Laurence Scott’s essays and criticism have appeared on NewYorker.com and in the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. He is a lecturer in writing at New York University in London and lives in London.Scott’s new book is Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century.
At the Guardian, he tagged his favorite books on convincing imposters. One title on the list:
“The real world isn’t just real … It’s virtual too.” So claims a character in Joanna Kavenna’s new tech-dystopian novel Zed, which explores how digital life isRead about the other entries on the list.making doubles of all of us. With our “real selves” now living alongside our lookalike online avatars, we have domesticated the spooky figure of the doppelganger.
Yet unsettling moral and political questions about the uniqueness of identity will inevitably proliferate in our doubled world of the physical and virtual. Deepfakes threaten to make audiovisual evidence inadmissible in court. Indeed, why should we be held accountable for the slanders, confessions, or virtually violent actions of our rebooted evil twins?
--Marshal Zeringue
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