Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

I read a review that described this book as a tale of political and psychological confusion, and I think that is an excellent one sentence summary of what is both a memoir and a work of nonfiction. As told by the author, it all started when people started to confuse her, Naomi Klein, with Naomi Wolf. This became an increasingly upsetting situation as Wolf went from having political ideas that were similar to the author to a full fledged conspiracy theorist as the COVID pandemic progressed. Along with this came a lot of alone time for people across the globe and not everyone did well with that, the author included. The Klein/Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms of disorientation that afflict both the right and the left, and the left's loss of its hold on the language of political resistance, and how, in the process, that language has lost its grip on the world. The old story of how at the extreme's the left and the right look alarmingly similar, and how quarantining the globe accelerated a rush to either extreme. Liberals reassure each other that we know when to trust the elites (on vaccine safety or climate science, for example) and when not to (if corporate branding or billionaire-owned media are involved). But this same attitude of studied suspicion is at work among vaccine sceptics and online wellness communities, all of whom pride themselves on doing their “own research”. Both left and right have theories as to how money and power knit modern societies together--not exactly the same, but the author explores all of this in the light of Big Tech and how manipulation of people can become a manipulation of elections.