Digital identity forces everyone to partition, perform, and project a public double

Evidence

My students may not have real live doubles making chaos for them, as I appear to have with Other Naomi. But they have nonetheless grown up with an acute consciousness of having an externalized double—a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their “real” selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed. At the same time, they must project the unwanted and dangerous parts of themselves onto others (the unenlightened, the problematic, the deplorable, the “not me” that sharpens the borders of the “me”). This triad—of partitioning, performing, and projecting—is fast becoming a universal form of doppelganging, generating a figure who is not exactly us, but whom others nonetheless perceive as us. At best, a digital doppelganger can deliver everything our culture trains us to want: fame, adulation, riches. But it’s a precarious kind of wish fulfillment, one that can be blown up with a single bad take or post. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 186

Categorization

• DEFINE: Klein’s core diagnostic tool — the partitioning/performing/projecting triad that generalizes her personal doppelganger into a universal condition. This is the analytical engine of the book.
• XREF: Connects to Goffman’s presentation of self, and to the deeper Mirror World thesis that digital identity is a universalizing form of doppelganging.