Digital engagement addiction can permanently transform formerly reasonable public figures

Evidence

Addiction is likely the most relevant lens for understanding these jarring personality transformations. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic of doppelganger literature, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Henry Jekyll turns back and forth into the murderous Edward Hyde when he drinks a mysterious serum; but over time, the serum stops working and the original Dr. Jekyll gets lost completely. When I look at the behavior over the past few years of several people I once knew and whose company and work I once enjoyed, it’s obvious that they are swilling a dopamine-releasing serum that has turned them, perhaps permanently, into digital-age versions of Mr. Hyde. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 344

Categorization

• BMF: Stevenson’s Jekyll-and-Hyde as the canonical doubling text that Klein’s own book title references — not a cross-domain jump but the same ancestral trope the book is built around; better marked as XREF to the project itself.
• XREF: The Jekyll/Hyde frame is the literary backbone of Klein’s own ‘Doppelganger’ project — this is the reader-facing articulation of the book’s title. — connects to: Always-on social feeds feel addictive though causation cannot be isolated from other media. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 600; Addiction researchers apply a five-element framework to explain compulsive social-media engagement. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1438