The book starts with a very thought-provoking question: 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 flighting against?
Not long ago, 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 similar enough to be her own that many people confused her for the other. For a moment, she lost her bearings.
And if that wasn't bad enough, she got interested, in a reality that seemed to be warping and doubling like a digital hall of mirrors. It's happening in our politics as New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers find common cause with fire-breathing for propagandists (all in the name of protecting "the children").
It's happening in our culture as AI gobbles up music, paintings, fiction and everything in between and spits out imitations that threaten to overtake the originals. And it's happening to many of us as individuals as we create digital doubles of ourselves, filtered and curated just so far for all the other duplicates to see.
This book is written by an award-winning journalist, as well as a best-selling author, public intellectual and activist, Naomi Klein. She writes books that orient us in our time. She has offered essential accounts of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls.
Now as liberal democracies teeter on the edge, Klein takes aim at absurdist authoritarianism, using a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the doubles that haunt us.
The book is part tragicomic memoir, part chilling reportage, and cobweb-clearing analysis. The book invites readers on a wild ride, smashing through the mirror world, charting a path beyond despair towards true solidarity.
This is a book like no other that I have ever read. It is a book that will not only make you think but it may just keep you up at night.
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