Doppelganger – Naomi Klein – 348 pages (399 with notes / index)
Modern networks and media platforms expose the average person to probably HUNDREDS of faces per day which accumulate over time, inevitably resulting in occasional experiences of surprise / curiosity or perhaps awkwardness / disgust after encountering the image or entire online “brand” of someone who looks nearly identical to us or shares the same name. Internet culture resurrected an old word – doppelganger – for that “other” person and the combination of feelings produced after encountering the “other”, whether in person or just as content on a site.
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein is a thought provoking book about the larger concept of doppelgangers in our individual lives, our culture and the very operation of our societies. The book "starts local" from an experience that began affecting the author as far back as the 2000s, but grew rather stark over the past five years. It became apparent to Klein that the combination of social media platforms, search optimizations and suggestions, an overlap of topics of interest and a simple coincidence – Naomi Klein’s internet-synthesized doppelganger is author Naomi Wolf – led to Internet users consistently confusing the two authors and incorrectly directing occasional praise but mostly vitriol at "Naomi #2" instead of "Naomi #1" or vice versa. Adding to the sense of mystery was confusion and surprise by many of how the views of Naomi Wolf had shifted – seemingly in 180 degree fashion – from her 1990s perspective to that of a typical alt-right conspiracy promoter.
These “crossed wires” became more frequent as COVID shutdown were applied globally, giving Klein a seemingly endless amount of time to “observe” her doppelganger to answer her own questions about why her doppelganger underwent such a logical / political 180. Amidst this "research," Klein began making connections between the forces likely contributing to this single doppelganger experience and larger events involving the handling of COVID, anti-vax conspiracies and their ties to autism care and some longer standing problems. The book starts with Klein’s "local" example then expands to implications of "online branding" of individuals on social media and branding of actual professionals / performers online. From there, the concept is used to shed light on the feeling of otherworldness being generated by political movements that seem completely disconnected from reality and ultimately on global issues of exploitation / repression / genocide.
Is Klein’s application of doppelganger dynamics a convenient logical crutch to tie together a book on random current events or does her analysis hold weight? The book provides coherent examples of the behaviors prompting her theory and analysis of the underlying events to help separate ACTUAL causes from the conspiratorial causes suggested by actors operating in a logical doppelganger fashion. Because some of the examples involve her own professional life and role as a mother, the book doesn’t read with as much of an analytical tone as The Shock Doctrine but Klein not only provides numerous examples, she shows how the examples interrelate to each other. The entire analysis is filled with "lightining bolt" prose – sentences or short paragraphs so well crafted I felt compelled to flag them as I read. After completing the book, I had 55 Post-Its across the 348 pages of content flagging key points.
Two Naomis
Naomi Klein’s problem – and the book’s origins – started from a simple mixup. There is Naomi Klein, a Canadian citizen famous in some circles for a series of books including No Logo and The Shock Doctrine which focus on flaws within capitalist systems which accentuate economic inequities and un-democratic political outcomes for the uber-wealthy. There is also Naomi Wolf, an American writer famous for her 1990s book The Beauty Myth which made the case that 1990s women were being indoctrinated with a myth of attainable perfect beauty that would allow success in the business world while actually NOT being achievable and PREVENTING women from achieving actual success by wasting their time chasing unobtainable perfection. Early in her career, Wolf was typically viewed as a left-oriented feminist thinker. However, over the past 8-10 years, Wolf’s writings and online appearances have shifted markedly to the alt-right, to the point where she is a frequent guest and even co-host on Steve Bannon’s podcast.
Klein first began noticing the occasional "crossed wire" in the late 2000s but became more intent on understanding the process during the period of Occupy Wall Street protests when she overheard two other women in a bathroom talking about what an IDIOT Noami Klein was about topic X. Having never written or even thought much about topic X, Klein interrupted the two and said, "um, I think you mean Naomi Wolf, not Klein.
Klein's first key insight into the mechanics of the problem she was facing came after numerous situations where show runners and producers would reach out via her social media account to begin making travel arrangements for upcoming appearances... Appearances for Naomi Wolf. Klein would typically send back a response of mock exasperation and politely remind them they wanted Wolf, not Klein. At one point during the pandemic, Klein was tagged on someone's post stating how "Klein" had been losing her mind for years and now has completely lost it, making comments comparing requirements to present proof of vaccinations with Jews being forced to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany. Klein curtly replied to the poster "You sure about that?" The poster realized his mistake, took down his post and tweeted her back... "Oh Jesus, it's Wolfe (sic)... damn twitter autocomplete. Sorry about that." BINGO. Having systems with millions of users being confused with "help" derived from search results from other confused users MAGNIFIES the confusion exponentially.
Everyone Has a Brand / Everyone Has a Doppelganger
As with The Shock Doctrine that came before, Klein anchors the entire narrative of the book around a term that strikes the reader as au courant but has a history – in this case – stretching back decades and centuries with psychological and religious connotations. In modern circles, most associate doppelganger with the eerie déjà vu experience one gets after seeing someone who appears to be a body double of someone else, or just another “John Smith” who might have a very similar life to a “John Smith” you know, creating a weird sense of the possibility of a parallel universe.
Klein traces ideas related to doppelgangers and the impacts of a dual self back to early 1900s psychological theories, a painting dating back to 1851 (When They Met Themselves by Dante Gabriel Rossita) of a medieval couple walking through a forest and encountering their doppelganger selves (and freaking out) and much older religious concepts of a soul. It might be an accident that doppelganger’s usage spiked with the rise of internet technologies and the fixation on digital identity but, as Klein argues throughout the book, its use is VERY apropos to the issues arising from these technologies.
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From this historical perspective, Klein makes the point that the idea of dual selves is processed by our consciousness as a threat. Multiple theories abound as to why... Fear of how the “other” might become more popular than the “real”. Fear the “other” could become more successful than the “real”, posing an existential risk to “real’s” livelihood and life. Fear that, by declaring a "soul" exists that is subject to eternity, attempting to assign all good attributes to that “soul” will result in an “evil twin” housing all of the real person's bad attributes, resulting in harm to others. Reframing these older historical implications of multiple selves in more modern and less religious overtones, creating dual selves can be viewed as an intrinsically unhealthy approach for dealing with reality. It encourages a partitioning of the person into good and bad hoping to preserve the good but in doing so, takes away internal attention on "bad" attributes, giving them a wider arena in which to act unchecked.
Klein’s first examples of these doppelganger impacts on modern life start at the individual layer, with experiences nearly everyone has had writing a college entrance application essay or creating an online resume for LinkedIn or similar sites.
Klein’s first book No Logo analyzed how modern capitalist emphasis on branding for corporations and products was overtaking individuals. While teaching a course on branding at a university, Klein solicited feedback from students on how they saw this affecting them as a generation warned by their parents to watch everything they do online because ANYTHING can come up on a college or job application years later. Feedback from many students cited their college application as the first point they recognized a schism being FORCED upon them between their true self and their persona via inane questions like Some students have a background, identity, interest or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
There were many nods when one student described the process as “packaging up your trauma into a consumable commodity.” It’s not that the traumas they wrote about were fake, it’s that the process required them to label difficult experiences in specifically marketable ways, and to turn them into something fixed, salable, and potentially profitable (since universities are themselves branded as the requisite first step to any lucrative career). A partitioning was occurring between these young people and this thing they were supposed to become to succeed.
Klein later points out that this first initial self-created schism is then subjected to the full force of the internet with likes, followers, search engines and AI to begin “rewarding” content which serves the need of other parties, creating incentives for individuals to accentuate whatever “pops” those algorithms. Since those search engines and algorithms are exclusively using data about the “digital you” rather than the full “real you”, those technologies INHERENTLY widen that schism, with profound impacts for individuals in not only the expected career realm but in the personal realm. Even for someone succeeding at creating a strong / valuable online “brand,” there is one key pitfall, as Klein ponders regarding her own brand:
Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation. Conceding to having become one at age thirty would have meant foreclosing on what I saw as my prerogative to change, evolve, and hopefully improve. It would have locked me into performing this particular version of me, indefinitely.
Elsewhere, Klein quoted author Zadie Smith and elaborated in this way:
”When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way, it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.” But we aren’t transcending to something higher, just less ourselves. And a flattened, reduced version of ourselves is easier to confuse with a flattened, reduced version of someone else.
This updated analysis on individual branding concludes with a key insight. By encouraging people to fixate on their “personal brand,” society is explicitly telling citizens that the individual is the ONLY force that can create change for the individual. This is conditioning people to completely ignore group actions – exactly at a point where existing systems have perfected ways to IGNORE or completely neuter individual calls for change and justice and GROUP action is the only viable approach for achieving required changes – economic, legal, civil or ecological.
Partitioning, Performing, Projecting
The words partitioning, performing and projecting appear frequently throughout the book to emphasize the deeper psychological / psychiatric concerns that stem from a world encouraging billions of people to create and cultivate online personas. People partition their own selves when they start choosing what to include or exclude in their online persona. Once “published”, the very concept of a “brand” requires consistency with those characteristics, whether they are still or ever were accurate. That emphasis on performance becomes more stressful over time, especially if the “brand” continues diverging from the “self” as one continually optimizes the digital version away from reality. The third term of the trio – projecting – refers to a process theorized by some in psychiatry in which the individual who believes in a soul that can “own” their good attributes worthy of eternal life also creates another parallel identity which can take on responsibility for all of their negative qualities. The concept is that someone willing to believe in a soul will be inclined to create another identity to avoid having to actually address their own flaws – just project them onto their evil twin. In this thinking, a person already willing to bifurcate their concept of self into “bodily me” and “soul me” who has also created “evil twin me” for additional false psychological compartmentalization is venturing into seriously warped territory when “online me” becomes equally critical to their short-term survival.
It’s one level of stress and risk for a software developer or account to “manage their brand” by updating a profile on LinkedIn, contributing to an industry blog, etc. For entertainers, writers or similar high profile public figures, the ongoing curation of their online brand poses existential economic and personal risks. One intemperate response on a Webex appearance or one sloppily written Tweet can, at a minimum, trigger an avalanche of condemnation or, in the new vernacular, complete cancellation.
That high-risk / high-reward dynamic and the algorithm-driven fixation on views and likes has created a unique – and uniquely distorted – environment online, populated with “influencers.” Initial search technologies might have resulted in actual random experts in a field popping up in search results and yielding a higher profile for those players. However, as newer “social media” technology was added to existing search engine technology, “content creators” quickly reverse engineered the algorithms involved and realized they could boost their appearance rates in results by commenting on whatever is trending in the larger internet. Don’t know a thing about vaccines but have an opinion? Blog it, tweet it, vlog it. Since clicks reinforce search results, toss your opinion out early enough as a topic starts trending and you can increase your traffic 20 percent. Actually knowing anything about vaccines is not a requirement.
One fascinating anecdote in the book involves a question many might ask. What happens when your actual self and your online self diverge and the world likes “online you” far more than “real you?” In 2022, South Korea elected a new President, Yoon Suk Yeol. During the campaign, his tech savvy staff created an online ad campaign featuring an obviously AI generated simulation of the candidate and named it AI Yoon. The problem was that the AI incarnation had more charisma (and better script writing?) than the real Yoon, who actually won the election. Many citizens still watch the AI version because he’s more relatable to them. So who actually won the election? Yoon and his team that wrote his human speeches and campaign platforms? Or the coders that created and scripted the AI Yoon content? Will that distinction be so clear in another ten or twenty years?
A Simple Formula
After outlining the new stresses of curating a unauthentic, synthesized doppelganger and the extreme high-risk / high-reward stakes of leveraging it for a career, Klein then tackles a question related to a phenomenon seen more frequently in the past decade. What triggered the surprising intellectual 180 turned by her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf? (Parenthetically, I can think of many more examples… Glenn Greenwald? Matt Taibbi? Lara Logan? Sharyl Atkisson? Seymour Hersch? Is there something new and unique that explains this phenomena?
About halfway through the analysis regarding Wolf’s U-turn, Klein summarizes one possible process behind these transformations in formula form:
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
In the case of her immediate Naomi (Wolf) doppelganger…
Wolf’s addiction to social media via likes and influence seemed to begin with comments in 2011 regarding Occupy Wall Street protests after the financial collapse of 2008. Despite the organization leading OWS explicitly stating it had no specific list of policy changes that lawmakers could enact that would end the protest, Wolf claimed to know otherwise and actually appeared in public seeming to negotiate her supposed list of OWS demands. By the time OWS protests ended across the country, Wolf claimed the shutdown of protests was ordered by Obama, as part of an growing authoritarian threat. Things just got weirder from there. Aid the US sent to Africa in 2014 wasn’t aimed at combatting the spread of Ebola but returning it to the US to trigger a pandemic to justify more government control. Actual beheadings of American and British captives by ISIS were staged with actors. The NO vote on the 2014 Scottish independence referendum being fraudulent when the margin was 10%. Bizarre.
The mid-life crisis portion of the formula for Wolf stemmed from a book Wolf wrote in 2019 regarding the history of sexual repression in Britain as part of a Ph. D she worked to earn from Oxford University. She appeared on a BBC program for an interview about the book, an interview which led to a HUGE mistake being identified in her book (and Ph. D). Wolf cited the words “death recorded” appearing in public records in Britain related to sodomy charges as proof that Victorian Britain was executing men for gay sex into the 1800s. Her interviewer from the BBC had done his homework. That language at that time didn’t mean they were executed, it meant they were charge and RELEASED. When she made her point, he rebutted her assertion. In real time. Wolf literally found out on live television that the core of her thesis behind her new Ph. D and her new book was EXACTLY wrong. Oxford yanked her Ph. D and her publisher withdrew the book. That chain of events clearly qualifies as one of the larger career failures and public shaming in modern media history.
With Wolf as an example, Klein theorizes that the assimilation of social media into traditional journalism and research into economics and politics has created an ecosystem which
- emphasizes “likes” and influencer “clout” rather than actual insight and truth
- requires participants to create and maintain a parallel online self to operate within that ecosystem
- delivers incentives for participants that further the divergence between their real self and “online self” with outsized rewards, often leading to fringe, unproven ideas and conspiracy theories as content
- can impose outsized penalties for failure or perceived transgressions
While trying to understand where Wolf might be going in her commentary, Klein concluded that to some extent, there was no theme to the issues Wolf would engage, except whatever was trending on the internet on a given day. In this system, when a participant self-implodes, there is little chance of resurrecting a career in their original sphere of influence. However, since they understand how the system is manipulated by views, likes, impressions, etc., they can adopt the strategy with a new audience – often by playing the “I’ve seen the light” angle with the new crowd -- and stay in the game.
You Can Ignore Them, But They’re Not Ignoring You
With Naomi Wolf as an example of people crossing intellectual boundaries no one would have predicted decades ago, the book introduces two other key concepts regarding patterns in our existing public discourse. As Wolf continued her shift to the alt-right and Klein continued getting misdirected feedback to the wrong Naomi, Klein started paying more attention to Wolf’s appearances. Many of those involved Steve Bannon so Klein – partly from intellectual curiosity, partly morbid fascination and partly having little else to do during COVID lockdowns – began listening to Bannon’s podcast on a regular basis. From that brain dulling experience, Klein extracted some crucial lessons that those who think they operate in the saner spectrum (left or right) need to understand and incorporate.
First, conspiracists not only make outrageous claims about various issues or put forth specific proposals for addressing them, they frequently coopt existing terminology or use terminology overlapping the opposition in their communication. In a media world driven by search algorithms, this leverages search engine stupidity to essentially “steal” hits from the opposition but subsequently – purposely -- taints the language of the debate to the point where more reasonable thinking individuals not only avoid the LANGUAGE involved, they avoid the ISSUE. In a world with issues A, B, C, X, Y and Z with two parties on either side connected to all six with policy ideas, “tainting” the language of X, Y and Z can result in “normal” people simply AVOIDING those issues entirely. Alt-right players -- and Steve Bannon in particular -- understand this phenomenon very clearly and leverage it explicitly in their strategy. For X, Y or Z to be an issue at all, there is CLEARLY something occurring generating concern in SOME portion of the population. Allowing X, Y and Z to go completely unaddressed because the crazies talk about them can likely cede any voters interested in X, Y or Z to the opposition. This pattern was seen in the 2016 election.
Of course, using this search engine hacking technique to “invade” an issue space and taint it so your opponent avoids it doesn’t require actual SOLUTIONS to be proposed for X, Y and Z. It only requires delivering content that keeps those attracted engaged and enraged enough to avoid mainstream players. Voters interested in X, Y or Z feel like the issues are abandoned (they are), leaving them vulnerable to simplistic solutions from the alt-right. Simplistic solutions which inevitably involve some “other” person, demographic or nationality that can serve as a distraction, long enough to capture a vote before those on the alt-right get elected then continue policies benefiting the “tenth of a percenters.” In the mean time, this strategy injects enormous amounts of conflict, fear and panic into the public sphere, sucking up all available oxygen for legitimate debate and putting citizens in a fight or flight mode rather than a calm mode that can facilitate listening, learning and actual problem solving.
The book uses the term diagonalism for this phenomenon of seeing unexpected actors operating in “issue spaces” not normally expected according to traditional ideas of left / right (pick your favorite dichotomy…) boundaries. The key point regarding all of this per Klein is that the forces that have learned these dynamics are leveraging them with great political effectiveness. Those who think they are operating in a sane world with “real facts” and shunning the crazies must understand they are still acting inside a room with a one-way mirror. We may not be paying any attention to “them” or even if we’re looking at the mirror, we aren’t seeing what they are doing. But “they” are watching the entire political space and finding areas not addressed with effective policies and priorities and co-opting that idea space – either to actually do something or, more likely, simply to use as a point to sow confusion and division and “flood the zone with shit” to keep attention diverted from the things they want that they know the majority would never knowingly support in an election. Instead of the shock doctrine, it’s the shit doctrine.
Doppelgangers as States
Considerable space in the book is devoted to applying the doppelganger concept to analyzing current events in Israel and the entire seventy plus year history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The analysis here starts with a key insight. Capitalist societies in general and western victors of World War II in particular decided to frame the Holocaust as a UNIQUE horror with no precedent that we must NEVER FORGET and NEVER REPEAT. That framing of “uniqueness” reflects a self-serving fiction that Hitler and Nazism arose from nowhere, the western allies stepped up to defeat him and, after having done so, were justified in compensating the victims by providing them a home. Western countries prefer this “unique” and “unprecedented” view of the Holocaust because it excuses them from contemplating the longer history of persecution and genocide, not only of Jews but of those involved in their own histories.
From that initial historical schism between “history” as remembered and “truth,” Klein’s analysis states that Israel was formed for the benefit of the victims of a industrialized Holocaust stemming from a government that treated Jews as disposable “others” for the advancement of the German state. In creating the new Israeli state, the new territory was taken from a DIFFERENT set of “others” (Palestinians) who had suffered under similar arbitrary partitions from other European colonial forces.
In reality, Hitler and Nazism did NOT arise from nothing, they were merely the most recent incarnation of a centuries old pattern of pograms, massacres and lower-tech genocides, not only against Jews in Europe but Native Americans in America and Canada. Before Hitler talked about lebensraum (“living space”) justifying the expansion of Germany, Americans and Canadians had “Manifest Destiny” as a justification for displacing natives based on white Christian superiority. Hitler actually cited American laws regarding segregation as influences on establishment of the Nuremberg Laws.
In reality, under this framing, Israel has been forced to operate as a split-brained doppelganger since its inception with a compounding set of existential challenges.
- Formed as compensation / justice for victims of a Holocaust.
- Territory provided by taking it from another people treated as “others” who already experienced the same treatment under prior colonial powers.
- At a time when the western capitalist victors themselves were supposedly recognizing policies based on colonialism and occupation needed to be eliminated because they didn’t work and caused more problems.
- While handing the keys to a new state that was immediately put in a position of being in a space to which it never had sole prior political claim.
- With little chance of survival of that new nation unless it adopts that colonial strategy 100%.
- And no party to this new arrangement is allowed to actually label this mode of operation as colonialist or cite its inherent unfairness.
How is the nation of Israel doing at operating in this perpetual split-brain doppelganger mode? Arguably, not well. The country is currently being torn apart by alt-right Orthodox conservatives working to cripple an independent Israeli Supreme Court to further cement militant policies pushing more settlements, continuing restrictions against Palestinians in those areas and impose restrictions on Israeli media. Oh, they also want to enact new legislation that would exempt Orthodox Jews from conscription in the military that would enforce these militant policies it wants pursued.
Naomi Klein identified two key goals for writing Doppelganger. 1) Formulating a coherent explanation for the otherworldliness quality many people currently report about world events… The feeling that not only friends and family seem to be making bizarre “hyperspace jumps” on the traditional X/Y grid of political / social / economic thought we all think we understand but that journalists and media players are doing the same thing, making us question the information from the entire system. 2) Replacing the sense of chaos and fear from that cognitive dissonance with a sense of calm based on understanding the process by which it operates and an anecdote for combatting it. A sense of calm is required for citizens to resume TALKING with one another and LISTENING to begin formulating solutions as a society. The alternative is to remain in individual cages of fear and ignorance to be preyed upon by the interests actually operating our country and economy for their selfish purposes.
I have yet to read any other analysis over the past ten years that provides a more straightforward explanation for the distorted information ecosystem we see operating today than that in Doppelganger. Applying that same concept to individuals as they attempt to navigate through a career managing an online “brand” and individuals just managing a social profile that makes them feel worse by magnifying the difference between their perfect-life online persona and their actual life was interesting. Applying the concept to the psychology of an entire nation seemingly set up for existential conflict from Day One without the vocabulary to describe its situation was icing on the cake.
Doppelganger serves an admirable purpose by describing a variety of interrelated processes in modern technology that are harming public discourse and being leveraged by groups benefiting from a flawed status quo. Describing the process and providing meaning vocabulary for using the concepts in discussions is a pre-requisite the calm Klein describes that aids meaning conversation about problems and solutions. However, millions of people need to absorb this material – and SOON -- for that calm to take hold.
WTH
