Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

A personal trip into the uncanny Mirror World of our polarised culture, from the international bestselling author of The Shock Doctrine

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all?

When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable?

To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world- one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.

This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

About the Author: Born in Montreal in 1970, Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international bestseller No Logo, which was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award. Translated into twenty-five languages, No Logo was called “a movement bible” and placed Naomi Klein at the vanguard of a new wave of considering globalisation and corporations. In Blank is Beautiful, Klein will once again revolutionize our way of thinking.Naomi Klein writes an internationally syndicated column for the Guardian and her articles appear in numerous publications, including The Nation, The New Statesman, Newsweek International, the New York Times and the Village Voice. A collection of her work, titled Fences and Windows- Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in October 2002. For the past six years, Klein has travelled throughout North America, Asia, Latin America and Europe, tracking the rise of anticorporate activism. She is a frequent media commentator and university guest lecturer and was a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics. Her latest book is The Shock Doctrine- The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Penguin, 2007).

19 Sep 2023

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein ISBN 9780241621318