Doppelganger by Naomi Klein: bold, brave and expertly researched

One of the most surreal moments of the pandemic was when Naomi Wolf, author of foundational third-wave feminist text The Beauty Myth, took to Twitter to praise the lack of 5G infrastructure in Belfast. She wrote: “It was amazing to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air, human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still, peaceful, restful, natural.” As many have pointed out, Belfast was anything but peaceful during the 1970s, though Wolf’s tweet was instructional in the sense that it gave a good indication of just how far many former liberals had drifted into right-wing hucksterism.

By contrast, Naomi Klein has always prided herself on her principled reputation. Whether working to expose the sweatshop horror at the heart of brand capitalism – as she did in her 2000 debut, No Logo – or tackling the existential threat posed by climate change in her 2014 magnum opus This Changes Everything, Klein has more or less been the poster-child of progressive thinking for the better part of three decades.

Imagine her consternation, then, when during the pandemic she found that thousands of people around the world were routinely mistaking her for Naomi Wolf. Not only must this have felt like an attack on her reputation, but an attack on her personality. For better or worse, both Naomis have cultivated their own particular brand of public intellectualism over years, and for both to have been so habitually confused must have seemed to stem from the most acute form of sexism. They’re both white, they’re both women and they’re both named Naomi. Surely this can only be one person?

The terrifying implication here is that any one of us could have not just one doppelganger, but multiple

This is the strange terrain from which Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger, navigates the murky underworld of conspiracy politics. Through her own personal experience with Wolf, Klein unravels the various techniques used by the far-right to spread disinformation. She asserts that the growing insinuation of the internet into our private lives has made the fight against capitalism more difficult than ever. This has even been to the detriment of her own work, since much of what she wrote in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine has been co-opted by anti-vaxxers looking for evidence of a shadowy elite. She finds that with the emergence of the pandemic in 2020, her own thesis on disaster capitalism and the manufacture of consent has become distorted, being used now as evidence by the far-right to explain everything from so-called “false flag” mass shootings to the use of crisis actors in news media footage of hospitals and morgues.

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In another particularly telling passage, as Klein delves ever deeper down the rabbit hole, she discovers that Wolf – who by this point has bought into the right-wing merry-go-round with gusto – has her own doppelganger. Someone who has stolen her appearance and ideas for the reason of generating followers on Twitter. The terrifying implication here is that any one of us could have not just one doppelganger, but multiple: self-managed online avatars, personal brands, bots, identity fraudsters and even – as in Klein’s case – issues of mistaken identity.

Klein suggests that online spaces should be co-opted by national and international governing bodies and treated with the same status as other vital public utilities

The internet, she suggests, has opened up a house of mirrors where our identities reflect and refract off one another until our central sense of self becomes indistinguishable from the simulacrum. This has the potential to affect everything from how we relate to our own bodies to the constant pressure we all feel to present the best “version” of ourselves at all times. The reality of such constant highwire performance, Klein writes, manifests as follows:

“As a frequently grafittied-about girl in high school ... [social media is] like reading what’s written about me on an infinitely scrolling restroom wall ... I instantly knew that [Twitter in particular] was going to be bad for me – and yet, like so many of us, I could not stop looking ... Perhaps if there is a message I should have taken from the destabilising appearance of my doppelganger, this is it: Once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.”

[ Naomi Klein on Naomi Wolf: ‘I felt like she had taken my ideas and fed them into a bonkers blender’ ]

Though this might seem like a treatise on turning off and tuning out, Klein is also acutely aware that the internet – and social media in particular – is too deeply ingrained in society to ever be completely jettisoned. She suggests instead that online spaces should be co-opted by national and international governing bodies and treated with the same status as other vital public utilities such as water, food, heat and electricity. This, she says, would require nationalisation and stricter international regulation on a vast scale, and to take big tech to task in a way few have dared to contemplate.

As always with Klein’s work, Doppelganger is a bold, brave and expertly researched book on one of the big issues facing our current moment; and along with other public intellectuals such as David Graeber, Rebecca Solnit and Emma Dabiri, she dares to not just lay out the problems before us but to offer practical, considered solutions for them too.