Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

The economic incentives for this kind of online content go a long way toward explaining the breed of public figure who seems to have turned into a different kind of person during that first Covid year—more manic; angrier; more willing to burn bridges, to make outlandish claims, and to share unreliable and poorly sourced information if it was likely to be carried by a strong current in the digital ocean. I could make a list, but I’m sure you are making your own in your head right now: “I used to really trust [X]. What has happened to them? It’s as if they had an alter ego and they have succumbed to it completely.” Addiction is likely the most relevant lens for understanding these jarring personality transformations. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic of doppelganger literature, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Henry Jekyll turns back and forth into the murderous Edward Hyde when he drinks a mysterious serum; but over time, the serum stops working and the original Dr. Jekyll gets lost completely. When I look at the behavior over the past few years of several people I once knew and whose company and work I once enjoyed, it’s obvious that they are swilling a dopamine-releasing serum that has turned them, perhaps permanently, into digital-age versions of Mr. Hyde. I feel certain that my doppelganger is familiar with this particular cautionary tale because of yet another uncanny detail I came across on this journey: in 1995, her father, Leonard Wolf, published T...