A review by lauraleafromthelibrary
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

informative slow-paced

3.0

3 ⭐️

• Girl, delete your twitter account.
• There are a lot of ignorant Americans; disinformation is rampant. Absolute lack of education.
• Social media is a dumpster fire; fuelling conspiracy theories.
• Politics are frustrating: I really don’t care about political science; if you care about politics, maybe you’ll enjoy this book. I care about democracy and voting but I will not waste my time with ignorant people.
• The ending of this book was much better than the beginning. It needed to be edited down — it felt like an academic paper; a very, very long academic paper.

• Introduction: Off-Brand Me —
  • Page 4: “In June 2021, as this project began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event dubbed a ‘heat dome’ descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family. The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent.”

• Part One: Double Life (Performance) —Chapter 1: Occupied —
  • Page 21: “I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-wear arrest, and a line in The Guardian jumped out at me: ‘Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.’ I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi). ‘What the actual fuck?’ he asked. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘It’s a goddamned conspiracy.’ Then we both burst out laughing.’”

• Page 27: October 2019 poem — “If the Naomi be Klein, you’re doing just fine. If the Naomi be Wolf, oh buddy. Oooooof.” 😆

• Not Me
  • Page 30: “I instantly knew that Twitter was going to be bad for me — and yet, like so many of us, I could not stop looking. So perhaps if there is a message I should have taken from the destabilizing appearance of my doppelgänger, this is it: once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media. I might have heeded the message, too. If COVID hadn’t intervened.”

• Chapter 2: Enter COVID, the Threat Multiplier —
  • COVID vaccine shedding
  • Dear GOD
  • It’s in the Code:
    • Page 39: “Beyond what I consider to be our different approaches to facts and research, there are plenty of other differences between us. She grew up in the United States, I in Canada. She is a liberal who reverentially references the founding fathers, fetishizes a highly individualistic version of ‘liberty,’ and wrote an entire book addressed to a ‘young patriot’. I am a third-generation leftist who believes freedom is won collectively and gets itchy around flags. She went to private universities in the United States and the United Kingdom; I dropped out of a public one in Canada. Her eyes are blue; mine are brown.”
  • Klein is an associate professor at UBC — yet didn’t finish her degree? 

• Chapter 3: My failed Brand, Or Call Me By Her Name —
  • The digital doppelgängers.
  • Personal branding on social media.
  • May 2019: Wolf gets a viral death for publishing a book without getting her facts straight.
    • Reminds me of the power of social media — a viral attack; Blake Lively v Justin Baldoni

• Part Two: Mirror World (Projection):
  • Chapter 5: They Know About Cell Phones
    • Naomi Wolf attacking the COVID passport; this is why I don’t watch the news.
    • She is absolutely NUTS in this chapter.
    • FOX News should be taken off the air for misinformation.
    • Everything she says is literally conspiracy theory. Why do people even slightly believe it?? This makes me think that there are just a lot of ignorant ass North Americans.
    • Page 88: “Everyone who is online today knows at least some of this. Knows that where we go, who we love, what we believe, and how our bodies behave is out there in ether, beyond our control. And yet the response to this extraordinary reality has so far been strangely muted, with much of it sublimated into ironic humor, like ‘Wait until they hear about cell phones’”.
      • Digital surveillance; who actually cares about this.
      • Why does it matter?
      • Is this a generational worry?
      • Is Naomi Klein also a problem, by creating commentary on the digital age and how it makes us less anonymous: she talked about her friends growing up and writing graffiti in a bathroom stall that only they would know about.
        • Page 90: She says “the world was indifferent to us, and we had no idea how lucky we were.”
        • Nostalgia?
        • Why does it matter?
        • I hate it here.

• Page 109: it’s mentioned that Elon Musk welcomes Wolf back to twitter in 2022; a crazy guy welcomes back the crazies.

• The Mirror World — America. 😵‍💫
  • Chapter 9: the far right meets the far-out — maybe the Mirror World is creeping into Canada.
  • I enjoyed reading chapter 9; talked  about fitness.

• Page 173: body doubling — “For the person dedicating themselves to transformation through diet and fitness, there is you as you are now, and — ever present — there is you as you imagine you could be, with enough self-denial and self-discipline, enough hunger and enough reps. A better, different you, always just out of reach.”
  • I liked this mini-chapter on fitness.
  • Fitness can get out-of-hand; to its extremes.
  • It was a little wild that gyms were forced to close but restaurants could stay open during COVID. What’s essential?

• Page 190: “Vancouver is the third most expensive city in North America, ahead of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and is also at the epicentre of the poisoned drug crisis.”
  • Talking about how Vancouver is changing politically to the far right due to yoga money from people like Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon. 😔
    • Don’t support him or the far-right but I still like his clothes.

• Page 241: the fantasy of justice — “There is the persistent liberal dream that Donald Trump will finally be held legally accountable for one or more of his crimes while in or out of office. But beyond that, who is actively calling for our living war criminals to be brought before the International Criminal Court? What is the plan for seizing the assets of the companies fuelling the climate crisis?” 🤬

• The Fuck Trudeau trucker convoy — I almost forgot about them. I had no idea about the convoy for Every Child Matters either.

• The two Naomi’s agree on the genocide in Palestine.
  • I enjoyed reading chapter 14: The Unshakeable Ethnic Double.

• Page 336: “When I try to understand Other Naomi, I see something similar. She, too, is both that and this. As a young writer, she helped inspire countless women to become feminists. In middle age, she took stands that required real moral courage — as when she walked out of that synagogue or shared her platform with people being pounded by missiles. She has also, especially lately, done a great many things that are extremely harmful, and I think many of the reasons behind them are pretty uninteresting: a desire for attention, for ego gratification, for cash; perhaps a drive to prove that she was right and that every person who ever attacked her was wrong.”

• Page 348: “If there is anything this journey has taught me, it’s that identity is not fixed. Not mine. Not Wolf’s. Not even the barrier between our two identities. It’s all fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating that doubling — between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves — is a part of what it means to be human. A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self. It’s about what we make together. ♥️