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.

At its essence, a shock is the gap that opens up between event and existing narratives to explain that event. Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums—which is why those opportunistic players, the people I have termed “disaster capitalists,” have been able to rush into the gap with their preexisting wish lists and simplistic stories of good and evil. The stories themselves may be cartoonishly wrong (“You are either with us or with the terrorists,” they told us after September 11, along with “They hate our freedoms”). But at least those stories exist—and that alone is enough to make them better than the nothingness of the gap.

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.

But she was far more ambivalent about the impulse to attach identity signifiers to our beings, to brand ourselves as a this, or a that. In her landmark 1984 book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, hooks cautioned readers to “avoid using the phrase ‘I am a feminist’” and opt instead for “I advocate feminism,” explaining that unlike the “I am” label, which triggers the listener’s prior beliefs about what and who is a feminist, the latter is far more likely to begin a conversation about what concrete changes feminism is trying to achieve and “does not engage us in the either/or dualistic thinking that is the central ideological component of all systems of domination in Western society.”

Wolf has similarly twisted the feminist movement’s core tenet that all people have the right to choose whom they have sex with and whether to carry a child. Now she was distorting that principle to cast Covid tests and vaccine mandates as violations of “bodily integrity” akin to those endured by women who underwent forced vaginal exams, claiming that all are examples of “the state penetrating their body against their will.” Clearly, that kind of language fills a cultural need, one bound up in the social currency of victimization, a theme I’ll return to later. But the point here is that abusing such terms is dangerous: it drains them of their intended meaning, their legibility, and their power.

There is something uniquely humiliating about confronting a bad replica of one’s self—and something utterly harrowing about confronting a good one. Both carry the unmistakable shudder of the doppelganger.

Many of us do appreciate a certain level of automated customization, especially algorithms that suggest music, books, and people who might interest us. And at first, the stakes seemed low: Is it really a big deal if we see ads and suggestions based on our interests and tastes? Or if chatbots help clear our email backlogs? Yet now we find ourselves neck-deep in a system where, as with my own real-life doppelganger, the stakes are distinctly higher. Personal data, extracted without full knowledge or understanding, is sold to third parties and can influence everything from what loans we are eligible for to what job postings we see—to whether our jobs are replaced by deep learning bots that have gotten shockingly good at impersonating us. And those helpful recommendations and eerie impersonations come from the same algorithms that have led countless people down perilous information tunnels that end in comparing a vaccine app to the Holocaust and may yet end up somewhere far more dangerous. So it turns out that none of it was ever benign—not even the cute shoes.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, progressives in North America had been pretty complacent about this threat because it had mostly been their political adversaries getting booted off platforms. But well before Musk started suspending the accounts of Twitter users who displeased him, the same kinds of power abuses had deplatformed Palestinian human rights activists at the behest of the Israeli government, and advocates for the rights of farmers and religious minorities at the behest of India’s Hindu-supremacist government.

Establishing a democratic, noncorporate media—through public broadcasting and community access to the airwaves—was once a core progressive demand. Though there are civil liberties groups that still stand up against corporate censorship, as well as civil rights groups that fight for net neutrality, progressives today have not, for the most part, made fighting for a democratic and accountable information sphere a cornerstone of their political agenda. On the contrary, many happily cheered corporate deplatformings—until the same dynamics came for them.

It’s a reminder that just because something is currently enclosed in a certain kind of financial arrangement does not mean it must forever stay enclosed. History is filled with successful struggles against earlier forms of enclosure—colonial powers were ejected from their onetime colonies; foreign-owned mines and oil fields have been nationalized and put under public control; Indigenous peoples have won legal victories reclaiming sovereign control over their ancestral territories. Unjust ownership structures have been changed before and they can be changed again.

It bears remembering that many of the technologies that form the building blocks of modern tech giants were first developed in the public sector, with public dollars, whether by government agencies or public research universities. These technologies range from the internet itself to GPS and location tracking. In essence, Big Tech has appropriated commonly held tools for private gain, while adopting the discourse of the commons to describe their gated platforms. For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, he described it as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” He was right about that—why then should it be held hostage to the capricious whims of one man?

The result is a troubling dynamic—one that sits at the heart of our doppelganger culture. Rather than being defined by consistently applied principles—about the right to a democratically controlled public square, say, and to trustworthy information and privacy—we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time. No, these camps are not morally equivalent, but the more people like Wolf and Bannon focus on very real fears of Big Tech—its power to unilaterally remove speech, to abscond with our data, to make digital doubles of us—the more liberals seem to shrug and sneer and treat the whole package of worries like crazy-people stuff. Once an issue is touched by “them,” it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else.

This is also why Wolf leans so heavily and continuously on extreme historical analogies—comparing Covid health measures with Nazi rule, with apartheid, with slavery. This kind of rhetorical escalation is required to rationalize her new alliances. If you are fighting “slavery forever” or a modern-day Hitler, everything—including the companion you find yourself in bed with—is a minor detail. It’s similar, in many ways, to how evangelical Christians were coaxed by their leaders to set aside the fact that Trump’s behavior—the philandering, the alleged sexual assaults, the lying, the cruelty—violated their professed values. To get over all that, they had to cast him, in all seriousness, as the Lord’s messy messenger, put on earth to fight God’s own doppelganger: the devil. With stakes as high as eternal salvation, what’s a little pussy grabbing?

When people are ejected in these ways from our social networks—whether online or in our daily lives—they can genuinely seem to have disappeared, to have been muted for real. But that is very far from the truth. When someone is pushed out of progressive conversations or communities because they said or did something hurtful or ignorant, or questioned an identity orthodoxy, or got too successful too fast and was deemed due for a takedown, their absence is frequently met with celebration, as Wolf’s exile from Twitter was. But these people don’t disappear just because we can no longer see them. They go somewhere else. And many of them go to the Mirror World: a world uncannily like our own, but quite obviously warped.

Johnson & Johnson, one of the major vaccine makers, not only is caught up in the opioid lawsuits but also has been ordered to pay out billions in legal settlements in recent years over alleged harm caused by several of its prescription medications and even its ubiquitous talcum powder (found to have contained asbestos). Against this backdrop, and given the lack of debate and allowable questioning of the vaccines in many progressive spaces, it’s no surprise that so many went off to “do their own research”—finding my doppelganger, and many more like her, waiting with their wild claims about vaccine shedding and mass infertility.

On the democratic socialist left, we favor social policies that are inclusive and caring—universal public health care, well-funded public schools, decarceration, and rights for migrants. But left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring. And in contrast to Bannon’s courting of disaffected Democrats, we also don’t put enough thought into how to build alliances with people who aren’t already in our movements. Sure, we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements’ borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller, not larger.

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.”)

For instance, when Bannon states that his armed and authoritarian posse is being “othered” by leftists and liberals, he is appropriating an important term that analysts of authoritarianism have used to describe how fascists cast their targets as less than human, making them easier to discard and even exterminate. But he is doing more than that, too. He is also making a mockery of the whole concept of othering, which in turn makes it harder to use the term to name what Bannon does as a matter of course—to migrants,

It seems so distant now, but there were a few months in 2020—a good half a year—when there had been a widespread belief that the pandemic might be a catalyst for a great many of the structural changes our societies had been collectively procrastinating and avoiding.

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—billionaires and oligarchic rule, climate breakdown, white supremacy, prison abolition, gender identity, Palestinian rights, sexual violence—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. Changing the discourse did not prevent the world’s ten richest men from doubling their collective fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion in the first two years of the pandemic; it did not stop police forces from increasing their budgets while teachers have to pay for basic supplies out of pocket; it did not prevent fossil fuel companies from collecting more billions in subsidies and new permits; it did not prevent the Israeli police forces from attacking the funeral of the revered Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh after a bullet that was almost certainly fired by an Israeli soldier took her life.

What unites the far right and the far-out is the hustle on the one hand, and a faith in hyper-individualism on the other. In the alternative-health world, everyone is selling something: classes, retreats, sound baths, essential oils, anti-metal-toxin sprays, Himalayan salt rock lamps, coffee enemas. Supplements alone were worth an estimated $155 billion worldwide in 2022. It’s much the same on Bannon’s War Room or Alex Jones’s Infowars, with their manly supplements, survivalist supplies, Freedom Fests, precious metal offers, colloidal silver toothpaste, and weapons training—and let us not forget Tucker Carlson’s 2022 documentary in which he recommended that men regularly tan their testicles with a special infrared light in order to increase testosterone levels in preparation for the “hard times” ahead.

These are the histories currently being conjured up in mainstream wellness culture, which has adopted Silicon Valley’s notion of self-optimization, itself a by-product of the personal-branding culture that torments so many young people today. Every step counted. Every sleep measured. Every meal “clean.” And it is this context that has prepared the ground for a redux of the 1930s fascist/New Age alliance. The very idea that humans can and should be “optimized” lends itself to a fascistic worldview—because if your food is extra-clean, it can easily mean other people’s food is extra-dirty. If you are safe because your immune system is strong, it can flip to mean others are unsafe because they are weak. If you are optimized, others are, by definition, suboptimal. Defective. Next door to disposable. This is also the context in which some prominent anti-vaxxers have taken to calling themselves “purebloods,” since their blood is supposedly untainted by the jabs, never mind the term’s chilling supremacist overtones.

There are conservatives who are stronger advocates for kids with disabilities than some liberals. And I don’t know anyone who is outside the reach of these pressures. Our culture lavishly credits parents for their children’s successes and judges them harshly for their children’s challenges; I am certainly not immune. What has helped me, strangely, is the ambivalence I had toward motherhood for much of my life. I never was one of those people with a fixed image in my head of who I would be as a parent and who my children would be to me; it just wasn’t a feature of my fantasy life. That probably made me a less instinctual parent, but it also may have made me more genuinely curious to meet whoever showed up. I say this because I have noticed, in my conversations with parents of autistic children, that they often undergo an intense grieving period as they mourn the fantasies that had taken deep root in their hearts. So sad are they about the child-double who wasn’t that they can’t really see the singular child who is. It’s not unlike what some parents of trans kids go through: they often need a little time to grieve the daughter or son they thought they had before they can fully accept their child’s gender identity.

Many young people in the clinic displayed characteristics the doctors described as “autistic”—from the Greek autos, meaning “self,” in the sense of being inwardly focused—and struggled with social norms. For years, however, the Vienna clinic rejected the idea of placing diagnostic labels on these children, or even classifying them as “abnormal.” The educators observed that many of the traits causing social difficulties had been present throughout history, expressing themselves through archetypes like the hyperfocused artist or the absent-minded professor, and so did not need to be treated as diseases. Instead, in keeping with Red Vienna’s ethos of child-centered policy, the educators simply saw these behaviors as different ways of being human and developed tailored supports for the children in their care. But it wouldn’t last.

By setting his “little professors” apart from the rest of their autistic peers, and arguing that they alone were worth saving, Asperger created the controversial distinction between “high-functioning autism” and “low-functioning autism.” This is Asperger’s legacy: lifting up a small group of neuroatypical children as supposedly superior to all the others, while being part of an apparatus that sent children without that competitive edge to their deaths. Asperger’s jarring career trajectory demonstrates that, in just a handful of years, the same institutions and some of the very same people can shift from an ethos of care and curiosity toward a vulnerable group to one of callousness and genocidal cleansing. As if a switch has been flipped.

I have had several such experiences, usually while waiting in line, and they always go the same way: first comes the friendliness of the neuroatypical person, piercing through my little bubble of public isolation (usually involving headphones), then the shame and panic of the parent or grandparent, and finally the relief at having permission not to feel those painful emotions about someone they love, finding a little safe harbor in a never-ending storm.

It’s well-off liberal parents who have turned childhood into an achievement arms race, one in which admittance to an elite university is the first of many finish lines, but one so important their children are pushed to turn their most intimate traumas into triumph-over-tragedy stories (while the wealthiest families simply bribe and cheat their way to access, as we all learned through recent scandals). I also worry that members of this same class of liberal parents will convince themselves, in a few years’ time, that doing just a little bit of embryonic gene editing to enhance their future child’s IQ or athletic prowess or height is not just their prerogative, but their duty. The world is spiraling out of control, they will tell themselves. Surely my kids deserve a competitive edge. Or as Bill McKibben said to me recently, “Instead of figuring out how to have a world where everyone can thrive, they want their kids to thrive in a world that is falling apart.”

The end result of being surrounded by this kind of discourse is a reflexive state of continuous disbelief that the Brazilian professor of philosophy Rodrigo Nunes calls “denialism.” This in an upside-down state that, like everything else in the Mirror World, neatly serves the right and undercuts the left because, Nunes writes, it “displaces the real threats looming on the horizon into distorted, fun-house versions of themselves. Thus, the problem with democracy is not political elites everywhere who are beholden to the interests of corporations and financial markets, but a secret cabal of pedophiles planning to institute a world government.” Just as “the problem with the environment is not climate change, but the weaponization of science by a political agenda bent on changing our lifestyles and preventing growth.” To which we can now add that the problem of Covid was not a highly infectious disease being fought half-heartedly by for-profit drug companies and hollowed-out states, but an app that wanted to turn you into a slave.

When people and societies enter into a state of shock, they lose their identities and their footing, he observed. “Hence, calm is a form of resistance.” I think about those words often. Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves.

In the neoliberal era that began in the 1970s and has not yet ended, every hardship and every difficulty—from poverty to student debt to home eviction to drug addiction—has been pathologized as a personal failing. Every success, meanwhile, is lauded as proof of the relative superiority of the supposedly self-made. And, of course, these delusions of rugged individualism go far deeper than the half century of neoliberal unmaking. We who live in settler colonial states like the United States, Canada, and Australia have, for the most part, never truly reckoned with the fact that our nations exist only because of the twin thefts of stolen land and stolen people, that slavery and genocide were the bloody subsidies that allowed colonists, many of whom were themselves in debt peonage, to engage in their self-making adventures. And neither have the European nations that launched those colonial crusades in the first place.

It is notable also that the Covid protests took aim at symbols of collective action including, in both Italy and Australia, trade union headquarters, which were attacked and ransacked by diagonalist demonstrators. “FREEDOM,” they bellowed in the streets. That empty, heavy word. Freedom to do what? Protests usually are expressions of collective power, based on the core principle that we are stronger when united. But this was something different: a temporary conglomeration of atomized individuals who saw anything collective as the enemy, set against their individual bodies and their individual families. It was, in a way, a revolt against connectedness, a howl against the lessons the virus had taught us all so jarringly: that we share the same air with people we don’t know, the same hospitals, the same biome. That we are enmeshed with one another, like it or not. No, the demonstrators were saying, we are individual islands, shaped with our own hands alone; we answer to no one. We are “sovereign citizens” they declared, and you cannot force us to be in community or society.

The black box is not just the algorithms running our communication networks—almost everything is a black box, an opaque system hiding something else. The housing market isn’t about homes; it’s about hedge funds and speculators. Universities aren’t about education; they’re about turning young people into lifelong debtors. Long-term care facilities aren’t about care; they’re about draining our elders in the last years of life and real estate plays. Many news sites aren’t about news; they’re about tricking us into clicking on autoplaying ads and advertorials that eat up the bottom half of nearly every site. Nothing is as it seems. This kind of predatory, extractive capitalism necessarily breeds mistrust and paranoia.

Did being a white woman count as a basis for discrimination at a time when everyone was railing against the archetypal Karen? Well, maybe, if a Karen can convince herself she is actually a Rosa in disguise, denied access to restaurants and transportation and shunned by friends and family. Surely, by laying claim to that abrupt loss of status, that would raise her status—which, let’s face it, is not an entirely outlandish thing to believe at this stage of neoliberal capitalism, which has done a fine job of transforming identity-based oppression from a basis for solidarity and shared analysis (the original intention of identity politics) to its own form of currency.

The flip side of the post–World War II cries of “Never again” was an unspoken “Never before.” The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a high cost. The countries that defeated Hitler did not have to confront the uncomfortable fact that Hitler had taken pointers and inspiration on race-making and on human containment from them, leaving their innocence not only undisturbed but also significantly strengthened by what was indeed a righteous victory.

I’m struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples. ‘replacement theory’—Manifest Destiny QAnon (mass institutionalized child abuse)—boarding and residential schools ‘plandemic’—smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism It’s all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others. As though the Black, Brown and Indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us.

Looking back as the parent of a child older than we were then, I am struck by what wasn’t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms. I am struck that we never actually grieved, nor were we invited to seize our anger and turn it into an instrument for solidarity. Many years later, my friend Cecilie Surasky, then one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, observed of these kinds of educational methods: “It’s re-traumatization, not remembering. There is a difference.” When she said it, I knew it was true. Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness. At its best, it allows us to be changed and transmuted by grief and loss. But re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state.

Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.”

Israel’s settler colonialism differed from its predecessors’ in another way. Where European powers colonized from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish victimization and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot.

it would help if more conversations could hold greater complexity—the ability to acknowledge that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were survivors of genocide, desperate refugees, many of whom had no other options, and that they were settler colonists who participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people. That they were victims of white supremacy in Europe being passed the mantle of whiteness in Palestine. That Israelis are nationalists in their own right and that their country has long been enlisted by the United States to act as a kind of subcontracted military base in the region. All of this is true all at once. Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but if Israel-Palestine teaches us anything, it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves, or partitioned nations.

That was the piece of theater that was supposed to get me under control, and it is a snapshot of the seedy bargain Israel offers to all Jews, now more than ever. Sure, you might not like the look of what we do—the Palestinian teenagers in prison, the killing of journalists, the openly racist, anti-Arab parties that have moved from the fringes to some of the most powerful offices in Israel’s government. But you will accept it because when the world turns against Jews once again—and it will, because Shylock is eternal—you will come running here, with our tanks, our fighter jets, and the nuclear arsenal we will neither confirm nor deny, as your only safe place in the world. I understand the primal terror that leads many of my people to co-sign that contract, because the same trauma has been passed down through the generations to me.

But doppelgangers, by messing with our heads and our illusions of sovereignty, can help teach us this lesson: that we are not as separate from one another as we might think. Not as individuals, and perhaps not even as groups of individuals who have been born into various kinds of seemingly eternal fratricidal duels. What I see in the photographs in I’m Not a Look-Alike! is a model for surrender, not to sameness but to interconnection and enmeshment—the same lesson the pandemic tried to teach us in those early days. No one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another. Reject that truth for long enough, and you will end up in the Mirror World, shouting “FREEDOM” into the freezing winter air while you honk an airhorn and declare yourself a “sovereign citizen,” accountable to no one and nothing.