"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? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a 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: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us--and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now--and an intellectual adventure story for our times"--

Featured as a Guardian Long Read in December 2018 EVERYTHING WE HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF THE INTERNET IS A MARKETING PLOY. As the Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown, private corporations consider it their right to use our data (and by extension, us) which ever way they see fit. Tempted by their appealing organisational and diagnostic tools, we have allowed private internet corporations access to the most intimate corners of our lives. But the internet was developed, from the outset, as a weapon. Looking at the hidden origins of many internet corporations and platforms, Levine shows that this is a function, not a bug of the online experience. Conceived as a surveillance tool by ARPA to control insurgents in the Vietnam War, the internet is now essential to our lives. This book investigates the troubling and unavoidable truth of its history and the unfathomable power of the corporations who now more or less own it. Without this book, your picture of contemporary society will be missing an essential piece of the puzzle.[Bokinfo]

Ten years after Cluetrain's original publication, too many companies still ignore the idea that markets are really made up of people. In our rapidly changing world, this book's message is more vital than ever. Companies may be wired for business, but they still struggle with how to talk to their customers like human beings.The 10th Anniversary Edition features extensive new commentaries by industry leaders, but the core message of this modern business classic remains intact.

Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperilled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialise on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection - a world without mind. In order to restore our inner lives, we must avoid being co-opted by these gigantic companies, and understand the ideas that underpin their success. Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science - from the Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stuart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley - Foer exposes the dark underpinnings of our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy. This is a nascent stage in the total automation and homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life. By reclaiming our private authority over how we intellectually engage with the world, we have the power to stem the tide. At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They're monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat. Foer explains not just the looming existential crisis but the imperative of resistance.

In April 1994, two immigration attorneys in Scottsdale, Arizona did something no one had ever done before. They advertised their legal services to approximately 6,000 of the 9,000 discussion groups called "Newsgroups" on the Global Internet, reaching tens of millions of people. Their innovative, money-making venture netted over 25,000 customer inquiries for one night's work. The two Internet pioneers, by spending only $20.00 - the price of this book - brought in $100,000 worth of business. But they also received a flood of "flames"--E-mailed insults - from thousands of Internet users who did not want this part of the Internet used for business purposes. With one advertisement, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel became the focal point of the violent controversy that continues to rage over commercialization of the once strictly academic Internet.

When the authors advertised their legal services on the Internet, they discovered the ultimate marketing tool. How else can an advertiser reach an audience of 30 million people for free? This guide explains exactly how the Internet operates and how its incredible potential as a marketing tool can put small businesses on an equal footing with the largest corporations. Photos.