finished: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
I finished Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
When I think of this book, I keep hearing the Sticks by the criminally underrated band the Cool Greenhouse. "There’s all sorts of inversions that you need to get your head around," Tom Greenhouse narrates as he flits from one odd conspiracy theory to another.
Klein was often confused for another Naomi on social media and eventually stopped looking away. She watched other Naomi embarrassed and ostracized, and then embraced and emboldened in the mirror world by people like Steve Bannon.
Most of us have been happy to look away, but the mirror has never stopped looking at us, studying us, even coopting our language and inverting our causes. It’s not just an echo chamber devolving into a parody of itself: it's a reflection that let's us see the structural flaws of our society and the parts ourselves we want to ignore but shouldn’t.
I'm back to Tom Greenhouse. "So is this the kind of catharsis you were after? / Strange shapes appear in the mirror when you’re not there" (The Sticks by the Cool Greenhouse). I guess the conclusion is to be there. Look into the mirror. Now what?