Personal branding online creates performative doppelgangers demanding constant attention

Evidence

This, then, is not a biography of Other Naomi, nor does it offer a psychoanalytic diagnosis of her behaviors. It is an attempt to use my own doppelganger experience—the havoc wreaked and the lessons learned about me, her, and us—as a guide into and through what I have come to understand as our doppelganger culture. A culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgangers—virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. A culture in which many of us have come to think of ourselves as personal brands, forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, a doppelganger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy. And all the while, tech companies use these data troves to train machines to create artificial simulations of human intelligence and human functions, lifelike doubles that carry their own agendas, their own logics, and their own threats. What, I have kept asking myself, is all of this duplication doing to us? How is it steering what we pay attention to and—more critically—what we neglect? — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the book’s central definitional move: ‘doppelganger culture’ as a distinct concept covering avatars, personal branding, and AI doubles.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior reading on the attention economy and on digital identity; also to Goffman’s dramaturgy of the self. — connects to: Platforms differ in how easily status can be faked versus genuinely performed — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 263; The Web enabled individuals to apply corporate branding strategies to themselves — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 466; Aggregated digital traces reveal more than individuals intend and prompt greater self-editing — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 638 (+9 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The compressed thesis here—that attention economy participation forges a partitioned us-and-not-us identity while training machines toward their own agendas—is the paradigm the whole book rests on.
• QUESTION: The closing questions—what duplication does to us, what it steers us to neglect—frame the empirical core the reader should track through the final chapters.