Klein tackles AI and identity in new book
Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein is one of the most recognizable thinkers of her generation.
From tackling corporate branding with her landmark 1999 book, “No Logo,” to climate change in her 2014 book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate” to, in 2017, the Trump presidency in “No Is Not Enough,” which in part examined the former president’s personal brand and how it “swallowed the world — and lined his pockets,” she has an uncanny ability to take the big issues of our times, make them understandable and propose a way forward.
Her latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” is set to publish in September, according to a statement released by Klein and her publishers, Penguin Random House Canada. In this book, she will tackle ideas of human identity in the age of artificial intelligence. And she’ll begin with herself.
According to the publisher, Klein will start by looking at the doppelganger she’s contended with over much of her career (while they only identify her as “a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own,” the confusion between Klein and Naomi Wolf, who became famous for her feminist book “The Beauty Myth” and was more recently suspended from Twitter for her views on Covid-19 vaccines, is well known).
She “dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World — our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements play-act solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances,” her publisher noted in the release.
Along the way, she’ll delve into how we think, and how we create understanding and construct identity, using analysis from Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock and bell hooks, among others. If ours is a complicated world filled with intersecting crises — environmental, political, et. al — then this book proposes “a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now.”
“This book is a departure for me,” Klein said in the statement. “It’s more personal, more experimental and while it’s not about my doppelganger in any traditional sense, it does explore what it feels like to watch one’s identity slip away in the digital ether, an experience many more of us will have in the age of AI. Mostly, it’s an attempt to grapple with the wildness of right now — with conspiracy cultures surging and strange left-right alliances emerging and nobody seeming to be quite what they seem.
“‘Doppelganger’ is my attempt at a usable map of our moment in history — but to make it, I had to get lost a few times.”
Klein’s publisher at Knopf Canada, Martha Kanya-Forstner, said that “as Naomi falls down the rabbit hole of collapsed meanings, blurred identities and the uncertain realities of the mirror world, she pulls us into the deep, into the distortion and disorientation of reflections seemingly without end. Nothing else I have read so precisely captures the vertiginous feeling of our moment in history.” “DOPPELGANGER” WILL BE RELEASED ON SEPT. 12 IN CANADA, THE U.S. (BY FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX) AND THE U.K. (BY PENGUIN U.K.).
‘‘ It’s more personal, more experimental and while it’s not about my doppelganger in any traditional sense, it does explore what it feels like to watch one’s identity slip away in the digital ether, an experience many more of us will have in the age of AI.
NAOMI KLEIN AUTHOR OF ‘DOPPELGANGER’