Synopsis:

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.

Rating:

Review:

This book was so bad. It was so bad that I gave up about 40% of the way through because I was feeling physically ill at the thought of reading any more. The synopsis asks a lot of interesting questions and I am familiar with Naomi Klein so I was hopeful that we’d get a good examination of self-identification, digital selves, and how our sense of self online might be influenced by AI/filters/influencers/etc. Unfortunately there is none of that in there.

This book starts with a simple premise. Naomi Klein frequently gets confused with Naomi Wolf. As the author says, the confusion makes some sense. Both of them share a first name. They are both women. They are both Jewish. They are both feminist authors and liberal activists. She expresses that she used to have a great admiration for Naomi Wolf, who she dubs “Other Naomi”, ever since she published The Beauty Myth in 1990. Both of them are known for their feminist takes on the world, and their dislike of greed driven capitalism. But during COVID, things starts to change. The author discovered that Other Naomi didn’t agree with her on a lot of COVID related issues. The author’s reaction to that, and the frequent confusion between them online, decided that the best course of action to take was to spend thousand of hours figuring out everything that Other Naomi was saying and doing online. She admits to neglecting her family and other life things to do so. Let’s just start with that idea. It doesn’t sound healthy. It sounds like maybe you should have taken a walk and turned off the internet for awhile.

Most of this book is a screed that is meant to harangue Other Naomi for all of her terrible opinions. And let’s be clear, Naomi Wolf has a lot of terrible opinions. But not all of them, and that is where the author started to lose credibility. She lambasts Other Naomi for suggesting that the COVID vaccine was causing menstrual issues for women. But yet, a few short years later, it was proven that it was true. Thousands of women experienced changes to their menstrual cycle after taking the COVID vaccine. Thousands of them. The National Institute of Health has published several studies about this, and a large percentage of women reported menstrual effects. So, sorry Naomi Klein this was a bad take because you were wrong.

Or when she lambasts Other Naomi for suggesting that young people shouldn’t get the vaccine because the risks don’t outweigh the benefits, and Other Naomi cites the heart issues that were making headlines as an example. Naomi Klein insists that COVID is horrible dangerous, and a potentially risky side effect is worth it! That’s her opinion, and one that she’s entitled to. But in the 2 years since COVID it’s become apparent that the risk was non-existent for healthy young people. The risk of being hospitalized or dying for a healthy young person was about 1%. And the vaccine is not useful for preventing spread to other people…so….what benefit could be gained by the potential risk? This take didn’t age well either.

So while we’re spending 90% of our time railing at Other Naomi for being wrong and bad, our author occasionally stumbles across what could be an interesting idea. She briefly talks about the idea that all of us are creating our own digital doppelganger, and how do we manage that version of ourselves with the true version of ourselves. Or when she briefly talked about AI and deep fakes, how to tell when we’re looking at a digital doppelganger. And the idea that with all of the banning and muting of people online, maybe we’ve made it a bit too easy to shut out opinions we disagree with and we create our own echochamber. But rather than actually exploring any of these ideas, they all are merely brief asides from the main topic that Other Naomi is bad and wrong.

I couldn’t take it anymore. At some point Naomi Klein seems to have forgotten that she opposes Big Business and Big Government Interference. She was part of the Occupy Wallstreet movement. Or maybe she only gets mad at the banking sector. Big Pharma is not her enemy, government intrusion into people’s lives isn’t her enemy. And that’s sad. She forgot that she used to rage against the machine and just joined the machine. Even in her worst takes Other Naomi is still true to that ideal, big business and government intrusion are bad things, even if her ideas are wrong and bad.