Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

For more than twenty years, ever since those jetliners flew into the glass and steel of the World Trade Center, I have been preoccupied with the ways that large-scale shocks scramble our collective synapses, lead to mass regression, and make humans easy prey for demagogues. In the years that it took to research and write The Shock Doctrine, my 2007 book on this topic, I delved deeply into how post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in many different contexts: 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and events significantly further back in time. With the public terrified and distracted, power-hungry players were able to move in and ram through policies that benefited corporate elites without debate or consent—not unlike the brutal methods deployed by torturers who use isolation and stress to soften up and break their prisoners.

The figure of the double began to fascinate me—its meaning in ancient mythology and in the birth of psychoanalysis. The way the twinned self stands in for our highest aspiration—the eternal soul, that ephemeral being that supposedly outlives the body. And the way the double also represents the most repressed, depraved, and rejected parts of ourselves that we cannot bear to see—the evil twin, the shadow self, the anti-self, the Hyde to our Jekyll.

the more I looked at her—her disastrous choices and the cruel ways she was often treated by others—the more I came to feel as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well. The ambient and all-pervasive hunger for ever-more-fleeting relevance; the disposability with which we treat people who mess up; the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility, and much else. In the end, looking at her helped me see myself more clearly, but it also, oddly, helped me better see the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.

Like the way that all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other—whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.

it is not only an individual who can have a sinister double; nations and cultures have them, too. Many of us feel and fear a decisive flip. Democratic to authoritarian. Secular to theocratic. Pluralist to fascistic. In some places, the flip has already taken place. In others it feels as close and as intimate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

“Seventeen magazine level of thinker”—

That's a hilarious turn of phrase

In this way, confrontations with our doppelgangers inevitably raise existentially destabilizing questions. Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be? And if enough others start seeing someone else as me, who am I, then?

this is the catch-22 of confronting your doppelganger: bark all you want, but you inevitably end up confronting yourself.

Once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.

Wolf and her fellow travelers had taken the argument for vaccines—which is that we belong to communities of enmeshed bodies, so what we do and don’t do to our bodies affects the health of other bodies, especially vulnerable bodies—and flipped it on its head. In their telling, it was actually vaccinated people who were the selfish ones sacrificing the vulnerable, and who were the spreaders and shedders.

When common lands in England were transformed into privately held commodities surrounded by hedges and fences, the land became something else: its role was no longer to benefit the community—with shared access to communal grazing, food, and firewood—but to increase crop yields and therefore profits for individual landowners. Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible. So, too, with our online activities, where our relationships and conversations are our modern-day yields, designed to harvest ever more data. As with corn and soy grown in great monocrops, quality and individuality are sacrificed in favor of standardization and homogenization, even when homogenization takes the form of individuals all competing to stand out as quirky and utterly unique.

As Richard Seymour writes in his blistering 2019 dissection of social media, The Twittering Machine, we think we are interacting—writing and singing and dancing and talking—with one another, “our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors—anyone we like. We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us, after keeping a record of the data.”

In the 2013 film adaptation of The Double, Jesse Eisenberg gives a memorable performance as Simon, the unremarkable bureaucrat whose identity is stolen and life destroyed by an unscrupulous and flamboyant look-alike, also played by Eisenberg. Near the end of the film, his face bloodied by battle, Simon looks into the camera and says: “I’d like to think I’m pretty unique.” We’d all like to think that, wouldn’t we? The trouble is, there are just so damn many of us out there trying to be unique at the same time, using the same preprogrammed tools, writing in the same fonts, answering the same prompts. No wonder Eisenberg saying those words has become a viral meme, circulating on the same platforms where we are all competing for uniqueness, authenticity, and, for some, proof that in these unreal times we’re still really us.

I looked for a current definition of “brand dilution” on a popular marketing website and found that there are three main causes for this kind of damage: “Stretching Capacity Too Thin” (like a restaurant franchising so quickly it loses control over quality). “Introducing Unrelated Services or Products” (like that time Colgate got into frozen dinners, only to discover people didn’t want their beef lasagna from the same people who make their toothpaste). “Losing Control of the Brand” (like, oh, I don’t know, having the words and actions of a serially deplatformed conspiracy monger attributed to you amid a deadly pandemic).

The dictates of good branding struck me as antithetical to the dictates of being a good journalist, let alone a trusted political analyst. Those roles rest on a tacit commitment to following one’s research wherever it leads, even if that turns out to be a very different place from what was originally expected. Trusted analysts have to be willing to be changed by what they discover. For a trusted brand, the duty is the opposite: to keep embodying your brand identity—your “promise”—no matter what the world throws at you. Good branding is an exercise in discipline and repetition. It means knowing exactly where you are headed all the time—which is essentially in concentric circles.

The Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank, who collaborated closely and later broke with Freud, saw the soul—the self believed to live beyond the body after death—as the original doppelganger, the most intimate of doubles. The choice to believe in a soul, he wrote, was “a wish defense against a dreaded eternal destruction.” Freud concurred, writing, “The double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self … ‘an energetic denial of the power of death’, and it seems likely that the ‘immortal’ soul was the first double of the body.”

What does it mean for young people to grow up knowing that every casual photo, video, and observation posted online could, when they are years older, be the thing that keeps them from getting a job, or getting into a school, or getting approved for an apartment? And, conversely, what does it mean when those same posts—trying on a cute outfit, dancing alone in their rooms—could also be the ticket to influencer fame and riches? Given the huge stakes, what do they do, and what don’t they dare even try? And what happens to their abject selves while they are busily performing their perfected selves? What evil twins get created in this partitioning?

By way of example, he talked about a notional “Dave in Accounting” who leads a dreary, unremarkable life but turns into “Ajax,” a gun-toting evil-slayer, when he is at home with his gaming console. “Now who’s more real,” Bannon asked—Dave or Ajax? You might say Dave, but Bannon saw it differently. “People take on these digital selves that are a more perfected version of themselves and where they can control things in a digital way that they can’t control in the analogue world,” he said of the gamers. So, he explained, Dave should back down and let Ajax take over. “I want Dave in Accounting to be Ajax in his life,” Bannon told The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior. She observed, rightly, “That’s precisely what happened on January 6. The angry, howling hordes arrived as real-life avatars, cosplaying the role of rebels in face paint and fur. They stormed the Capitol while an enemy army tried to beat them away … They skipped a day of work. And then they expressed outrage—and utter incredulity—when they got carted away. The fantasy and the reality had become one and the same.”

...example, he (Steve Bannon) talked...

One student shared that she had gotten off Instagram because the pressures to perform an idealized version of herself, and the inundations of images of others doing the same, were ravaging her mental health. But then came the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. “My friends all told me I had to get back on Instagram and post pro-BLM,” she said, “or everyone would think I was racist”—this despite the fact that she had been participating in all the protests in her area, albeit in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way. She logged back on and posted, but reluctantly; she knew there was something wrong with a culture that valued public performances of a virtuous self over more tangible solidarities and relationship building.

The permanence of the brand was its power—it was designed to follow the enslaved person for the rest of their life, insurance against the irrepressible will to be free.

It seems to me that both things can be true: these young influencers can be in real emotional distress over the pressure to produce mediated widgets and the cruelty they continually face from those they have invited into their lives, and they can simultaneously be figuring out how to monetize that pain. Because that is what they have been told they must do if they are to avoid becoming attention-economy roadkill. And, like so much else, it’s a vicious cycle. If you successfully thing-ify yourself, then other people will begin to believe you are a thing and will throw all kinds of hard objects at you, sure that you will not bleed. And then you have to conjure up even more revealing forms of self-exposure—up to and including having a full-blown nervous breakdown in your bedroom with the webcam rolling. Don’t come for me, these influencers seem to be pleading to their fans-turned-foes, I’m wounded—can’t you see that I’m bleeding here? Forgetting that the pack loves blood and there is nothing bloodier than performative trauma.

we should not fear having voices in our heads—we should fear their absence.

This might seem surprising at a time when the highest praise is to be declared an icon. But she did not want the name bell hooks—the persona or the idea in people’s heads—to upstage bell hooks’s ideas, and she understood that there is an unavoidable tension between the baggage a name can come to carry—its relative bigness in the world—and the ability of one’s words to reach people and be adopted as their own. A gulf can open up between author and reader, and hooks was making an attempt to close it. Of course, inevitably, the hooks name became its own kind of market signal, as everything in our capitalist culture does. But this did not seem to be her intent: on the contrary, hooks cared enough about her work, her ideas, not to want to weigh them down with a heavy name.

So much of intellectual and activist life today is about credit claiming. I do it; I’ve done it repeatedly in these pages. I wrote that. I said that. That’s my phrase. My buzzword. My hashtag. I was horrified the first time I noticed a colleague self-cite, embedding quotes from his earlier work in a column—“as I wrote here [link] and here [link].” Why was he quoting himself? Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time: “As I wrote here” … “See my earlier tweet” … “Just bumping this up.” We have to do it, or so many of us believe—we are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don’t remind people of what we have said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus.

My doppelganger has rarely shied away from extreme rhetoric—she has predicted domestic coups and accused the United States of tipping into “fascism” continuously since 2007 and said that “Obama has done things like Hitler did.” This kind of intemperance presents a challenge, I have noticed, when Wolf is trying to raise a new alarm: How to find words powerful enough to convince people that, this time, it’s the Big One?

It is a serious mistake to underestimate her, or the movements she now helps to lead. Because here is a non-snide version of the “Wait until they hear about cell phones” quip: They know all about cell phones. They just don’t know what to do about cell phones (or smart speakers or search histories or shadow banning or email and social media metadata…). And neither, it seems, does anyone else, including those in power, who are patently unwilling to rein in what the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism.” And Wolf, with her “Five Freedoms” campaign and her calls for anti-vax civil disobedience, is giving her followers something to do. She is telling them that it’s not too late to get their privacy, and their freedoms, back.

The Faustian bargain of the digital age—free or cheap digital conveniences in exchange for our data—was only ever explained to us after it was already a done deal. And it represents an enormous and radical shift not only in how we live but also, far more importantly, in what our lives are for. We are all mine sites now, data mine sites, and despite the intimacy and import of what is being mined, the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable.

It was there, on the side of that road, that I became convinced that whatever was happening with her wasn’t just relevant to me because of my admittedly niche doppelganger problem—it was far more serious than that. If someone like her could be shifting alliances so radically, it seemed worth trying to figure out what was driving that transformation—

These new alliances eventually kicked off the self-described Freedom Convoy that shut down Ottawa, the capital city in my own country, for three weeks, and then spread to the United States and Europe, branching out from Covid-related grievances to a more general, amorphous cry for “freedom.” These formations bring together many disparate political and cultural strains: the traditional right; the QAnon conspiratorial hard right; alternative health subcultures usually associated with the green left; a smattering of neo-Nazis; parents (mainly white mothers) angry about a range of things happening and not happening in schools (masks, jabs, all-gender bathrooms, anti-racist books); small-business owners enraged by the often-devastating impacts of Covid controls on their bottom lines, which gave way to rage at everything from inflation to induction stove tops.

“Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties. At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.”

I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like: Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown.

Because what Wolf turned into over the past decade is something very specific to our time: a clout chaser. Clout is the values-free currency of the always-online age—both a substitute for hard cash as well as a conduit to it. Clout is a calculus not of what you do, but of how much bulk you-ness there is in the world. You get clout by playing the victim. You get clout by victimizing others. This is something that is understood by the left and the right. If influence sways, clout squats, taking up space for its own sake.

This is a twist on the disaster capitalism I have tracked in the midst of earlier shocks. In the past, I have reported on the private companies that descend to profit off desperate needs and fears in the aftermath of hurricanes and wars, selling men with guns and reconstruction services at a high premium. That is old-school disaster capitalism picking our pockets; this is disaster capitalism mining our attention, at a time when attention is arguably our culture’s most valuable commodity.

The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality—we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.

many of Wolf’s words, however untethered from reality, tap into something true. Because there is a lifelessness and anomie to modern cities, and it did deepen during the pandemic—there is a way in which many of us feel we are indeed becoming less alive, less present, lonelier. It’s not the vaccine that has done this; it’s the stress and the speed and the screens and the anxieties that are all by-products of capitalism in its necro-techno phase. But if one side is calling this fine and normal and the other is calling it “inhuman,” it should not be surprising that the latter holds some powerful allure.

the mirror arguments and mirror political agenda carefully designed to repel arguments deployed by his adversaries. Some of this is standard political fare: Democrats talk about the Big Lie (the idea that Trump won the election); Bannon talks about the Big Steal (the idea that Biden stole it). Democrats talk about how Trump fomented the January 6 insurrection; Bannon says Democrats enabled rioters to burn down cities during the 2020 racial justice uprisings. Democrats are scandalized that Trump wouldn’t recognize the legitimate election results; Bannon is scandalized that Democrats never recognized Trump as a legitimate president. In the Mirror World, there is a copycat story and answer for everything, often with very similar key words.

And yet, if Putin was able to sell these upside-down claims to many, it’s partly because the U.S. government consistently does this kind of mirror imaging itself, feigning outrage over Russian interference in U.S. elections with no concern for the irony that its intelligence operatives have meddled in elections and helped overthrow democratically elected governments the world over since the 1950s, from Iran to Chile to Honduras—and let’s not forget the gloves-off U.S. interference in post-Soviet Russia to back Boris Yeltsin, who passed the baton on to none other than Putin.

When editors and journalists steer clear of important topics for fear that their audiences can’t cope with complex truths, it doesn’t throttle conspiracies—it fuels them.

today it is Meloni denouncing a system in which everyone is reduced to being “perfect consumer slaves”—only instead of offering an analysis of capital, a system that must enclose all aspects of life inside the market in order to mine them as new profit centers, she blames trans people, immigrants, secularists, internationalism, and the left for a hollowness at the core of modernity.

today it is (Giorgia) Meloni...

Under trademark law, a brand that is not actively being used can be deemed dormant and thus fair game for another party to usurp. I started to feel that what had been happening to me, with Other Naomi, has happened to the left much more broadly—with Bannon and Vance and Meloni and others. Issues that we had once championed had gone dormant in a great many spaces. And now they were being usurped, taken over by their twisted doubles in the Mirror World.

This, once again, is the opposite of what happens on large parts of the left. When we have differences, we tend to focus on them obsessively, finding as many opportunities as possible to break apart. Important disagreements need to be hashed out, and many conflicts that arise in progressive spaces are over behaviors that, when unchallenged, make those spaces unwelcoming or dangerous for the people they target. But it’s not a great secret that plenty of people routinely go too far, turning minor language infractions into major crimes, while adopting a discourse that is so complex and jargon-laden that people outside university settings often find it off-putting—or straight-up absurd. (“Speak in the vernacular,” the radical historian Mike Davis once pleaded with young organizers. “The moral urgency of change acquires its greatest grandeur when expressed in shared language.”)

Bannon, who has done as much as anyone in contemporary times to unleash the floodgates of xenophobic hate in the United States, has even begun to adopt the language of “othering” to describe how liberals treat his listeners. This is key, he says, to why he has been forced to build the Mirror World, with its mirror social media and mirror currency and mirror book publishing. Because his people were being “othered.” But no more. “Never again will they be able to other you, disappear you … That’s what the Chinese Communist Party did, that’s what the Bolsheviks did, that’s what the Nazis did,”

In fact, fascist and neofascist movements from Mussolini to Pinochet have recognized the powerful role played by women, particularly when cast in their supposedly “natural” role as mothers and protectors of nationalist traditions and healthy bloodlines (e.g., Giorgia Meloni). Hitler rewarded women deemed of good Aryan stock who agreed to quit the workforce and become baby-making machines.

Our Bodies, Ourselves, the health bible my mother regularly consulted, has been supplanted with an all-pervasive ethos of “my body, my worth”— the corollary of which seems to be “your body, your problem.”

In many ways, the most successful influencers in the wellness and fitness worlds—the people who make fortunes from selling idealized versions of themselves and the idea that you, too, can attain nirvana through a project of perpetual self-improvement—are a perfect fit with far-right economic libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, who also fetishize the individual as the only relevant social actor.

If the U.S. efforts to control Covid through free vaccination and wage-replacement programs had been more successful, that would have demonstrated that the federal government, when it sets its mind to something, can still provide timely, universal, and humane care to the entire population. But that raises some questions: If they can do it for Covid-19, why stop there? Why not launch similarly ambitious public programs to tackle other human emergencies? Could the government tackle hunger, soaring housing costs, and the need for universal health care? A successful Covid response would have set a precedent for a modern, activist government—a precedent many on the right consider dangerous. So it’s worth considering the possibility that Covid public health measures may have been in the crosshairs for people like Bannon and Carlson for a deceptively simple reason: because they were public.

doctors and drug companies want you to be sick so they can sell you Band-Aids, while fitness and wellness professionals want you to be well—but first you have to buy whatever they are selling instead.

Both the propagandists of the far right and the influencers of the far-out had their own good reasons to poison the well for the vaccine rollout. The former feared the precedent of a functional, caring state (and a political win for their rivals); the latter feared losing explosive growth in their sector. But I’ve come to believe that the bond is deeper and more troubling—that in these worlds reaching toward each other, there are also increasingly explicit shared beliefs, ones having to do with whose lives count most and whose deaths might be “nature” doing its work.

The disability justice advocate and author Beatrice Adler-Bolton refers to the mindset that has animated so much Covid denialism as “deaths pulled from the future”—which she defines as the judgment-laden posture that frames “deaths from Covid-19 as somehow preordained” because the people doing most of the dying were probably going to die prematurely anyway. Covid just moved up the timeline a few years, so what’s the big deal? And that’s at the moderate end of the spectrum—at the extreme, sandalwood-scented end, those deaths pulled from the future are actually welcomed. Like the yoga woman said, “I think those people should die.”

From the very first ripples of Covid conspiracy theories to the tidal waves of lies that would go on to inundate us, one claim has recurred with more frequency than any other: that the plan behind all of this was to cull large parts of humanity. First, it was that the virus was a bioweapon designed by the Chinese to cull us; then it was Bill Gates, supposedly a closet eugenicist, who cooked up the virus to push the vaccine, which was the real mechanism to cull us. But who is actually engaging in behaviors that have contributed to a culling, to mass and unnecessary human sacrifice? It is the diagonalists themselves—by systematically refusing the simple and safe measures that were our best chance of preventing a highly infectious disease from culling the more vulnerable members of our communities: the already sick, the disabled, the immunocompromised, the elderly.