>What if our books, and our movements as they are currently constructed (often in ways that resemble corporate brands), are only changing words? What if words – written on the page or shouted in protest – change only what people and institutions say, and not what they do? > >”I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS,” Fake Roth announces to Real Roth, touching on the central question of many doppelganger stories: Who is real and what is real?… > >This speaks to the quicksand underpinning of our age: the confusion between saying/clicking/posting and doing. The tension between the virtual nature of lives led in the blue glow of screens and the reality of the embodied labor… and material inputs… > >That is the real source of my speechlessness in this unreal period: a feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them. In recent years, left social movements have won huge victories in transforming the way we talk about all kinds of issues… and I have to believe that those changes represent real victories, that they matter. And yet, on almost every front, tangible ground is being lost.