332. Naomi Klein with Mike Davis: A Trip into the Mirror World

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?

Not long ago, activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had an unsettling experience—she was confronted with an online 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. As lifestyles of internet celebrities have caused reality itself to become unmoored, Klein asks, “Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?”

Join us at Town Hall for a trip into what Klein calls the “Mirror World,” a series of reflections on the distorted edges that exist at the borders of our daily lives that we try to unscramble. This deep dive uses a combination of studied critique and reportage along with more personal perspectives to tap into the issues of politics, socio-economics, social media, and identity. Through the endless waves of contradictory claims and AI-generated content that we have access to, Klein aims to reconnect with sturdier foundations of what we believe and how we fight for what matters to us in the sea of environmental and electronic uncertainty.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and regular contributing columnist for The Guardian. Her published works include No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, and more. She is appointed by the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice (tenured) and is a founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice.

Mike Davis is the arts and culture reporter at KUOW, Seattle’s NPR member station. He’s a freelance editor at the Seattle Emerald, where he formally covered arts, culture, and politics. Mike is a Seattle native, a creative storyteller, and a proud member of the Seattle Association of Black Journalists.