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When Naomi Klein talks about how dopplegangers can take over a person’s identity and life by acting *more* like them (with a nod to Dostoevsky’s The Double which I haven’t read) this reminds me of the psychological model of hyperstimulation. As botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer says, we humans can learn a lot from biomimicry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
So in Psychology class, we were given the example of a bird which lays dark-spotted eggs that stimulate birds who lay pale-spotted eggs to prefer to incubate them, and raise a doppelganger in place of their own chick (brood parasitism).
Of course, AI makes it easier to generate hyperstimulant content which is selected by consumers and pushed by algorithms. But the basics were long in place, as the Wikipedia article explains (giving junk food and pornography as examples). One could add the ‘Mar-a-Lago Face’ and similar trends, even the Shock-and-Awe style of state terrorism with really big explosions/demolitions/casualties.