Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

 
　　得獎無數的記者、當代最重要思想家及公共知識分子娜歐蜜．克萊恩（Naomi Klein），同時也是國際暢銷書《拿回我們的未來》（How to Change Everything）、《震撼理論》（The Shock Doctrine）、《No Logo》的作者，在新書《分身》中，公開自己在網路社群平台上被有心人士惡意設置假帳號的歷程，描述在數位世界中，眼睜睜看著自己的身份被剝奪、利用的感受及負面影響，並提出警告與反思。
 
　　假如你某天早上醒來，發現在數位世界中，竟然多了一個自己？這個「分身」的名子和公眾形象幾乎就是你，就像鏡子中的自己。他關注你所關注的一切，卻刻意反對你所贊同的一切，並以一種扭曲、顛倒的方式，代替你公開發表言論和意見！
 
　　這絕非意圖混淆視聽的單一事件，越來越多公眾人物，正在經歷、或即將面臨虛實莫辨的陰謀惡行。這些「分身」蓄意操弄輿論方向，散播公共衛生、政治、軍事、民生經濟……等各層面的不實言論，左右大眾認知，已嚴重危及社會的安全與穩定性，是刻不容緩、必須抑制的惡行。
 
　　而AI迅速生成圖像及言論的技術，將加速模糊真實和虛假之間的界線。本書帶讀者正視分身和數位言論所製造的混亂，共同思考、積極尋求危機下的解決之道。(文/博客來編譯)

A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER National Indie Bestseller

A New York Times notable book of 2023 Vulture’s #1 book of 2023
One of Slate’s ten best books of 2023 A Guardian best ideas book of 2023 One of Time’s ten best books of 2023 Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

＂I’ve been raving about Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger . . . I can’t think of another text that better captures the berserk period we’re living through.＂ --Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

＂If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one.＂ --Katie Roiphe, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

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 fighting against?

Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual 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 sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us--and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now--and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of international bestsellers including This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, No Is Not Enough, and On Fire, which have been published in more than thirty-five languages. She is an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, the founding codirector of UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice, and an honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University. Her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world, and she is a columnist for The Guardian.