Doppelganger: an evening with Naomi Klein

*Please check special ticket conditions for this event below, incl. information about access.

PS: Ticket sales will end at 6pm through the website, after that you can try your luck on the door at Assembly Rooms on George Street.

The work of Naomi Klein has been integral for more than one generation of activists, writers, readers and commited community-members striving for a more just world. The Lighthouse-community is, of course, no exception, and so we're absolutely ecstatic to be able to host the Edinburgh launch of her brand new, urgently needed book: Doppelganger!

Having spent the past twenty-five years charting and documenting our politics and culture with incisive best-selling books such as No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, with Doppelganger, Klein takes a more personal turn. Braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and piercing cultural analysis, she dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilised present rife with doubles and confusion. In this alternate world, far-right movements feign solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere. Klein begins this intellectual adventure story by grappling with her own doppelganger— a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years.

This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

Join us to celebrate a true great, and a book that arrives at just the right moment, to shine a light and a way forward.

Naomi Klein will be in conversation with Gemma Milne.

Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of international bestsellers including This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, No Is Not Enough, and On Fire, which have been published in more than thirty-five languages. She is an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, the founding co-director of UBC’s Centre of Climate Justice, and an honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University. Her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world, and she has just launched a regular column for The Guardian.

Gemma Milne is a Glasgow-based writer and researcher focused on narratives surrounding, activism in and political economy of science and technology. She is author of 'Smoke & Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It'; is a researcher in Science and Technology Studies and Sociology at both Edinburgh University and Glasgow University focused on corporate futurism and the political economy of deep tech. Gemma writes for outlets such as The Guardian, WIRED, Forbes, the BBC and others; is co-host of the Radical Science podcast; and is the editor of The New Real Editions - a magazine focused on the intersection of AI and art. Gemma is a Fellow of the Creative Industries Research Centre Europe (CIRCE), an Assessor for Innovate UK, a Fellow of the Institute for the Future of Work, and an Innovation Jury Member for SXSW and has previously been a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, an Expert Advisor for the European Commission and a Scout for Backed VC.

Special ticket information:

Please note that masks will be required at this event (as with all Lighthouse events).

As there are limited free spaces, these will be restricted to one free ticket per person.

The venue is wheelchair accessible. If you have any mobility/access needs for seating, please send us an email with your booking number, detailing your needs, and we will send you a seat allocation on the day of the event.

For full accessibility information, please visit the Assembly Rooms website