Summary of Doppelganger By Naomi Klein: A Trip into the Mirror World

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Doppelganger By Naomi Klein: A Trip into the Mirror World

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Naomi Klein's book, Doppelganger, explores the concept of a double self, a self that shares many preoccupations but furthers the same causes as the author. Klein's experience with a doppelganger led her to understand the strangeness of AI-generated text, New Age wellness entrepreneurs, and liberal democracies. The book explores the psychic landscapes and possibilities for building hope amid economic, medical, and political crises. Klein uses humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to confront the strange doubles that haunt us, examining what we neglect as we perfect our digital reflections. The book aims to chart a path beyond despair, asking what we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections, and if it is possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223943297

Willie M. Joseph

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INTRODUCTION

The author, who has been writing about corporate power and its ravages for over a decade, refers to her as Other Naomi. She has been involved in various events, such as the United Nations Climate Summit, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, 9/11, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, during this time, she was overcommitted to writing about the climate change fight and neglected other important things.

In June 2021, a heat dome descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, Canada, causing over six hundred deaths, an estimated ten billion marine creatures being cooked alive, and an entire town going up in flames. The author's deepest shame lies in the number of podcasts she mainlined, which consumed nearly every interstitial moment in her life. She rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many urgent crises, is at the nexus of several forces that are crucial for helping humans take to the streets in rebellion against hallucinated tyranny.

The author believes that Grounding Space-Faring Billionaires and using their wealth to pay for housing and healthcare, getting off fossil fuels before the future is one protracted heat dome, or sending shark-identified children to elementary school without fearing they will come home with a highly contagious and potentially lethal virus. This book is not about the author's intention to write about the heat dome, but rather about the challenges they face in their pursuit of understanding and combating the global crisis.

Doppelganger is a term that refers to having a double walking around, which can be profoundly unsettling and alienating. This feeling is particularly acute because the unfamiliar thing becomes you, making you unsure of your true self. Many people grapple with the sense that reality is warping, as they have lost loved ones or trusted intellectuals and commentators.

For over twenty years, the author has been preoccupied with the ways large-scale shocks scramble our collective synapses, lead to mass regression, and make humans easy prey for demagogues. The Shock Doctrine, her 2007 book on this topic, explores how post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in various contexts, such as 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and events significantly further back in time.

The Covid pandemic has scrambled the author's personal world, as it did all of our worlds. For the first four months, while living in New Jersey, the author was confined to their home with their neuroatypical son, trying to help him learn online and soothe his porous soul. Ambulances picked up neighbors, and the virus tore through their friend group.

A state of shock occurs when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have an adequate explanation. Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums, which is why opportunistic players, known as disaster capitalists, rush into the gap with their preexisting wish lists and simplistic stories of good and evil.

Controlling the virus forced many of us, including the author, the very conditions that make humans most vulnerable to states of shock: prolonged stress and isolation. The author's isolation grew more extreme when returning to Canada, where they now live full-time on a rock at the dead end of a street three hours from the closest city.

The author explores the concept of doubles and doppelgangers, focusing on the idea that they represent both our highest aspiration and the most repressed parts of ourselves. They find that the appearance of a doppelganger is often chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing, pushing individuals to their limits. Doppelgangers have been understood as warnings or harbingers, as reality starts doubling, indicating that something important is being ignored or denied. This applies to individuals and societies that are divided, doubled, polarized, or partitioned into warring, seemingly unknowable camps.

The author's identity crisis is likely unavoidable, as the appearance of one's doppelganger is chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing. They have also explored the push and pull of doppelganger literature and mythology, such as Philip Roth's Operation Shylock novel. They have followed their doppelganger as she burrows deeper into conspiracy plots, investigating her alliances with malevolent men, their rewards, and the deep racial, cultural, and historical fears and denials they feed.

The author feels justified in following their doppelganger, as they have been confused with Other Naomi for so long and frequently that it seems only right that they should follow her back. The doppelganger often acts as an unwelcome mirror, showing undesirable aspects of our shared culture, such as the ambient hunger for ever-more fleeting relevance, the disposability of people who mess up, and the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility. Looking at her helped the author see themselves more clearly and better understand the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.

This is an attempt to explore the doppelganger culture, a society where individuals maintain online avatars and create virtual versions of themselves that represent them to others. This culture has led to a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, with tech companies using data troves to train machines to create artificial simulations of human intelligence and functions. The author questions what this duplication is doing to us and how it influences what we pay attention to and what we neglect.

The author observes that politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society divided in two and each side defining itself against the other. Race, ethnicity, and gender create dangerous doubles that hover over whole categories of people, casting them as savage, terrorist, Thief, Whore, or Property. This fascist clown state is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and despising.

The pandemic has taken humanity somewhere we have not been before, and this difference accounts for the strangeness we have been trying to name. Uncanny people, upside-down politics, and a growing difficulty discerning who and what is real are some of the strangeness we have been trying to name. The author aims to decipher the chaos of doppelganger culture, focusing on escaping its mind-bending confines and finding collective power and purpose.

PART ONE

Double Life

OCCUPIED

In November 2011, during the height of Occupy Wall Street, two women in Manhattan were discussing Naomi Klein's views on the protests. The two women were both Jewish and had distinct writerly lanes, with Naomi Klein focusing on corporate assaults on democracy and climate change. The two women had intersected with the protests, and their disagreements began when Wolf claimed that the crackdown on Occupy demonstrated the United States tipping into a police state.

Organizers used the human microphone to prevent the police from clearing the protest camp, but Wolf claimed the movement had specific demands and that she had figured them out. She turned the results