Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world
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?
I’m slightly annoyed at this book, because I’d like to review it and recommend it as a nice find, but also everyone has already raved about it (Cory Doctorow, Alice Cappelle and Ben Werdmuller, among others) and it even has a Women’s Prize now. That’s fine, I’ll talk about it still. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein…