Even in peak solitude Klein compulsively reached for her doppelganger’s content

Evidence

In that perfect moment, I could have listened to anything. I could have rolled down the windows and filled my ears with the surf and the gulls. I could have blasted Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” which I had recently rediscovered thanks to Brandi Carlile’s cover. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I touched the purple podcast app, pulled up Steve Bannon’s War Room, and read the capsule summary of the most recent episode. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 308

Categorization

• XREF: The stark contrast (surf/gulls/Joni vs. Bannon’s War Room) displays Klein’s device: she stages her own susceptibility to the Mirror World as evidence that its pull is gravitational, not fringe.
• STORYSTEM: A writer whose #1 intrusive thought, in perfect solitude and beauty, is a podcast from a man diametrically opposed to her — that’s the germ of a character study about digital self-sabotage as magnetic compulsion.