Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.”

What aren’t we building when we are building our brands?

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.

The solution to this informational crisis, however, is not to look to tech oligarchs to disappear people we don’t like; it’s to get serious about demanding an information commons that can be counted upon as a basic civic right. The tech writer and theorist Ben Tarnoff, in his book Internet for the People, argues that this is an achievable goal but it must begin with a process of “deprivatization”—putting the tools that have become our public square into the public’s hands, under democratic control. “To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized,” Tarnoff writes, adding, “What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of democracy—a possibility that an internet organized by the profit motive precludes.”

Tarnoff’s recommendations are less a prescriptive checklist of to-dos than an urgent call for experimentation. There is no silver bullet for deprivatizing the information sphere, but, he argues, the internet can be taken back piece by piece, including through internet service providers owned by communities rather than conglomerates. Tarnoff cautions, however, that this is not something the political class, enmeshed and entwined with Silicon Valley at every level, is going to do on its own: “From the edges to the core, from the neighborhoods to the backbones, making a democratic internet must be the work of a movement.”

Unlike Fox News, which, despite its obvious bias, still has the trappings of cable news, War Room has built an explicitly activist media platform—or, more precisely, a militarist one. Rather than television’s airbrushed talking heads, Bannon cultivates a feeling that his audience is part of a rolling meeting between a commander and his busy field generals, each one reporting back from their various fronts: the Big Steal strategy (challenging the results of the 2020 election); the precinct strategy (putting ideological foot soldiers in place at the local level to prevent the next election from being “stolen”); the school board strategy (challenging “woke” curricula as well as masks and vaccine policies); the “command by negation” strategy (pressuring Republican representatives to deny Biden every possible legislative victory).

If someone like her could be shifting alliances so radically, it seemed worth trying to figure out what was driving that transformation—especially because, by then, it was also clear that quite a few prominent liberals and leftists were making a similar “post-left” lurch to the hard right.

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.”

they must continue to identify as proud members of the left, or devoted liberals, while claiming that it is the movements and tendencies of which they were once part that have betrayed their own ideals,

This, obviously, is gonzo stuff, the kind of thing that makes me feel smug and superior, like those cell phone jokes. But here, once again, is the trouble: 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.

Bannon has other, more unsettling mirror tricks. These relate to the way he latched onto legitimate fears of surveillance and Big Tech, and the way those surveillance fears were going largely unaddressed in liberal circles. That is far from the only liberal failing on which he has pounced.

Bannon crafted a campaign message out of the betrayals of his rivals: Trump would be a new kind of Republican, one who would stand up to Wall Street, shred corporate trade deals, close the border to supposedly job-stealing immigrants, and end foreign wars—moreover, unlike Republicans before, he pledged to protect social programs like Medicare and Social Security. This was the original MAGA promise.

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes—men who despise you—enslave you—who regiment your lives—tell you what to do—what to think and what to feel!… Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!… Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

was the trouble that I, and many others on the left, had been too timid and obedient during the Covid era? Had we gone along too readily with pandemic measures that offloaded so much onto individuals? And had we failed to forcefully take on the corporate greed that has run rampant in this period?

“We did change the discourse…,” a friend remarked to me the other day, and then the thought trailed off. We did. But we appear to have done it at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming on those screens. A torrent that assiduously amplifies the most operatic forms of virtue performance and the most cynical forms of pipiking. Angela Davis, in the spring of 2022, put the tension of the historic post–George Floyd protests like this: “In many ways, nothing has really changed at all, but at the same time, everything has changed.”

what more centrist leaders have been doing for much longer: using words as intended, yet with no intention of acting on them. And one form of denialism feeds the other: the outright denialism in the Mirror World is made thinkable by the baseline war on words and meaning in more liberal parts of our culture.

If nothing means anything and nothing follows from anything else, then, as Hannah Arendt warned, everything is possible.

Pivot the conversation to the need to regulate those companies, break them up, treat them as public utilities, guarantee everyone’s right to be part of a digital town square.

Pivot to common ground: why lifesaving treatments and medicines shouldn’t be run for profit in the first place. Shift to the need to expand public health care to include prescription drugs. Talk about how we can create good jobs in public health and preventive medicine.”

Feminist health, back then, was a movement fighting for changes at the collective and institutional level—like birthing centers inside hospitals, and certification of midwives and doulas, and access to safe abortions, and building research institutions focused on long-ignored aspects of women’s health.

It was also about the right to go on paid parental leave and the right to breastfeed without being criminalized.

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.”

Then came Covid—

As Ehrenreich taught us, we turn toward the body when life feels out of control. It was in this period that so many of those fit and beautiful influencers stopped merely cooing soothingly and offering encouraging words to motivate our home workouts and green juicing and started whispering to us alarmingly, about dark forces coming to poison us, and eventually, to gag, jab, and dominate us. It was then that the diagonal lines started to race toward one another.

At bottom, I suspect that much of the mirroring and doubling we are seeing comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see, to really look at—in our midst, in our past, and in the tumultuous future racing toward us.

The accelerated need for growth has made our economic lives more precarious, leading to the drive to brand and commodify our identities, to optimize our selves, our bodies, and our kids. That same imperative set the rules (or lack thereof) that allowed a group of profoundly underwhelming tech bros to take over our entire information ecology and build a new economy off our attention and outrage. It’s also the logic behind the offloading of Covid response onto the individual (wear your mask, get your jab), to the exclusion of those bigger-ticket investments in strengthening public schools, hospitals, and transit systems. Elites who benefit greatly from these priorities are the same ones who bankroll political and media projects devoted to pitting nonrich people against one another based on race, ethnicity, and gender expression—making them less likely to unite based on common economic and class interests.

I am a leftist focused on capital’s ravaging of our bodies, our democratic structures, and the living systems that support our collective existence.

Jack Bratich, a Rutgers University communications scholar with a focus on conspiracies, explained this possible trajectory to me like this: “Liberal investments in individualism result in thinking of power as residing in individuals and groups rather than structures. Without an analysis of capital or class they end up defaulting to the stories the West tells itself about the power of the individual to change the world. But hero narratives easily flip into villain narratives.” This is a crucial point: conspiracy culture does not challenge the hyper-individualism that is at the heart of so many crises reaching their breaking points. Instead, it mirrors it, putting all the blame for society’s ills on singularly powerful individuals: Fauci. Gates. Schwab. Soros.

playwright James Baldwin wrote, “It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know!”

For Jesse Wente, a prominent Ojibwe writer and chair of the Canada Council for the Arts, the mirroring was glaring. It’s “not a coincidence this occurs as more truths of history are revealed,” Wente wrote about the convoy, which he described as “a desire to reassert colonial dominance in the face of actually having to face [those truths] and to provide a sense of community where the pandemic has shown there is little.”

Lindqvist writes, “The idea of extermination lies no farther from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar. That insight has been almost completely repressed, even by the Germans, who have been made sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination that are actually a common European heritage.”

one of the hardest habits of thought to shake is the reflex to look away, to not see what is in front of us, and to not know what we know.

The more I looked at doppelgangers and the messages they carry, both personally and politically, the more relevant that knowledge seemed to our prospects of becoming the kinds of people capable of getting off our treacherous path. The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision).

At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see—in our past, in our present, and in the future racing toward

“We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people,” says the civil rights scholar john a. powell.

the truth is that nothing of much consequence in the face of our rigged systems can be accomplished on our own—whether by our own small selves or even by our own identity groups. Change

If our situation seems uniquely challenging (and on bad days, borderline hopeless), it likely has to do with how much we have come to expect from our individual selves combined with the brokenness of structures—trade unions, close-knit neighborhoods, functioning local media, and so on—that once made it easier to do things together. It’s our fragmentation that daunts us, as much as the challenges themselves.