Naomi Klein has a good radar.
Her first book,
No Logo
, came out two weeks after the Battle of Seattle.
It quickly became the bible of the anti-globalization movement.
The second,
The Shock Doctrine
, came out a year before the fall of Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis.
It is difficult to navigate moments in our recent history without concepts such as disaster capitalism.
This changes everything.
Capitalism against the Climate
, marks the beginning of the hottest decade ever recorded.
In that trilogy, Klein examined the main dark patterns of contemporary capitalism.
Her new book tries to explain the strangest: the production of a multiplicity of doubles, avatars, digital golems and shadows of ourselves that coexist and compete with us in the age of attention.
Some are deliberate and aspirational, like the careful projection that we have built post by post, photo by photo, on the social network.
Others are secret, like the profile that algorithms build automatically with the trace of our cell phones, computers and credit cards.
Since the explosion of generative AI, there are synthetic doubles training in data centers to impersonate us in the office, mail, and, in the worst cases, humiliating non-consensual pornography scenarios.
All these doubles live with us in this world.
Then there is the inverted world of his
doppelganger
, the essayist Naomi Wolf.
The premise is hilarious: Klein lives comically and chronically confused with “the other Naomi,” a Jewish intellectual who has jumped from liberal feminism to anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and anti-government activism, sponsored by political strategist Steve Bannon, former senior advisor to the former president of the United States. United, Donald Trump.
Klein receives prayers every time Wolf says things like how, because of masks, children under three will never learn to smile.
Nobody can believe that the author of
No Logo
has lost her mind like that.
But above all, Klein identifies in her conspiracies an inverted version of her own ideas.
For example, the great replacement.
The idea that the pandemic is a crisis caused or exploited by financial elites to establish a new world order is, literally, the shock doctrine.
The
doppelganger
is a double antagonist, a distorted and shameful reflection of everything we do not want to see and do not want to be.
Studying the phenomenon through literature and cinema, from Dostoevsky to Charlie Chaplin, Klein finds guidance in
Operation Shylock
, the hilarious novel by Jewish writer Philip Roth.
“This wasn't just treacherous, it was interesting,” exclaims the real Roth in his first telephone conversation with Roth, the impostor.
In that same spirit, Klein follows “the other Naomi” to the other side of the mirror, to understand the mechanism by which a liberal feminist academic moves into the authoritarian world of the extreme right and conspiracy.
“It would be something like: Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public humiliation = Collapse of the right.”
In that parallel universe where vaccines kill, authoritarian regimes save, women lie, genocides protect, migrants rape and the weak, old or poor deserve to die, there is a revelation.
The other side is the land of shadows where causes abandoned by the left are transformed into the demons of liberal propaganda.
Anyone who, in recent years, has found family, friends and ideas transformed into parodies of themselves by conspiracies, the extreme right or the Social Network, will find comfort in
doppelganger: A trip to the mirror world
, but also tools.
It is not a collective schizophrenia outbreak.
It is another pattern of capitalism.
It is also a symptom of the problems paralyzing the left.
It is a fascinating book, fun and terrifying, like a good double.
Look for it in your bookstore
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