This book gradually expands out from its - let's be honest, hysterically funny - basic premise into one of the very few serious analyses of the bizarroland we're now in. It also lays out some possible - if very tough - paths out of it. Easily Klein's best book and quite extraordinarily good by anyone's standards.
August 16, 2023
This book is a fascinating look at doppelgangers in academia and popular culture. Klein analyzes her own doppelganger relationship to Naomi Wolf and Wolf's antivax/conspiracy theory views. Overall, I really enjoyed this one, especially the sections that were more about political doppelgangers.
September 18, 2023
My head is spinning…
Can I classify this book as a conspiracy theory? I find it really hard to believe that enough people who were fans of Naomi Klein mistook Naomi Wolf’s words to be hers (I never even heard of Ms. Wolf until I read this book). That’s like saying people kept confusing George Bush for George Saunders. Instead of defining what a doppelgänger is, she should’ve looked up what a reach is.
Also, Ms. Klein’s take on the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine are ironic for someone whose bread and butter is researching shock states and conspiracy theories. How can she be so naive?
Can I classify this book as a conspiracy theory? I find it really hard to believe that enough people who were fans of Naomi Klein mistook Naomi Wolf’s words to be hers (I never even heard of Ms. Wolf until I read this book). That’s like saying people kept confusing George Bush for George Saunders. Instead of defining what a doppelgänger is, she should’ve looked up what a reach is.
Also, Ms. Klein’s take on the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine are ironic for someone whose bread and butter is researching shock states and conspiracy theories. How can she be so naive?
October 27, 2023
Naomi Klein’s latest book Doppelganger represents a departure from her previous works, focusing on a highly personal subject at a time when she is eager to delve into another book about climate change. A significant portion of the book is dedicated to analysing Naomi Klein's frequent experiences of being mistaken for Naomi Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth who has recently been fervently advocating the anti-vax movement and various conspiracy theories. Klein frequently refers to Wolf throughout the book as Other Naomi, while emphasising the striking similarities between their names, appearances, and even their partners' names, which have compounded the persistent issue of misidentification. Initially a source of embarrassment for Klein, this case of mistaken identity later evolved into an existential threat to her personal brand, echoing the themes explored in her acclaimed book No Logo.
The misattribution has caused considerable discomfort for Klein, particularly on social media during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when much of our activities shifted online. There were instances where the Other Naomi made offensive statements to netizens, prompting people to criticise Klein for things she never actually said. It was during this period that the concept of doppelgänger entered Klein's consciousness, providing an entirely new subject matter to explore. While Naomi Wolf plays a prominent role in this book, it is not solely about her. Instead, she serves as a case study through which Klein elucidates the phenomenon of individuals existing as doppelgängers, particularly as they are perceived by others.
The book meticulously traces Naomi Wolf's transformation from a feminist icon to a controversial figure associated with conspiracy theories, examining pivotal moments that have defined her trajectory. From her seminal work on feminism in the 1990s to her perplexing assertions about vaccines and geoengineered skies, Wolf's transition from mainstream media to her current platform on Steve Bannon's far-right podcast, War Room, offers a compelling case study on the current state of society and media. At times, the narrative appears to cast aspersions on Wolf, interrogating her journey from a prominent feminist author of her generation to a conspiracy theorist who has been de-platformed by Twitter seven times.
Klein's narrative provides a thought-provoking perspective, dissecting not only the personal challenges arising from mistaken identity but also the broader implications of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and the allure of right-wing populism for many individuals. This exploration becomes even more pertinent given the failure of left-wing politicians to provide significant policy guidance during the challenging period of the recent pandemic. Klein delves deep into the mechanisms that propel individuals towards embracing conspiratorial beliefs, highlighting how narcissism, coupled with social media addiction and midlife crises, can often lead to ideological shifts, frequently to the right. While this equation provides valuable insights, Klein carefully refrains from psychoanalysing her doppelgänger, instead focusing more on the sociological dimensions of the issue. Her analysis of the Mirrors World also draws from a diverse range of literature, prominently featuring Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession.
One of the book's standout features is Klein's contemplation of the commonalities she discovered between her left-leaning beliefs and certain aspects of right-wing populism while listening to Steve Bannon's podcast, a perspective that her peers on the left simply dismissed as irrelevant to their collective work. Her candid admission that "game recognises game" offers a nuanced understanding of how populist messaging can resonate across the political spectrum. Overall, I find the book to be insightful, providing a pertinent exploration of questions related to identity, conspiracy theories, and the cultural shifts that influence our understanding of the world.
The misattribution has caused considerable discomfort for Klein, particularly on social media during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when much of our activities shifted online. There were instances where the Other Naomi made offensive statements to netizens, prompting people to criticise Klein for things she never actually said. It was during this period that the concept of doppelgänger entered Klein's consciousness, providing an entirely new subject matter to explore. While Naomi Wolf plays a prominent role in this book, it is not solely about her. Instead, she serves as a case study through which Klein elucidates the phenomenon of individuals existing as doppelgängers, particularly as they are perceived by others.
The book meticulously traces Naomi Wolf's transformation from a feminist icon to a controversial figure associated with conspiracy theories, examining pivotal moments that have defined her trajectory. From her seminal work on feminism in the 1990s to her perplexing assertions about vaccines and geoengineered skies, Wolf's transition from mainstream media to her current platform on Steve Bannon's far-right podcast, War Room, offers a compelling case study on the current state of society and media. At times, the narrative appears to cast aspersions on Wolf, interrogating her journey from a prominent feminist author of her generation to a conspiracy theorist who has been de-platformed by Twitter seven times.
Klein's narrative provides a thought-provoking perspective, dissecting not only the personal challenges arising from mistaken identity but also the broader implications of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and the allure of right-wing populism for many individuals. This exploration becomes even more pertinent given the failure of left-wing politicians to provide significant policy guidance during the challenging period of the recent pandemic. Klein delves deep into the mechanisms that propel individuals towards embracing conspiratorial beliefs, highlighting how narcissism, coupled with social media addiction and midlife crises, can often lead to ideological shifts, frequently to the right. While this equation provides valuable insights, Klein carefully refrains from psychoanalysing her doppelgänger, instead focusing more on the sociological dimensions of the issue. Her analysis of the Mirrors World also draws from a diverse range of literature, prominently featuring Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession.
One of the book's standout features is Klein's contemplation of the commonalities she discovered between her left-leaning beliefs and certain aspects of right-wing populism while listening to Steve Bannon's podcast, a perspective that her peers on the left simply dismissed as irrelevant to their collective work. Her candid admission that "game recognises game" offers a nuanced understanding of how populist messaging can resonate across the political spectrum. Overall, I find the book to be insightful, providing a pertinent exploration of questions related to identity, conspiracy theories, and the cultural shifts that influence our understanding of the world.
October 22, 2023
Doppelganger is my top read of 2023 to date.
Naomi Klein has delivered a brilliant and disruptive exploration of identity that fundamentally changed how I think about a world dominated by social media and an isolating centering of the self.
Doppelganger is underpinned by Klein's turmoil managing her reputation and personal brand when confused and conflated with her own doppelganger; the feminist turned conspiracy peddler Naomi Wolf. Using personal anecdotes and journalistic reflections, Klein explores almost every type of doubling impacting our modern world, from AI algorithms and digital avatars to cultural stereotypes and conspiracy theories.
Part memoir, part cultural and political commentary, Klein's Doppelganger investigates how the by-products and mechanisms of capitalism coax us through a topsy-turvy "mirror-world" where identities are co-opted and manipulated. Klein contextualizes the doppelganger phenomenon throughout history and popular culture and illuminates how doubling doesn't just reflect the beliefs of individuals and cultures; it frequently distorts them.
Thank-you to NetGalley & Knopf Canada for the ARC.
Naomi Klein has delivered a brilliant and disruptive exploration of identity that fundamentally changed how I think about a world dominated by social media and an isolating centering of the self.
Doppelganger is underpinned by Klein's turmoil managing her reputation and personal brand when confused and conflated with her own doppelganger; the feminist turned conspiracy peddler Naomi Wolf. Using personal anecdotes and journalistic reflections, Klein explores almost every type of doubling impacting our modern world, from AI algorithms and digital avatars to cultural stereotypes and conspiracy theories.
Part memoir, part cultural and political commentary, Klein's Doppelganger investigates how the by-products and mechanisms of capitalism coax us through a topsy-turvy "mirror-world" where identities are co-opted and manipulated. Klein contextualizes the doppelganger phenomenon throughout history and popular culture and illuminates how doubling doesn't just reflect the beliefs of individuals and cultures; it frequently distorts them.
Thank-you to NetGalley & Knopf Canada for the ARC.
September 12, 2023
Naomi Klein is the author of such bestselling titles as No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything. She's a social activist, who has worked on Bernie Sanders campaigns and writes about globalisation.
Naomi Wolf is the author of books such as The Beauty Myth, Fire With Fire and The End of America. She made her name as a feminist writer.
Both are North American, white, Jewish women. They even have husbands who share the same name. But the similarities stop pretty soon afterwards. Because Wolf has gone down the rabbit hole at this point, and is an arch conspiracy theorist. This book considers the person that Klein sees as Other Naomi, or her doppelganger.
She relates a story from around the time of the Occupy Wall Street protests. She was in a bathroom stall and overhears another women asking her friend if she's seen what Naomi Klein has said about the protests. This was not Klein saying these things, but Wolf. Klein is aware that mistakes are made, but in the eyes of the vaguely disinterested average person, perhaps these two women are seen as the same person?
This is a fascinating book - part memoir, part investigation and part manifesto. Klein has a lot to get off her chest, and of course Covid-19 brought out the worst in Wolf, as she became an anti-vaxxer and began drifting away from her feminist roots ever more towards the outer reaches of the far right, teaming up with the likes of Steve Bannon, Trump's one time chief strategist and now a fixture in the far right with influential podcasts and YouTube videos espousing those views.
The book identifies a pivot point in Wolf as being her 2019 appearance on Radio 3's Free Thinking with Matthew Sweet. She was promoting her then new book Outrages which explored the criminalisation of same-sex relationships in the Victorian era. But she had made claims of "several dozen executions" of men for being homosexual. Sweet challenged her on this, and it became apparent that she had taken "death recorded" to mean "execution" when in fact the judge had pardoned the men. Furthermore, some of the cases were those of child abuse and not homosexuality.
The mistakes saw her book being withdrawn by the publishers, and undoubtedly was a professional embarrassment. And as time has gone on, her claims have become extreme, and largely come without any attempt at supplying evidence. Klein talks in the books about diagonalism - the way that those who would once have been seen as belonging to the social left, suddenly veering wildly over towards the far right.
Klein reports from canvassing prospective voters in Canada, where her husband stood for public office, and finding prospective voter who had in one fell swoop shifted from being a supporter of centre-left New Democratic Party, to the far-right People's Party. The more mainstream Liberal and Conservative parties were skipped over entirely.
The book also examines doppelgangers in film and literature, and references among them what I think is quite an important addition to the canon in China Miéville's The City and the City, where two cities co-exist in the same space without one even recognising the other.
My only small criticism of the book is that it does lack a little structure. You feel that Klein really wanted to get all this out, and probably quite quickly. She writes about how her family were uncertain about her behaviour as she found herself listening to extremist podcasts to try to understand how the message was being disseminated and how people were acting on it. And it's really interesting to see how some of these characters have to side-step issues that don't quite gel across the spectrum. Some might be QAnon believers, but not all - so don't talk about it. Klein notes that Wolf was once an important writer about Israel and Palestine, but today avoids the topic because her (past?) views no longer adhere to those of some of her supporters today.
A fascinating, thoughtful, and frankly, worrying book.
Naomi Wolf is the author of books such as The Beauty Myth, Fire With Fire and The End of America. She made her name as a feminist writer.
Both are North American, white, Jewish women. They even have husbands who share the same name. But the similarities stop pretty soon afterwards. Because Wolf has gone down the rabbit hole at this point, and is an arch conspiracy theorist. This book considers the person that Klein sees as Other Naomi, or her doppelganger.
She relates a story from around the time of the Occupy Wall Street protests. She was in a bathroom stall and overhears another women asking her friend if she's seen what Naomi Klein has said about the protests. This was not Klein saying these things, but Wolf. Klein is aware that mistakes are made, but in the eyes of the vaguely disinterested average person, perhaps these two women are seen as the same person?
This is a fascinating book - part memoir, part investigation and part manifesto. Klein has a lot to get off her chest, and of course Covid-19 brought out the worst in Wolf, as she became an anti-vaxxer and began drifting away from her feminist roots ever more towards the outer reaches of the far right, teaming up with the likes of Steve Bannon, Trump's one time chief strategist and now a fixture in the far right with influential podcasts and YouTube videos espousing those views.
The book identifies a pivot point in Wolf as being her 2019 appearance on Radio 3's Free Thinking with Matthew Sweet. She was promoting her then new book Outrages which explored the criminalisation of same-sex relationships in the Victorian era. But she had made claims of "several dozen executions" of men for being homosexual. Sweet challenged her on this, and it became apparent that she had taken "death recorded" to mean "execution" when in fact the judge had pardoned the men. Furthermore, some of the cases were those of child abuse and not homosexuality.
The mistakes saw her book being withdrawn by the publishers, and undoubtedly was a professional embarrassment. And as time has gone on, her claims have become extreme, and largely come without any attempt at supplying evidence. Klein talks in the books about diagonalism - the way that those who would once have been seen as belonging to the social left, suddenly veering wildly over towards the far right.
Klein reports from canvassing prospective voters in Canada, where her husband stood for public office, and finding prospective voter who had in one fell swoop shifted from being a supporter of centre-left New Democratic Party, to the far-right People's Party. The more mainstream Liberal and Conservative parties were skipped over entirely.
The book also examines doppelgangers in film and literature, and references among them what I think is quite an important addition to the canon in China Miéville's The City and the City, where two cities co-exist in the same space without one even recognising the other.
My only small criticism of the book is that it does lack a little structure. You feel that Klein really wanted to get all this out, and probably quite quickly. She writes about how her family were uncertain about her behaviour as she found herself listening to extremist podcasts to try to understand how the message was being disseminated and how people were acting on it. And it's really interesting to see how some of these characters have to side-step issues that don't quite gel across the spectrum. Some might be QAnon believers, but not all - so don't talk about it. Klein notes that Wolf was once an important writer about Israel and Palestine, but today avoids the topic because her (past?) views no longer adhere to those of some of her supporters today.
A fascinating, thoughtful, and frankly, worrying book.
September 20, 2023
Have you been feeling that in the last few years things are slightly off with the world? Public violence seems to be increasing, & people have little time, care, or respect for others. Online, the slightest disagreement results in pile-ons, doxxing, & calls for people to lose their jobs. I know that I sometimes look around & wonder what the hell is going on. There's a feeling that we have truly stepped through the looking glass. Naomi Klein calls this the Shadow or Mirror world, which leads her onto Doppelganger culture: the world of the Shadow selves.
Klein, author of books such as 'No Logo' & 'Shock Doctrine' has over the last few years been continually confused with another writer of a similar name but who holds the opposite viewpoints in many things. It's all a bit tenuous - I can imagine it is frustrating to have people keep attributing her words to you, but a doppelganger? Not sure. There were some very interesting sections, one being the modern 'branding' of the self as a selling point which is fuelling this reluctance to be seen even considering other viewpoints lest they spoil our 'brand' (the polarised debate over face mask wearing during Covid is one topic covered). Another being the argument that the ideas synonymous with Nazi Germany did not spring from nowhere but were influenced both by the expansionist policies of contemporary Europe & the eugenics & segregation polices of the US.
Overall though it jumps about from topic to topic (including racism, xenophobia, the Holocaust, communism, climate change, Covid, & facism) & it was difficult at times to stay on track whilst reading. My mind started to wander at times. There were some things I agreed with but others I was not altogether convinced. It's my least favourite of her books that I've read for sure. There were several mentions of films & books which deal with doppelgangers, most of which I noted down for later reading/watching. 2.5 stars (rounded up)
My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Penguin Press UK/Allen Lane, for the opportunity to read an ARC.
Klein, author of books such as 'No Logo' & 'Shock Doctrine' has over the last few years been continually confused with another writer of a similar name but who holds the opposite viewpoints in many things. It's all a bit tenuous - I can imagine it is frustrating to have people keep attributing her words to you, but a doppelganger? Not sure. There were some very interesting sections, one being the modern 'branding' of the self as a selling point which is fuelling this reluctance to be seen even considering other viewpoints lest they spoil our 'brand' (the polarised debate over face mask wearing during Covid is one topic covered). Another being the argument that the ideas synonymous with Nazi Germany did not spring from nowhere but were influenced both by the expansionist policies of contemporary Europe & the eugenics & segregation polices of the US.
Overall though it jumps about from topic to topic (including racism, xenophobia, the Holocaust, communism, climate change, Covid, & facism) & it was difficult at times to stay on track whilst reading. My mind started to wander at times. There were some things I agreed with but others I was not altogether convinced. It's my least favourite of her books that I've read for sure. There were several mentions of films & books which deal with doppelgangers, most of which I noted down for later reading/watching. 2.5 stars (rounded up)
My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Penguin Press UK/Allen Lane, for the opportunity to read an ARC.
September 23, 2023
Well, this one left me puzzled. On one hand, we have a well-known Naomi Klein who made herself known from her reporting on capitalism and evil corporations. On the other hand, we have Naomi Wolf, who is a real person, but who has totally different opinions from Klein on literally everything. The problem is... or rather Kleins' problem is, that people often confuse these two, which is harmful for her career. I fully understand her frustration and feel sorry for her. But MY problem here is that this feels like it's all about bashing Wolf and Bannon by the way. If these two won't sue her that would be a miracle, because I sure would.
And because of this everything that Klein wants to say in this book gets somehow lost, washed away. There are some interesting parts, but these are rare and small, it would be fantastic if she could expand her thoughts and reflections. But no, she just keeps going back to Wolf.
Dear Naomi... please rewrite this, because it's worth it.
And because of this everything that Klein wants to say in this book gets somehow lost, washed away. There are some interesting parts, but these are rare and small, it would be fantastic if she could expand her thoughts and reflections. But no, she just keeps going back to Wolf.
Dear Naomi... please rewrite this, because it's worth it.
October 26, 2023
Phenomenal.
This book brought so much more than it may have looked like on the surface and dives into the theme of doppelgangers and mirrorworlds in unexpected ways. The chapter on Palestine and Israel was particularly harrowing and insightful, especially against the backdrop of the war that is raging in Gaza now. Absolute must-read.
This book brought so much more than it may have looked like on the surface and dives into the theme of doppelgangers and mirrorworlds in unexpected ways. The chapter on Palestine and Israel was particularly harrowing and insightful, especially against the backdrop of the war that is raging in Gaza now. Absolute must-read.
Read
September 25, 2023More than anything else, this book made me think about how easily we believe things in this digital day and age. How easy to not read/see the whole picture before a like/comment/share until the truth itself is blurred. Thoughtful passages on the digital life, the ease of access to information (which could be tweaked intentionally or unintentionally), a doppelganger situation. In this book Klein analyzes how people mixed her up with another writer and the impact of Wolf's antivax/conspiracy theories had on her own life. Naomi and other Naomi. In this case only the names are similar, but their identities were mixed up by the audience. Ultimately it made me think how easy it is for us to mix up things, facts, people in this fast paced world; and are we ready for this?
Much thanks to Penguin for an ARC. All opinions are my own
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Much thanks to Penguin for an ARC. All opinions are my own
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September 18, 2023
BRILLIANT AS ALWAYS
November 15, 2023
Damn! Another long review. Sorry.
It began, for Naomi Klein, as an amusing curiosity. Before long, though, it was a problem. Again and again, she found people were confusing her writings with those of Naomi Wolf, a different person entirely. It was understandable, she supposed. Both were Jewish women authors, both known for their left-leaning political and cultural commentary, both close in age. The difference between them, however, was significant. Naomi Wolf made her name as a serious thinker (her book “The Beauty Myth” was a bestseller) but now she was a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s show, saying crazy things about how the government’s response to the Covid epidemic was like the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, and that the Covid vaccine had all manner of sinister side effects that were being kept secret. Suddenly — and all too frequently — Naomi Klein was hearing and reading about crazy things she allegedly said but were in fact the words of the Other Naomi (“one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises”). And the more people confused or mistook the two women, the worse the problem got because social media algorithms learned to present them together.
For Klein it was like falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. “It’s a vertiginous thing to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas—while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are,” Klein writes. She knew who she was and what she believed, of course, but now, somehow, she had a doppelgänger out there in the world, a double, with whom she was constantly being confused. Those who liked what the Other Naomi was saying mistakenly lauded Naomi Klein for having the guts to speak truth to power. Those who were shocked by what the Other Naomi was saying, wondered — again mistakenly — what the hell happened to Naomi Klein.
“Doppelgänger” is about Klein’s efforts to make sense of how this confusion came to be and what it says about the way we live now. How technology — most particularly “this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media” — has led to the existence of a kind of mirror world filled with dark doubles and disturbing parallels, where all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other—whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.
Our minds are designed to understand the world in a particular way, Klein says. But this new world is another thing entirely: When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us. They say we live in a “clown world,” are stuck in “the matrix” of “groupthink,” are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called “mass formation psychosis” (a made-up term). The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality—we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.
“Doppelgänger” explores the ways the Mirror World works and the impact it has on us. How social media has turned personal identity into a kind of “branding” where who or what a person is must be curated and guarded. Where we have our "real" existence and another, virtual one, also ours, that exists on our screens -- only sometimes the boundaries between the two become porous. Where her students “grow up knowing that every casual photo, video, and observation posted online could, when they are years older, be the thing that keeps them from getting a job, or getting into a school, or getting approved for an apartment.”
How we think we are interacting with other people when we are online but are in fact interacting with computer programs and algorithms and avatars and bots.
How the Mirror World uses the language and imagery of… I’m going to call it the Real World … to insidiously create an alternative but recognizable reality. Steve Bannon, for example, tells his followers that in storming school board meetings and electing Republicans they are “bending the arc.” Similarly, protestors against mask mandates and “vaccine passports” announce themselves part of “a new civil rights movement,” fighting “medical apartheid” and “second class citizenship.”
(Klein points out the irony in all this when she describes an episode of Steve Bannon’s show where Wolf fervently portrayed herself and her followers as victims of a plot by an oppressive government and greedy corporations to forever take away our freedom. Klein observes, “While Wolf was cosplaying Rosa Parks, some of her newfound fellow warriors in the fight for “freedom” were busily banning books about the precise history they were all pilfering, including a little illustrated book called I Am Rosa Parks, which made it onto a Pennsylvania school board’s banned book list.”)
For all that the Right is frequently targeted for Klein's criticism, “Doppelgänger” is not at all a one-sided diatribe against Bannon, MAGA, Fox News, et al. Klein holds nothing back in exposing the venality of both sides in their contributions to the dark dynamic of the Mirror World.
What unites the far right and the far-out is the hustle on the one hand, and a faith in hyper-individualism on the other. In the alternative-health world, everyone is selling something: classes, retreats, sound baths, essential oils, anti-metal-toxin sprays, Himalayan salt rock lamps, coffee enemas. Supplements alone were worth an estimated $155 billion worldwide in 2022. It’s much the same on Bannon’s War Room or Alex Jones’s Infowars, with their manly supplements, survivalist supplies, Freedom Fests, precious metal offers, colloidal silver toothpaste, and weapons training—and let us not forget Tucker Carlson’s 2022 documentary in which he recommended that men regularly tan their testicles with a special infrared light in order to increase testosterone levels in preparation for the “hard times” ahead.
Klein draws two key conclusions from all of this. First, there are real and rational concerns finding expression in the Mirror World. Questions about the risks of bad side effects to the vaccine were suppressed rather than openly addressed lest the public resist what the experts were saying. Likewise, suspicion about pharmaceutical firms weren't totally crazy. Persistent reticence at most serious news outlets to provide anything more than sporadic coverage of adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, fear that anything more than a passing report on possible risks would damage vaccine uptake and provide fodder for the conspiracy crowd. Except the opposite turned out to be true: A door was left wide open for my doppelganger and other attention-economy hustlers to position themselves as fearless medical investigators, combing through raw vaccine trial data and supposedly suppressed CDC reports that people without medical degrees generally lack the expertise to interpret.
Similarly, people are honestly concerned that their freedom is under threat because of high tech surveillance, etc., but such concerns are too often blown off by "the elite" as unserious, ignorant, or the product of fear-mongering. Anxiety about such things aren’t irrational, Klein says. ("We are all mine sites now, data mine sites [but] the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable." Those — like Bannon, Trump, Carlson, Wolf, and others — who treat disagreements over important problems as if they were plot points in a reality show, or as something they can profit from by trivializing, diminish real and complex issues. “When the figure of the buffoon becomes central to public life," Klein writes, "the problem is not only that they say foolish things but also that everything they touch becomes foolish, including—especially—the powerful language we need to talk about them and what they are doing.”
Second, our society has become centered more and more on the Me rather than the Us. “We live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves," Klein notes, "while making it hard to care for others outside our immediate family (and often within it) in any sustained way.” Where our bodies can be branded and monetized. (Klein notes that "Our Bodies, Ourselves," the book her mother's generation consulted for information and advice has been replaced by the ethos of "my body, my worth" -- "the corollary of which seems to be 'your body, your problem.' "
The costs of this stark ethos — politically, socially, culturally — are substantial:
[People have] accepted the proposition that their job was to take care of themselves and their families and that nothing more would be asked of them… They had bought the story that their comforts and successes were the product of their ingenuity and hard work alone (not their workers, not their caregivers, not the trade policies that favor rich nations, and certainly not their race or class). And then, suddenly, we were all confronted with a crisis that required us to act as more than individuals, more than families, more than nations, because we are actually entangled with one another. And that was a shock bigger than Covid itself.
“Doppelgänger” is not without its flaws. Sometimes her use of the doppelganger image is stretched too far, and sometimes her critique of modern capitalism (well-deserved though it may be) overwhelms the point she is trying to make. But over all, it is an impressive and thought-provoking book. As you can tell by the length of this review.
It began, for Naomi Klein, as an amusing curiosity. Before long, though, it was a problem. Again and again, she found people were confusing her writings with those of Naomi Wolf, a different person entirely. It was understandable, she supposed. Both were Jewish women authors, both known for their left-leaning political and cultural commentary, both close in age. The difference between them, however, was significant. Naomi Wolf made her name as a serious thinker (her book “The Beauty Myth” was a bestseller) but now she was a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s show, saying crazy things about how the government’s response to the Covid epidemic was like the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, and that the Covid vaccine had all manner of sinister side effects that were being kept secret. Suddenly — and all too frequently — Naomi Klein was hearing and reading about crazy things she allegedly said but were in fact the words of the Other Naomi (“one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises”). And the more people confused or mistook the two women, the worse the problem got because social media algorithms learned to present them together.
For Klein it was like falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. “It’s a vertiginous thing to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas—while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are,” Klein writes. She knew who she was and what she believed, of course, but now, somehow, she had a doppelgänger out there in the world, a double, with whom she was constantly being confused. Those who liked what the Other Naomi was saying mistakenly lauded Naomi Klein for having the guts to speak truth to power. Those who were shocked by what the Other Naomi was saying, wondered — again mistakenly — what the hell happened to Naomi Klein.
“Doppelgänger” is about Klein’s efforts to make sense of how this confusion came to be and what it says about the way we live now. How technology — most particularly “this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media” — has led to the existence of a kind of mirror world filled with dark doubles and disturbing parallels, where all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other—whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.
Our minds are designed to understand the world in a particular way, Klein says. But this new world is another thing entirely: When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us. They say we live in a “clown world,” are stuck in “the matrix” of “groupthink,” are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called “mass formation psychosis” (a made-up term). The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality—we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.
“Doppelgänger” explores the ways the Mirror World works and the impact it has on us. How social media has turned personal identity into a kind of “branding” where who or what a person is must be curated and guarded. Where we have our "real" existence and another, virtual one, also ours, that exists on our screens -- only sometimes the boundaries between the two become porous. Where her students “grow up knowing that every casual photo, video, and observation posted online could, when they are years older, be the thing that keeps them from getting a job, or getting into a school, or getting approved for an apartment.”
How we think we are interacting with other people when we are online but are in fact interacting with computer programs and algorithms and avatars and bots.
How the Mirror World uses the language and imagery of… I’m going to call it the Real World … to insidiously create an alternative but recognizable reality. Steve Bannon, for example, tells his followers that in storming school board meetings and electing Republicans they are “bending the arc.” Similarly, protestors against mask mandates and “vaccine passports” announce themselves part of “a new civil rights movement,” fighting “medical apartheid” and “second class citizenship.”
(Klein points out the irony in all this when she describes an episode of Steve Bannon’s show where Wolf fervently portrayed herself and her followers as victims of a plot by an oppressive government and greedy corporations to forever take away our freedom. Klein observes, “While Wolf was cosplaying Rosa Parks, some of her newfound fellow warriors in the fight for “freedom” were busily banning books about the precise history they were all pilfering, including a little illustrated book called I Am Rosa Parks, which made it onto a Pennsylvania school board’s banned book list.”)
For all that the Right is frequently targeted for Klein's criticism, “Doppelgänger” is not at all a one-sided diatribe against Bannon, MAGA, Fox News, et al. Klein holds nothing back in exposing the venality of both sides in their contributions to the dark dynamic of the Mirror World.
What unites the far right and the far-out is the hustle on the one hand, and a faith in hyper-individualism on the other. In the alternative-health world, everyone is selling something: classes, retreats, sound baths, essential oils, anti-metal-toxin sprays, Himalayan salt rock lamps, coffee enemas. Supplements alone were worth an estimated $155 billion worldwide in 2022. It’s much the same on Bannon’s War Room or Alex Jones’s Infowars, with their manly supplements, survivalist supplies, Freedom Fests, precious metal offers, colloidal silver toothpaste, and weapons training—and let us not forget Tucker Carlson’s 2022 documentary in which he recommended that men regularly tan their testicles with a special infrared light in order to increase testosterone levels in preparation for the “hard times” ahead.
Klein draws two key conclusions from all of this. First, there are real and rational concerns finding expression in the Mirror World. Questions about the risks of bad side effects to the vaccine were suppressed rather than openly addressed lest the public resist what the experts were saying. Likewise, suspicion about pharmaceutical firms weren't totally crazy. Persistent reticence at most serious news outlets to provide anything more than sporadic coverage of adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, fear that anything more than a passing report on possible risks would damage vaccine uptake and provide fodder for the conspiracy crowd. Except the opposite turned out to be true: A door was left wide open for my doppelganger and other attention-economy hustlers to position themselves as fearless medical investigators, combing through raw vaccine trial data and supposedly suppressed CDC reports that people without medical degrees generally lack the expertise to interpret.
Similarly, people are honestly concerned that their freedom is under threat because of high tech surveillance, etc., but such concerns are too often blown off by "the elite" as unserious, ignorant, or the product of fear-mongering. Anxiety about such things aren’t irrational, Klein says. ("We are all mine sites now, data mine sites [but] the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable." Those — like Bannon, Trump, Carlson, Wolf, and others — who treat disagreements over important problems as if they were plot points in a reality show, or as something they can profit from by trivializing, diminish real and complex issues. “When the figure of the buffoon becomes central to public life," Klein writes, "the problem is not only that they say foolish things but also that everything they touch becomes foolish, including—especially—the powerful language we need to talk about them and what they are doing.”
Second, our society has become centered more and more on the Me rather than the Us. “We live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves," Klein notes, "while making it hard to care for others outside our immediate family (and often within it) in any sustained way.” Where our bodies can be branded and monetized. (Klein notes that "Our Bodies, Ourselves," the book her mother's generation consulted for information and advice has been replaced by the ethos of "my body, my worth" -- "the corollary of which seems to be 'your body, your problem.' "
The costs of this stark ethos — politically, socially, culturally — are substantial:
[People have] accepted the proposition that their job was to take care of themselves and their families and that nothing more would be asked of them… They had bought the story that their comforts and successes were the product of their ingenuity and hard work alone (not their workers, not their caregivers, not the trade policies that favor rich nations, and certainly not their race or class). And then, suddenly, we were all confronted with a crisis that required us to act as more than individuals, more than families, more than nations, because we are actually entangled with one another. And that was a shock bigger than Covid itself.
“Doppelgänger” is not without its flaws. Sometimes her use of the doppelganger image is stretched too far, and sometimes her critique of modern capitalism (well-deserved though it may be) overwhelms the point she is trying to make. But over all, it is an impressive and thought-provoking book. As you can tell by the length of this review.
September 15, 2023
This book blows basically every 5 star rating I’ve ever given out of the water. Incredible
November 4, 2023
Nieuwe feiten vragen om nieuwe terminologie en dat maakt het noch voor de auteur, noch voor de lezer eenvoudig. Bij aanvang was het ons ook niet helemaal duidelijk waar Naomi Klein met Dubbelganger naartoe wilde. Wilde ze haar persoonlijke frustratie en fascinatie omtrent het feit dat mensen haar dikwijls met Naomi Wolf verwisselden van zich afschrijven?
Nee, blijkt gaandeweg. De persoonsverwisseling waarmee ze regelmatig geconfronteerd wordt en die haar niet loslaat, gebruikt Naomi Klein om een blik te werpen op wat ze de Spiegelwereld gaat noemen: de rechtse QAnon en aanverwanten die gretig complottheorieën spuien en - in eerste instantie merkwaardig genoeg - tijdens de COVID-19 periode ook door linkse gezondheidsgoeroe's, yogamoeders en het fitsnessfreaks in de armen worden gesloten. Haar dubbelganger Naomi Wolf - een vermaard feministe uit de jaren '90 - maakt de bocht ook gretig.
Vanuit haar confrontatie met die dubbelgangster, probeert Klein te analyseren waar die spiegelwereld vandaan komt en hoe het komt dat heel wat mensen er zo gemakkelijk in afdwalen. Ze kijkt kritisch naar rechts, links én zichzelf en probeert de risico's van die spiegelwereld voor de toekomst in te schatten.
Die spiegelwereld blijkt alomtegenwoordig in onze samenleving: het is een manier om onze blik af te wenden van ongelijkheid, racisme en het koloniale verleden waarop het Westen zijn rijkdom heeft gebouwd. Die spiegelwereld in stand houden lijkt noodzakelijk om de confrontatie met het verleden uit de weg te gaan, de klimaatcrisis te ontkennen en is voor opportunistische en demagogische politici de manier om frustratie van hun kiespubliek te kanaliseren zonder dat ze de oorzaken van die frustraties moeten aanpakken.
Noami Klein schrijft helder, toegankelijk en vlot en past haar theorie toe op verschillende delen van onze samenleving of conflicten uit onze geschiedenis. Dat de holocaust niet uit het niets kwam, hoe het conflict tussen Israël en Palestina het prototype is van een spiegelwereld die noodzakelijk is om van de slachtoffers beulen te maken, en waarom mensen niet altijd het één of het ander zijn, maar dikwijls beide tegelijk.
Zo vat ze in een pittig slotstuk samen waar de mogelijke oplossingen liggen en hoe we die kunnen omarmen en stimuleren. Straf leesvoer. Noodzakelijk en brandend actueel.
Nee, blijkt gaandeweg. De persoonsverwisseling waarmee ze regelmatig geconfronteerd wordt en die haar niet loslaat, gebruikt Naomi Klein om een blik te werpen op wat ze de Spiegelwereld gaat noemen: de rechtse QAnon en aanverwanten die gretig complottheorieën spuien en - in eerste instantie merkwaardig genoeg - tijdens de COVID-19 periode ook door linkse gezondheidsgoeroe's, yogamoeders en het fitsnessfreaks in de armen worden gesloten. Haar dubbelganger Naomi Wolf - een vermaard feministe uit de jaren '90 - maakt de bocht ook gretig.
Vanuit haar confrontatie met die dubbelgangster, probeert Klein te analyseren waar die spiegelwereld vandaan komt en hoe het komt dat heel wat mensen er zo gemakkelijk in afdwalen. Ze kijkt kritisch naar rechts, links én zichzelf en probeert de risico's van die spiegelwereld voor de toekomst in te schatten.
Die spiegelwereld blijkt alomtegenwoordig in onze samenleving: het is een manier om onze blik af te wenden van ongelijkheid, racisme en het koloniale verleden waarop het Westen zijn rijkdom heeft gebouwd. Die spiegelwereld in stand houden lijkt noodzakelijk om de confrontatie met het verleden uit de weg te gaan, de klimaatcrisis te ontkennen en is voor opportunistische en demagogische politici de manier om frustratie van hun kiespubliek te kanaliseren zonder dat ze de oorzaken van die frustraties moeten aanpakken.
Noami Klein schrijft helder, toegankelijk en vlot en past haar theorie toe op verschillende delen van onze samenleving of conflicten uit onze geschiedenis. Dat de holocaust niet uit het niets kwam, hoe het conflict tussen Israël en Palestina het prototype is van een spiegelwereld die noodzakelijk is om van de slachtoffers beulen te maken, en waarom mensen niet altijd het één of het ander zijn, maar dikwijls beide tegelijk.
Zo vat ze in een pittig slotstuk samen waar de mogelijke oplossingen liggen en hoe we die kunnen omarmen en stimuleren. Straf leesvoer. Noodzakelijk en brandend actueel.
October 18, 2023
Thank you to Macmillan for the audiobook!
This has fascinating commentary on a lot of current issues. Covid misinformation, online personas, AI, feminism, right wing extremism, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and more. A lot of the takes were well articulated and interesting. These are many important issues that are interconnected through this book. This was a tough listen because I've seen people I care for fall into some of these traps, and it felt so unbelievably real and relatable.
It's interesting to see the evolution of misinformation. This was a wonderful commentary on the state of the world right now, and a look into different mindsets and how we get to them.
I do think some chapters and sections were a bit draggy and could have been cut down a bit, but the information shared is valuable. So, while this isn't a fast or easy read, I think it's a good one. It shows how so many people slid into "the mirror world" of covid misinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories.
This feels both well researched and personal - which I really like. Klein did a wonderful job of getting information across in a way that was accessible and easy to understand.
This has fascinating commentary on a lot of current issues. Covid misinformation, online personas, AI, feminism, right wing extremism, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and more. A lot of the takes were well articulated and interesting. These are many important issues that are interconnected through this book. This was a tough listen because I've seen people I care for fall into some of these traps, and it felt so unbelievably real and relatable.
It's interesting to see the evolution of misinformation. This was a wonderful commentary on the state of the world right now, and a look into different mindsets and how we get to them.
I do think some chapters and sections were a bit draggy and could have been cut down a bit, but the information shared is valuable. So, while this isn't a fast or easy read, I think it's a good one. It shows how so many people slid into "the mirror world" of covid misinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories.
This feels both well researched and personal - which I really like. Klein did a wonderful job of getting information across in a way that was accessible and easy to understand.
September 9, 2023
A kind of comparative autobiography this latest book by Naomi Klein, where she informs us that for years she was mistaken for Naomi Wolf, feminist of the 1980s, just to say something nice.
Probably because here in Europe this Wolf would have been confusable only with Tom, it was news to me, but in the meantime I learned a lot about Bannon, Klein's life, Wolf's life, and the situation on a Canadian island during the pandemic. The most interesting part for me was definitely the one about the Doppelgänger, Philip Roth and the use of mirroring. Peppered with philosophical thoughts and digressions on Meta and AI also, this book flows fast and gives a lot to think about although no, I wouldn't have confused her with Naomi Campbell either :)
Una specie di autobiografia comparata questo ultimo libro di Naomi Klein, dove lei ci informa che per anni l'anno scambiata per Naomi Wolf, femminista degli anni '80, per dire solo qualcosa di carino.
Probabilmente perché qui in Europa questa Wolf sarebbe stata confondibile solo con Tom, per me é stata una novità, ma nel frattempo ho imparato un sacco di cose su Bannon, la vita della Klein, la vita della Wolf e la situazione su un'isola canadese durante la pandemia. La parte piú interessante per me é stata sicuramente quella sul Doppelgänger, su Philip Roth e sull'utilizzo del mirroring. Condito da digressioni filosofiche anche su Meta e sull'AI, questo libro scorre veloce e da parecchio da pensare anche se no, non l'avrei confusa nemmeno con Naomi Campbell :)
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
Probably because here in Europe this Wolf would have been confusable only with Tom, it was news to me, but in the meantime I learned a lot about Bannon, Klein's life, Wolf's life, and the situation on a Canadian island during the pandemic. The most interesting part for me was definitely the one about the Doppelgänger, Philip Roth and the use of mirroring. Peppered with philosophical thoughts and digressions on Meta and AI also, this book flows fast and gives a lot to think about although no, I wouldn't have confused her with Naomi Campbell either :)
Una specie di autobiografia comparata questo ultimo libro di Naomi Klein, dove lei ci informa che per anni l'anno scambiata per Naomi Wolf, femminista degli anni '80, per dire solo qualcosa di carino.
Probabilmente perché qui in Europa questa Wolf sarebbe stata confondibile solo con Tom, per me é stata una novità, ma nel frattempo ho imparato un sacco di cose su Bannon, la vita della Klein, la vita della Wolf e la situazione su un'isola canadese durante la pandemia. La parte piú interessante per me é stata sicuramente quella sul Doppelgänger, su Philip Roth e sull'utilizzo del mirroring. Condito da digressioni filosofiche anche su Meta e sull'AI, questo libro scorre veloce e da parecchio da pensare anche se no, non l'avrei confusa nemmeno con Naomi Campbell :)
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
October 13, 2023
holy shit
October 9, 2023
7 sterren. Echt niet normaal goed.
October 1, 2023
naomi klein mothered the fawk out of this book as usual…timely and fascinating..Klein explores the concept of doppelgängers and the mirror world as a framework for looking at the right-wing-conspiracy-anti-facts complex…nuanced and empathetic look at how people of all political alignment fall into the mirror world..very grounding analysis that helped me make sense of the covid crisis and state of the world 3 years into covid
September 24, 2023
So many ideas. I highlighted over 300 passages and wrote my own essay.
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