One of the things I try to do on my podcast The Gray Area is sort through all the political and cultural confusion in our society.
To say that our world is becoming deranged by our technologies and media ecosystem might be a little much, but I do think that we’ve scrambled our relationships to ourselves and each other in profound and puzzling ways.
And yet I sometimes wonder if things are really as weird as they seem. Every generation thinks their time is uniquely strange or dysfunctional, so maybe we’re falling into that same trap — or maybe things are actually as strange as they appear.
A new book by the influential writer and activist Naomi Klein is a near-heroic attempt to sort through these sorts of questions. It’s called Doppelganger and it’s ostensibly about her struggles to avoid being confused with Naomi Wolf, the former liberal feminist icon turned anti-vax conspiracist.
But you realize pretty quickly that the book isn’t really about this dynamic. It’s about the distortions and absurdities of life in the digital world and about how all of us, not just public figures, are experiencing our own bewilderment in this environment. It’s a fascinating — and often disorienting — read, so I invited her onto The Gray Area to talk about her journey and how it helped her make sense of this moment.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
Sean Illing
How do you sum up what this book is about when people ask?
Naomi Klein
I don’t really have a great elevator pitch for it. It’s an attempt to wrap my arms around the wildness of intersecting crises. There was a moment when I decided this isn’t going to be a quirky essay. I was going to write an essay about identity confusion that would revisit some of the…
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