Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

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“Naomi Klein’s books have been building one on the next to create a very powerful and influential cognitive mapping of our time. This new book takes a personal turn, then opens out into an analysis of our shared global dilemma that is as incisive and fascinating as anything she has ever written—which is saying a lot….” – Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future

Braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, this richly nuanced intellectual adventure story begins by Naomi Klein grappling with her own doppelganger—an author whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, she turns her gaze both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, to name a few—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises. Diving deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere.

This short film about the book uses twinning and AI to perfectly capture the wildness of now.

“This book is a departure for me. It’s more personal, more experimental, and while it’s not about my doppelganger in any traditional sense, it does explore what it feels like to watch one’s identity slip away in the digital ether, an experience many more of us will have in the age of AI. Mostly, it’s an attempt to grapple with the wildness of right now—with conspiracy cultures surging and strange left-right alliances emerging and nobody seeming to be quite what they seem. Doppelganger is my attempt at a usable map of our moment in history—but to make it, I had to get lost a few times.”

Doppelganger is now available in bookstores or online today!

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