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Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Nonfiction (2023)What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self―a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?
Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.
Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?
Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.
Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published September 12, 2023
About the author
Naomi Klein
82 books6,870 followersNaomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses; support of ecofeminism, organized labour, and leftism; and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascism and capitalism. As of 2021, she is an associate professor, and professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, co-directing a Centre for Climate Justice.
Klein first became known internationally for her alter-globalization book No Logo (1999). The Take (2004), a documentary film about Argentine workers' self-managed factories, written by her and directed by her husband Avi Lewis, further increased her profile. The Shock Doctrine (2007), a critical analysis of the history of neoliberal economics, solidified her standing as a prominent activist on the international stage and was adapted into a six-minute companion film by Alfonso Cuaron and Jonás Cuarón, as well as a feature-length documentary by Michael Winterbottom. Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) was a New York Times nonfiction bestseller and the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
In 2016, Klein was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her activism on climate justice. Klein frequently appears on global and national lists of top influential thinkers, including the 2014 Thought Leaders ranking compiled by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Prospect magazine's world thinkers 2014 poll, and Maclean's 2014 Power List. She was formerly a member of the board of directors of the climate activist group 350.org.
Klein first became known internationally for her alter-globalization book No Logo (1999). The Take (2004), a documentary film about Argentine workers' self-managed factories, written by her and directed by her husband Avi Lewis, further increased her profile. The Shock Doctrine (2007), a critical analysis of the history of neoliberal economics, solidified her standing as a prominent activist on the international stage and was adapted into a six-minute companion film by Alfonso Cuaron and Jonás Cuarón, as well as a feature-length documentary by Michael Winterbottom. Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) was a New York Times nonfiction bestseller and the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
In 2016, Klein was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her activism on climate justice. Klein frequently appears on global and national lists of top influential thinkers, including the 2014 Thought Leaders ranking compiled by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Prospect magazine's world thinkers 2014 poll, and Maclean's 2014 Power List. She was formerly a member of the board of directors of the climate activist group 350.org.
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September 27, 2023
Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be?
What a fascinating, hard-to-define book. It's a cultural critique, I guess, but quite unlike any I've read before.
Klein begins her descent into the Mirror World-- the dark side of today's culture where climate deniers, antivaxxers and QAnon devotees invent "facts" and the Internet propels them around the globe-- with the story of her own personal doppelganger. The one time feminist writer, now conspiracy theorist, Naomi Wolf.
Klein has been getting confused with Wolf online for many years now, to the point where she has received countless hate messages aimed at Wolf. What's interesting, for Klein, is that she kind of understands it. Both writers, both dark-haired women, both writing about society and culture. Wolf is a conspiracy theorist, but then you could argue that there was an underlying element of that to Klein's The Shock Doctrine.
This premise opens up the floor for an in-depth look at modern society, predominantly in the United States and Canada. The difference between the real Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf is a bit like looking in a funhouse mirror-- almost the same, yet a distorted, slightly wrong version of oneself --and Klein likens that to the way rational skepticism and activism has been morphed into wild conspiracy theories in today's world.
This, Klein explains, is why so many of us have lost friends and family down the "rabbit hole" of online radicalism in recent years, and especially during COVID. A healthy skepticism of the government and medical industry turns into belief in outlandish claims.
Because here is the inherent problem: the state and government, the laws and medical industry, are indeed flawed and we should be able to question and challenge this… but what happens when that gets distorted beyond all reason? What happens when “maybe we should question the overprescription of drugs in a for-profit industry” becomes “doctors are in collusion with the government to install tracking devices in our arms”?
The notion of the doppelganger, the other, our mirror self, comes up repeatedly throughout. Klein deconstructs various examples of the doppelganger in media, from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Operation Shylock, and likens this doubling to many aspects of life today. We each create a kind of doppelganger in our online presence-- an avatar, a brand, that is us but also not fully us at the same time. This Klein describes as:
a doppelganger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy.
She also laments a “mass unraveling of meaning”. This refers to all kinds of things like regurgitating slogans to show political alignment regardless of whether one agrees with-- or has even thought about --what it says, the right-wing appropriation of terms like "racism" and "enslavement", and the way small tweaks to the truth can result in outright falsehoods. Whoever can scream "fake news" first and loudest is right.
One area of this book I found especially interesting was one that explained to me something I did not understand until now. In the past, if someone mentioned New Age body fanatics, I thought of hippies... so left-wingers, basically. I lived in left-wing hotspot Los Angeles for close to seven years, and wellness-obsessed, holistic yoga moms who know the colour of their auras were the norm. It was very odd for me to see, especially in the wake of COVID, these women fleeing into the arms of Steve Bannon and embracing conspiracies. I had thought they were kooky, but I also thought they were solidly on the left. But here Klein explores the long history of the fascist/New Age alliance, including the Nazi Party obsession with health fads in their pursuit of a pure race.
Far from the unlikely bedfellows they first seemed to be, large parts of the modern wellness industry are proving to be all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority, and disposable people.
I guess it makes sense in an awful way.
This review is getting long, but that's because I made so many notes about it. I'll try to wrap it up now.
I'm not sure all the sections were relevant to the doppelganger idea; some worked better, and were more interesting, than others, but it was an overall really engaging read. It looks at the train wreck that certain parts of the Internet have made of modern politics and the ability to have open discussions and apply reason. It's so crazy it's almost funny at times, until you remember it isn't.
In Klein's own words: "It all would be so ridiculous— if it weren’t so serious."
May 19, 2024
I’m in awe of Naomi klein. She draws from an enormous knowledge base and pens it down for the readers benefit. The result is a masterfully crafted deep-dive into uncharted water, exploring concepts and phenomena I hadn’t thought much about, but now feel drawn towards.
February 14, 2024
One of my favorite books of the year
November 28, 2023
I kept hearing about how great this book was but I couldn't bring myself to read it. After the last few years, did I really need to know any more about how awful things are getting on the far right, and did I really want to get any of that through the lens of the strange relationship between Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf? (I am online enough that I have confused them myself AND I have seen them confused many times AND I have also seen the little rhyme to help differentiate them shared many times.) But it turns out that somehow this book was just the thing I needed to help make me feel a little bit better about the world.
I find some of the negative reviews funny. Just the same thing over and over they say. Well yes. She is taking this idea of the doppelganger, centering it on this one relationship, but then imposing it on all these other things in the world, these things that feel out of our control, these things that are about, underneath everything how we relate to each other. The doppelganger is both familiar and terrifying because of its familiarity, there is so much about what makes us human in the idea. But also this summary makes it sound like a boring book, which it really isn't. I wanted to listen to it all the time, which is exactly the opposite of what I thought would happen.
Somehow I felt more sane as I listened. A lot of things made more sense. Klein really does go for it, she dives in so deeply to the far right that she is able to find the sense that lies underneath the nonsense. This is, for me, reassuring. I admit that it's bleakly reassuring, it's not like it fixes the problem, but understanding the problem is so much better than having a problem that feels incomprehensible.
At one point, I had to take a break for a week or so because I couldn't bear to listen to Klein's chapters on her Jewish faith and heritage, Zionism, and the conflict with Palestine while we watch it all play out in front of us. But this was again because Klein was so astute, so clear, made sense of something that had felt overwhelming and impossible. That clarity made the disaster even more overwhelming for me, even more emotionally difficult to process. Although it turned out that when I started again I only had five minutes left in the section. Ah well.
The thing is, I shouldn't have really enjoyed this book. This year I have really struggled to get into anything. I haven't given a book five stars in so long I don't remember when the last time was. But this book really gave me something, it opened up a part of me, it calmed me. It made me feel in a way that most books haven't been able to do in a very long time. It is a rare and precious thing, so I will give it those five stars happily.
Klein reads the audio and is a very good and engaging narrator.
I find some of the negative reviews funny. Just the same thing over and over they say. Well yes. She is taking this idea of the doppelganger, centering it on this one relationship, but then imposing it on all these other things in the world, these things that feel out of our control, these things that are about, underneath everything how we relate to each other. The doppelganger is both familiar and terrifying because of its familiarity, there is so much about what makes us human in the idea. But also this summary makes it sound like a boring book, which it really isn't. I wanted to listen to it all the time, which is exactly the opposite of what I thought would happen.
Somehow I felt more sane as I listened. A lot of things made more sense. Klein really does go for it, she dives in so deeply to the far right that she is able to find the sense that lies underneath the nonsense. This is, for me, reassuring. I admit that it's bleakly reassuring, it's not like it fixes the problem, but understanding the problem is so much better than having a problem that feels incomprehensible.
At one point, I had to take a break for a week or so because I couldn't bear to listen to Klein's chapters on her Jewish faith and heritage, Zionism, and the conflict with Palestine while we watch it all play out in front of us. But this was again because Klein was so astute, so clear, made sense of something that had felt overwhelming and impossible. That clarity made the disaster even more overwhelming for me, even more emotionally difficult to process. Although it turned out that when I started again I only had five minutes left in the section. Ah well.
The thing is, I shouldn't have really enjoyed this book. This year I have really struggled to get into anything. I haven't given a book five stars in so long I don't remember when the last time was. But this book really gave me something, it opened up a part of me, it calmed me. It made me feel in a way that most books haven't been able to do in a very long time. It is a rare and precious thing, so I will give it those five stars happily.
Klein reads the audio and is a very good and engaging narrator.
September 15, 2023
For me, this is a difficult book to review. The author has some important, insightful and well researched observations about the behaviour of significant sections of the population that I have previously found bewildering and difficult to comprehend: conspiracy theorists, deniers of various kinds, and those that would liken minor lifestyle inconveniences with the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. However, the book felt in places like a disjointed ragbag of ideas that were loosely (sometimes very loosely) tied together by the Doppelgänger theme - a theme that often felt slightly forced, or crowbarred in to justify talking about a particular topic in the context of the book.
Given the disjoint nature of the book, I was also left unsatisfied regarding any overall conclusion. The suggestion that we should work together, rather than as individuals, to address many of the problems we are currently facing seems shallow and weak - especially compared to the depth and strength of some of the issues covered, and the detail with which they have clearly been researched.
After reading this book, I do feel like I have more insight behind what might be driving some mass behaviours that I otherwise found incomprehensible - but I don’t know where that leaves me. I certainly don’t feel any better equipped, nor more hopeful - so I feel I may have missed something.
Thank you #NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for the free review copy of #Doppelganger in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Given the disjoint nature of the book, I was also left unsatisfied regarding any overall conclusion. The suggestion that we should work together, rather than as individuals, to address many of the problems we are currently facing seems shallow and weak - especially compared to the depth and strength of some of the issues covered, and the detail with which they have clearly been researched.
After reading this book, I do feel like I have more insight behind what might be driving some mass behaviours that I otherwise found incomprehensible - but I don’t know where that leaves me. I certainly don’t feel any better equipped, nor more hopeful - so I feel I may have missed something.
Thank you #NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for the free review copy of #Doppelganger in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
July 22, 2024
1 Rule for Neo-Fascism: A Parody of Crisis and Populism:
Preamble:
--Here I was, with a mounting pile of increasingly-dense tomes on structural crises (climate/ecology/geopolitical economy) which I want to unpack/make accessible, yet somehow only finding time to stare at my notes for reviewing “chaos” (ex. “Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male”).
…Yes, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
…I tried to convince myself it was a worthy case study because of Peterson’s reach here in Canada, where some circles which I can reach consider him synonymous with “public intellectual” and “dissident” (for contrast, I associated these terms with Chomsky when I was learning to apply critical thinking to politics: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky).
…This dragged on for a year and a review finally manifested as “1 Rule for Reactionism: An Anesthesia to Chaos”, with a punchline of “Numb yourselves to the pain of others, for you can still rise above them…”, which did help me iron out a few ideas in addition to unpacking Peterson vs. Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and playing with fascism from below and fascism from above.
--Now a touch of serendipity: it turns out Naomi Klein, another of my early “public intellectual”/“dissident” influences (who has recently joined my favourite department at my local university) has emerged from her own rabbit-hole [emphases added]:
The Missing:
1) Contextualizing Klein’s readership:
--There was certainly an initial relief in reading a familiar voice (and climate/anti-capitalist activist) detail her own misadventures researching the reactionary rabbit-hole, enough for me to consider this as my favourite Klein book.
--My longstanding critique of Klein has been contradictory:
a) Her reach:
--Since the success of her 2000 No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein’s audience has expanded into the Western bubble of default liberals (with some vague Leftish sentiments, who read books… we can debate how mainstream this actually is). When you live in North America (esp. the more apolitical Canada), this is the default ideology of public education; Leftists (esp. structural critiques of capitalism) still struggle to find traction here.
--If you search for accessible critiques of “capitalism” here, Klein’s 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism often appears at the top. From the context of the target audience, this is surely a success, as they would never read and contextualize something like Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1.
b) The impossibility of full Leftist representation:
--Of course, reading reviews from comrades remind me of how those not needing Klein’s bridge (i.e. “self-respecting” oppressed groups, Leftists already reading Klein’s sources) put pressure on Klein (as one of the few bridges to more mainstream audiences). Friction can help us learn.
--But of course there is no way a single person can (or should) represent all the diverse, radical views. And of course the messaging will be diluted and framed (yes, marketed) in the context for default liberals which seems inappropriate to radicals. Ex. radicals may approach this topic by centering works like black radical W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double-consciousness” (The Souls of Black Folk), which Klein mentions briefly in Ch.14.
--This latest book may polarize this contradiction even more with its memoir format, given how these different groups relate to Klein’s context. Reviewing this contradiction just reminds me that my goal is synthesis. Those who already relate to Klein will of course love her writing style applied to personal details [emphasis added]:
2) “Conspiracy” in the Western Bubble:
--Before we continue, “What is Politics?” reminds me to be extra careful with political terms (“Left”, “Right”, “capitalism”, “socialism”, etc.). I define how I use “reactionary” (right-wing reaction to status quo crisis), “conservative” (conserving hierarchical traditions), “liberal” (cosmopolitan capitalism, current status quo), etc. in my Jordan Peterson review; I did not use “neo-fascism” in that review, which I’ll distinguish as follows:
a) Peterson: “reactionary” to status quo (cosmopolitan capitalism) crisis, with vague hand-waving regarding “suffering” and women-chaos vs. men-order. Hence, an anesthesia to chaos.
b) Steve Bannon: also “reactionary” to status quo crisis, but his right-wing nationalism is buttressed by concrete geopolitical economic/military strategy (with the historical precedence of Mussolini/Hitler), hence a new fascism (“neo-fascism”).
--“conspiracy without the theory”: conspiracies (secret plots usually by the powerful to do something bad/illegal) are normal and expected given our material conditions of concentrated private powers amidst great inequality. Global capitalism’s most significant planning are all done behind closed doors of power (capitalist class of financiers/industrialists and their lobbyists; military, etc., with all their contradictions), and the public relations for their conspiracies become our political theater. What is illegality when you write the law? However, this occurs within the logic of capitalism’s structural absurdities, which need to be carefully theorized.
--I’ll highlight how Klein unpacks reactionary “conspiracy theories” later. Let’s start with “conspiracy theories” in general. One check I find helpful is to take a step back and consider if the hype is from the echo-chamber of the Western/US bubble.
--Ex. “911 Inside Job”: possible? Of course, but how much is the emphasis on the geopolitical ties with Saudi Arabia monarchy? See Paul Jay interviewing Senator Bob Graham. How much would proving an inside job actually affect the global “War on Terror”, the endless US interventions and military bases around the world, etc.?
--Ex. “COVID-19 plandemic”: possible? Well, lab leak certainly, as scientific research is distorted by anti-social incentives (military industrial complex, patenting monopolization, cost-cutting outsourcing, publication bias, etc.). But “Why Vaccine Passports Equal Slavery Forever” sounds rather Hollywood (despite exploiting historical truths like the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) when the Global South is protesting against vaccine apartheid (i.e. Global North hoarding vaccines) because of capitalist patent monopolization (a longstanding issue with the global reach of “Big Pharma”). Even academics from liberalism have warned of contradictions promoting pandemics (ex. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance). Of course Leftists take deeper dives: Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19.
The Good:
1) Wolf’s liberal contradictions and crisis:
--In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein explores how global capitalism’s structural crises (note: from structural contradictions more than deliberately manufactured by individual elites) in the late 1960’s brought a state of shock which opportunists (“free market” economics of “Neoliberalism”) could exploit to dismantle the status quo (New Deal’s welfare state compromise).
--Note: Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy) and Hudson (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) focus on the geopolitical material conditions (materialism) behind the crises that drove even New Dealers in power (ex. Paul Volcker, who advised Nixon on the Nixon Shock 1971 and later committed the Volcker Shocks as chairman of the Federal Reserve 1979-87) to dismantle the New Deal/unleash Wall Street’s volatility to preserve the US empire, whereas “free market” economists were more of an ideological cover.
…Meanwhile, Klein’s framing focuses on the battle of ideas (idealism) where some opportunist economists (“free market” fundamentalists like Milton Friedman) took over. One constructive takeaway seems to be learning from the Right’s tactics: the Left needs to prepare ready-to-go constructive alternatives (not just deconstructive critiques) to present during opportunities. However, this requires careful analysis of the material structures/conditions of the crisis.
--With the 1960’s youth radicalism being neutralized by “Neoliberalism”, we see the first appearance of Naomi Wolf in her 1990 The Beauty Myth as part of “Third-wave Feminism”. Klein notes how Wolf’s framing was to help individualist middle-class (professional/educated/“white”) women better compete with men in liberal meritocracy, thus neglecting the ongoing intersectionality critiques (intersections of class/race/gender) by Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, etc.
…This only escalated with Wolf’s 2nd book, 1993’s Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century, a “lean in” approach to power which saw Wolf connect with the Democratic Party (Clinton/Gore).
--In 2014, Wolf stepped out-of-line of the liberal status quo by speaking against Israel’s latest violence against Gaza (“1,462 Palestinian civilians were killed that summer, compared with 6 Israeli civilians; 789 Palestinian fighters were killed, compared with 67 Israeli soldiers.”), which led to “anti-Semitism” smears in mainstream media, losing her university position and getting online threats. Later, Klein examines the mirroring of the Holocaust/Israel apartheid.
For the rest of the review, see the comment section below…
“2) A Vacuum for reactionary populism”
“3) Bannon’s embrace and Neo-fascist strategy”
“4) “Socialism or Barbarism””
Preamble:
--Here I was, with a mounting pile of increasingly-dense tomes on structural crises (climate/ecology/geopolitical economy) which I want to unpack/make accessible, yet somehow only finding time to stare at my notes for reviewing “chaos” (ex. “Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male”).
…Yes, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
…I tried to convince myself it was a worthy case study because of Peterson’s reach here in Canada, where some circles which I can reach consider him synonymous with “public intellectual” and “dissident” (for contrast, I associated these terms with Chomsky when I was learning to apply critical thinking to politics: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky).
…This dragged on for a year and a review finally manifested as “1 Rule for Reactionism: An Anesthesia to Chaos”, with a punchline of “Numb yourselves to the pain of others, for you can still rise above them…”, which did help me iron out a few ideas in addition to unpacking Peterson vs. Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and playing with fascism from below and fascism from above.
--Now a touch of serendipity: it turns out Naomi Klein, another of my early “public intellectual”/“dissident” influences (who has recently joined my favourite department at my local university) has emerged from her own rabbit-hole [emphases added]:
In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book. […] Not now—not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet.
[…] I told myself it was “research.” That if I was going to understand her [Naomi Klein’s doppelganger: Naomi Wolf] and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows with names like QAnon Anonymous and Conspirituality that unpack and deconstruct the commingling worlds of conspiracy theories, wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with Covid-19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism. This on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson, on whose shows Other Naomi had become a regular guest.
The Missing:
1) Contextualizing Klein’s readership:
--There was certainly an initial relief in reading a familiar voice (and climate/anti-capitalist activist) detail her own misadventures researching the reactionary rabbit-hole, enough for me to consider this as my favourite Klein book.
--My longstanding critique of Klein has been contradictory:
a) Her reach:
--Since the success of her 2000 No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein’s audience has expanded into the Western bubble of default liberals (with some vague Leftish sentiments, who read books… we can debate how mainstream this actually is). When you live in North America (esp. the more apolitical Canada), this is the default ideology of public education; Leftists (esp. structural critiques of capitalism) still struggle to find traction here.
--If you search for accessible critiques of “capitalism” here, Klein’s 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism often appears at the top. From the context of the target audience, this is surely a success, as they would never read and contextualize something like Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1.
b) The impossibility of full Leftist representation:
--Of course, reading reviews from comrades remind me of how those not needing Klein’s bridge (i.e. “self-respecting” oppressed groups, Leftists already reading Klein’s sources) put pressure on Klein (as one of the few bridges to more mainstream audiences). Friction can help us learn.
--But of course there is no way a single person can (or should) represent all the diverse, radical views. And of course the messaging will be diluted and framed (yes, marketed) in the context for default liberals which seems inappropriate to radicals. Ex. radicals may approach this topic by centering works like black radical W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double-consciousness” (The Souls of Black Folk), which Klein mentions briefly in Ch.14.
--This latest book may polarize this contradiction even more with its memoir format, given how these different groups relate to Klein’s context. Reviewing this contradiction just reminds me that my goal is synthesis. Those who already relate to Klein will of course love her writing style applied to personal details [emphasis added]:
What made it worse for me was that, with [Naomi] Wolf’s new focus on abuses of corporate and political power during states of emergency, something she touched on only briefly in The End of America, I felt like I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, one with all facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And while I was not yet confused with my doppelganger all that often, I knew that some people would credit me with Wolf’s theories. It was an out-of-body feeling. I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-wear arrest, and a line in The Guardian jumped out at me: “Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
“What the actual fuck?” he asked.
2) “Conspiracy” in the Western Bubble:
--Before we continue, “What is Politics?” reminds me to be extra careful with political terms (“Left”, “Right”, “capitalism”, “socialism”, etc.). I define how I use “reactionary” (right-wing reaction to status quo crisis), “conservative” (conserving hierarchical traditions), “liberal” (cosmopolitan capitalism, current status quo), etc. in my Jordan Peterson review; I did not use “neo-fascism” in that review, which I’ll distinguish as follows:
a) Peterson: “reactionary” to status quo (cosmopolitan capitalism) crisis, with vague hand-waving regarding “suffering” and women-chaos vs. men-order. Hence, an anesthesia to chaos.
b) Steve Bannon: also “reactionary” to status quo crisis, but his right-wing nationalism is buttressed by concrete geopolitical economic/military strategy (with the historical precedence of Mussolini/Hitler), hence a new fascism (“neo-fascism”).
--“conspiracy without the theory”: conspiracies (secret plots usually by the powerful to do something bad/illegal) are normal and expected given our material conditions of concentrated private powers amidst great inequality. Global capitalism’s most significant planning are all done behind closed doors of power (capitalist class of financiers/industrialists and their lobbyists; military, etc., with all their contradictions), and the public relations for their conspiracies become our political theater. What is illegality when you write the law? However, this occurs within the logic of capitalism’s structural absurdities, which need to be carefully theorized.
--I’ll highlight how Klein unpacks reactionary “conspiracy theories” later. Let’s start with “conspiracy theories” in general. One check I find helpful is to take a step back and consider if the hype is from the echo-chamber of the Western/US bubble.
[…] but I laughed at America's fear--Ex. “JFK assassination conspiracy theories”: is a conspiracy possible here? Of course, but does this deserve so much attention where, if proven, will lead to some paradigm shift? I think this is mostly for those still stuck in the US political theatre, which does not represent the global community despite its oversized influence. JFK’s administration featured technocrats like Robert McNamara, who later escalated the genocidal war on Vietnam under LBJ (which included an actual false-flag conspiracy, the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”) and after became president of the World Bank to derail Global South decolonization/industrialization and get them to export cash crops and starve.
Of a New World Order controllin' the hemisphere
'Cause my people been livin' that for the past 500 years
[-Immortal Technique (R.A. the Rugged Man “Who Do We Trust?”)]
--Ex. “911 Inside Job”: possible? Of course, but how much is the emphasis on the geopolitical ties with Saudi Arabia monarchy? See Paul Jay interviewing Senator Bob Graham. How much would proving an inside job actually affect the global “War on Terror”, the endless US interventions and military bases around the world, etc.?
--Ex. “COVID-19 plandemic”: possible? Well, lab leak certainly, as scientific research is distorted by anti-social incentives (military industrial complex, patenting monopolization, cost-cutting outsourcing, publication bias, etc.). But “Why Vaccine Passports Equal Slavery Forever” sounds rather Hollywood (despite exploiting historical truths like the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) when the Global South is protesting against vaccine apartheid (i.e. Global North hoarding vaccines) because of capitalist patent monopolization (a longstanding issue with the global reach of “Big Pharma”). Even academics from liberalism have warned of contradictions promoting pandemics (ex. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance). Of course Leftists take deeper dives: Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19.
The Good:
1) Wolf’s liberal contradictions and crisis:
--In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein explores how global capitalism’s structural crises (note: from structural contradictions more than deliberately manufactured by individual elites) in the late 1960’s brought a state of shock which opportunists (“free market” economics of “Neoliberalism”) could exploit to dismantle the status quo (New Deal’s welfare state compromise).
--Note: Varoufakis (The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy) and Hudson (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance) focus on the geopolitical material conditions (materialism) behind the crises that drove even New Dealers in power (ex. Paul Volcker, who advised Nixon on the Nixon Shock 1971 and later committed the Volcker Shocks as chairman of the Federal Reserve 1979-87) to dismantle the New Deal/unleash Wall Street’s volatility to preserve the US empire, whereas “free market” economists were more of an ideological cover.
…Meanwhile, Klein’s framing focuses on the battle of ideas (idealism) where some opportunist economists (“free market” fundamentalists like Milton Friedman) took over. One constructive takeaway seems to be learning from the Right’s tactics: the Left needs to prepare ready-to-go constructive alternatives (not just deconstructive critiques) to present during opportunities. However, this requires careful analysis of the material structures/conditions of the crisis.
--With the 1960’s youth radicalism being neutralized by “Neoliberalism”, we see the first appearance of Naomi Wolf in her 1990 The Beauty Myth as part of “Third-wave Feminism”. Klein notes how Wolf’s framing was to help individualist middle-class (professional/educated/“white”) women better compete with men in liberal meritocracy, thus neglecting the ongoing intersectionality critiques (intersections of class/race/gender) by Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, etc.
…This only escalated with Wolf’s 2nd book, 1993’s Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century, a “lean in” approach to power which saw Wolf connect with the Democratic Party (Clinton/Gore).
--In 2014, Wolf stepped out-of-line of the liberal status quo by speaking against Israel’s latest violence against Gaza (“1,462 Palestinian civilians were killed that summer, compared with 6 Israeli civilians; 789 Palestinian fighters were killed, compared with 67 Israeli soldiers.”), which led to “anti-Semitism” smears in mainstream media, losing her university position and getting online threats. Later, Klein examines the mirroring of the Holocaust/Israel apartheid.
For the rest of the review, see the comment section below…
“2) A Vacuum for reactionary populism”
“3) Bannon’s embrace and Neo-fascist strategy”
“4) “Socialism or Barbarism””
August 31, 2023
I am shocked that anyone actually published this book. How is a person with a completely different name to Ms Klien her doppelganger exactly?
Ironically I think I first heard about Klein by confusing her with the superior author Naomi Prins. Klein's books used to be okay... Her book on disaster capitalism was very informative but apparently when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry she just can't or won't see the big picture. The delusion she is harboring while defending people like Anthony Fauci - the very faces of extractive capital and the pharmaceutical industry under the guise of government - are the exact problems she pretends she is identifying which she is now propping up.
I'm sure she means well, but in reality she is confusing her own desire to believe in the validity of a vaccine that was not properly tested and does not work by any metric we would have used to term something an effective vaccine, with the reality around the completely interconnected roles of Fauci and big pharma and a profit scheme that continues to pay out for big business while providing questionable benefits to citizens. Fauci in reality was one of the biggest profiteers off the pandemic and spreaders of vaccine disinformation - consistently repeating the lie that it stopped the spread of the disease and giving false security to many people who behaved according to his lies and made the people around them very ill. He spread misinformation about the efficacy of cloth masks and disinformation about the origin of the virus to cover his own ass on the funding of his gain of function research project that more than likely caused the pandemic leak in Wuhan. If she really cared about public health she would not defend the people involved in these lies. It's tragic that she doesn't see that what she's actually doing is merely protecting power that has behaved unconscionably and to the detriment of the world.
Even today a billion-dollar contract was signed for a new vaccine on the same day that the CDC announced that the new strain of Covid is more likely to infect those who have been vaccinated. Yikes. This book will not age well. She really should have waited before she rolled out her poorly conceptualized "conspiracy theory" that everyone who disagreed with her worldview is wrong. I have not seen much on Wolf and I don't have any particular concern around what issues she is right or wrong on, but the promotions I've seen of Klien's book and her own proclamations for what is true and why she made it are deeply disturbing. We are going to end up in a very dangerous place when people like Klein continue to ignore science while claiming they "believe science" as though it is some kind of religious dogma that is indisputable, not a series of credentialed scientists and doctors who have conflicting opinions and studies and data points in an environment where one side is being silenced and censored to the detriment of the American people.
The video I watched promoting her book - which could not have been more of a dystopian AI modeled video straight out of science fiction - literally has videos of the JFK assassination being used to convey the idea that some people don't "believe in reality", when in REALITY Kennedy's assassination is the best case to look at to understand America's authoritarian impulse to lie about what it represents and deny truth about its history to its people. There could not be more well-documented resources to understand the Kennedy assassination. Many of the people slandered as "conspiracy theorists" were credentialed principled legal experts and journalists who worked with thousands of incredibly dedicated researchers who have read through hundreds of thousands of documents for no pay in the hopes of eventually bringing the truth and justice to the American people.
The work they've done has put together a story far more plausible and based in fact than the delusions of the Warren Commission that repeated a completely unsourced declaration of one man's guilt by the FBI in the hours after the assassination with absolutely no investigation completed and ignoring the testimony of hundreds of witnesses and whistleblowers testimony to the contrary. And all of those factual interviews and witnesses and even the coverup identified by the House Select Committee on Assassinations that have completely discredited the only official narrative that has ever been conveyed to Americans should tell her that this is not the example to use when trying to lay down your take on what is "reality".
For someone who thinks they are "seeing through" a mirror... It might do her some good to actually look into one and realize she is propping up some very dangerous lies in the name of fighting disinformation. It's a shame to see. And you have to hope the people reading these books have actually done their homework enough to understand what the debates are and read her proclamations on disinformation with the skepticism they deserve - For some reason I have a feeling we will not be that lucky. The sooner people realize that this fight is not about a ruling elite telling the truth and a world of delusion that is getting in the way, but rather a slipping Empire's desperate grasp to control a narrative in order to protect themselves from accountability and consequences based on truths that they are desperate to cover up the better off we will all be. Sad to see someone who could have contributed to that fight on the wrong side of history.
Ironically I think I first heard about Klein by confusing her with the superior author Naomi Prins. Klein's books used to be okay... Her book on disaster capitalism was very informative but apparently when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry she just can't or won't see the big picture. The delusion she is harboring while defending people like Anthony Fauci - the very faces of extractive capital and the pharmaceutical industry under the guise of government - are the exact problems she pretends she is identifying which she is now propping up.
I'm sure she means well, but in reality she is confusing her own desire to believe in the validity of a vaccine that was not properly tested and does not work by any metric we would have used to term something an effective vaccine, with the reality around the completely interconnected roles of Fauci and big pharma and a profit scheme that continues to pay out for big business while providing questionable benefits to citizens. Fauci in reality was one of the biggest profiteers off the pandemic and spreaders of vaccine disinformation - consistently repeating the lie that it stopped the spread of the disease and giving false security to many people who behaved according to his lies and made the people around them very ill. He spread misinformation about the efficacy of cloth masks and disinformation about the origin of the virus to cover his own ass on the funding of his gain of function research project that more than likely caused the pandemic leak in Wuhan. If she really cared about public health she would not defend the people involved in these lies. It's tragic that she doesn't see that what she's actually doing is merely protecting power that has behaved unconscionably and to the detriment of the world.
Even today a billion-dollar contract was signed for a new vaccine on the same day that the CDC announced that the new strain of Covid is more likely to infect those who have been vaccinated. Yikes. This book will not age well. She really should have waited before she rolled out her poorly conceptualized "conspiracy theory" that everyone who disagreed with her worldview is wrong. I have not seen much on Wolf and I don't have any particular concern around what issues she is right or wrong on, but the promotions I've seen of Klien's book and her own proclamations for what is true and why she made it are deeply disturbing. We are going to end up in a very dangerous place when people like Klein continue to ignore science while claiming they "believe science" as though it is some kind of religious dogma that is indisputable, not a series of credentialed scientists and doctors who have conflicting opinions and studies and data points in an environment where one side is being silenced and censored to the detriment of the American people.
The video I watched promoting her book - which could not have been more of a dystopian AI modeled video straight out of science fiction - literally has videos of the JFK assassination being used to convey the idea that some people don't "believe in reality", when in REALITY Kennedy's assassination is the best case to look at to understand America's authoritarian impulse to lie about what it represents and deny truth about its history to its people. There could not be more well-documented resources to understand the Kennedy assassination. Many of the people slandered as "conspiracy theorists" were credentialed principled legal experts and journalists who worked with thousands of incredibly dedicated researchers who have read through hundreds of thousands of documents for no pay in the hopes of eventually bringing the truth and justice to the American people.
The work they've done has put together a story far more plausible and based in fact than the delusions of the Warren Commission that repeated a completely unsourced declaration of one man's guilt by the FBI in the hours after the assassination with absolutely no investigation completed and ignoring the testimony of hundreds of witnesses and whistleblowers testimony to the contrary. And all of those factual interviews and witnesses and even the coverup identified by the House Select Committee on Assassinations that have completely discredited the only official narrative that has ever been conveyed to Americans should tell her that this is not the example to use when trying to lay down your take on what is "reality".
For someone who thinks they are "seeing through" a mirror... It might do her some good to actually look into one and realize she is propping up some very dangerous lies in the name of fighting disinformation. It's a shame to see. And you have to hope the people reading these books have actually done their homework enough to understand what the debates are and read her proclamations on disinformation with the skepticism they deserve - For some reason I have a feeling we will not be that lucky. The sooner people realize that this fight is not about a ruling elite telling the truth and a world of delusion that is getting in the way, but rather a slipping Empire's desperate grasp to control a narrative in order to protect themselves from accountability and consequences based on truths that they are desperate to cover up the better off we will all be. Sad to see someone who could have contributed to that fight on the wrong side of history.
October 2, 2023
This is one of the best, strangest and hardest to define books I've read in recent memory.
Doppelganger is the latest from Naomi Klein author of the Shock Doctrine, No Logo and This Changes Everything.
Compared to her previous works it's a much more personal discussion of her own sense of dread hunting a political shadow twin as they descend into the realms of quackery and grifting buffoonery. But it also encompasses a cultural analysis of the last 3 years and a greater over-all look at how power structures in general work and how the nature of those systems create doubling cultures.
Worlds built upon shadow worlds like sedimentary layers in a rock.
Naomi takes you into the dizzying mirror-land of her own Doppelganger, a former feminist turned rabid anti-vaxxer.
Naomi is so often confused for her twin, that she even gets consistent hate mail from people believing they are one and the same. The effect feels like a combination of political nightmare, emotional turmoil, social media's most toxic elements and trauma combining to create an intense sense of dissociation.
The Doppelganger is a feeling that you're seeing somebody else living your life, twisting it and corrupting it. The name comes from a mythological creature that's found in literally hundreds of cultures that can either take your place, represent your own hubris and comeuppance or even embody a sense of self-loathing.
Or all of the above.
Much like the fairy Changelings, the Doppelganger can also be a figure that's deeply seated in
discrimination of people with mental illness or autism or disabilities. "The evil twin" was a convenient a way to explain children that were neurodivergent and to justify hatred and ostracization of people with behavioural differences. It was easier to say "my loved one was replaced by an evil duplicate" rather than face the reality that your child was different.
And a lot of discrimination of autism and disabilities and conspiracy theories surrounding mental illness in the modern era are still deeply seated in this ancient and superstitious form of demonisation.
By invoking the myth of the Doppelganger to define modern culture, Klein perfectly describes the almost otherworldly sense of horror of seeing people you know get captured in the online cult factory that is social media. Where more and more professional outrage merchants and grifter parasites latch onto political movements like zebra mussels and capsize important issues and discussions with frenzied conspiracies and bloated semantic pollution.
But I think this discussion of the Doppelganger is even more useful in this book to describe a person's personal struggles with their own sense of identity in the face of a world where identity itself has become a commodity.
Where every person is being 'twinned' by the design of social media, seeing their identity as potential brands and trying to control the value of those brands. Where people have become so entangled in media, it's now become a part of them like a new growth, or tumor, which was predicted in David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Where being a teenager online is now a dizzying combination of growing up and trying to find your place in the world, while at the same time being your own PR and HR department trying to negotiate for every mistake you make.
A culture where billionaires demand you pay them money to confirm you exist, so you can create free content on their social media platforms. Making a sense of self into a luxury.
This particular brand of hell was predicted by the late anime filmmaker Satoshi Kon and his films Perfect Blue (which deals with seeing your own identity/celebrity become a dangerous Doppelganger) and Paprika (where technology allows a woman to live as her own artistic expression and where corporations move towards the commodification of dreams and internal psyche). A large part of the isolation of modern identity also was predicted in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's horror film PULSE where the rise and overvalued state of online identity becomes like a tomb, where people cut themselves off from the real world and exist only through representation so much, they become living ghosts.
There's also the continuing rippling effect covid has had on identity (both online and off).
For a lot of wealthy people covid was a disturbing time stuck in their large houses and large apartments when they had to order food.
It was a period where podcasters and comedians wanted to have 'debates' about the value of science and vaccination while not knowing the difference between adverse effects and side effects. Where people who did not know the difference between aerosols and gases told everybody that masks don't work. Which is a lot like that one episode of Friends where Joey claims to be fluent in French while being unable to say anything but "Loop-de-boop!".
For these people covid was a joke. And discussing it was a hobby. But while these entitled people sat around debating how to stop the plague? Many workers, disabled people and their families were fed to the plague.
The poor, the disabled, the front-line workers were shoved into the SARS equivalent of a Wicker Man.
A mass ritual sacrifice that people felt 'must happen' so the culture can return to a sense of normalcy. But like the actual Wicker Man, that sacrifice was a symbolic gesture. So many people who lost loved ones for 'the greater good' have come to realise those sacrifices were publicity stunts. Promotional ads.
This created its own mirror-land where one half of the culture saw covid as not a big deal, because they were protected, insulated, while the other half has been cut to pieces, enraged, decimated and are looking for one outlet or another to vent their anger.
Being disabled I can tell you there is a massive sense of betrayal in my community towards every single political party, not just due to how the disabled have been abandoned by everybody (and even justified being put on 'no revive' lists) during covid but who abandoned them.
I know many people in my community who seethe about discussions of possible mass slaughter of minority groups and the potential rise of fascism, when in their eyes, that mass slaughter and that rise has already happened.
Three years running. In fact.
Those death tolls aren't a possible reality, they are a significant reality that have already effected millions of people. That didn't need to happen. And many of the people who claim to want to fight back against that kind of systematic decimation of the underprivileged on both the right and the left, have already proven they will do absolutely nothing when it arrives.
Because it arrived and they did nothing.
If anything, they cheered it on from the sidelines.
Klein herself notes how she had discussions with people who once voted NPD (the more left-wing party in Canadian politics) who openly expressed how disabled people and people who are immunocompromised (like myself) should die.
This opinion wasn't rare, if anything it was mainstream. All over podcasts and social media. Radio personalities went on-air to demand that people like me should step into the strike zone and take one for the team.
And the disabled and the immunocompromised and the poor did die. They did sacrifice. They were culled. And they continue to die to this day.
How many millions are gone? And to what end?
Did all of those sacrifices bring a close to Covid? No. Did they bring back everybody's normal life? No. Did they bring about a great herd immunity? No. Did they save anybody's small business? No. Did they lower the price of food or make housing more affordable? No.
All for nothing.
Meanwhile the professional outrage merchants, the podcaster class, the protected and spoiled social media celebrities fiddled, and mastur-debated and dismissed our deaths with casual, uncaring and unimpressed hand waves.
"Let the poor and disabled fall. We have bigger political problems like cancel culture and bathroom discussions and endless, meandering conversations about JK Rowling's hot-takes and whether Martin Scorsese should like Marvel superheroes."
It is no wonder that such a current cultural divide has given rise to so much anger. And there are so many people looking to take advantage of it.
There are three horsemen of the personal apocalypse: The Guru, The Conspiracy Addict and the Self-Styled Truth-Seeker. And all of them have been hungrily feeding off the rage of the victims of covid.
People not looking to fix any social ill, but looking to inflame hatred for their own benefit. Validating people's fears and insecurities and anger when nobody else will. Listening to their feelings that nobody wants to hear. Because trauma burns bridges and isolates. And just like with disaster capitalism, what is personally devastating for some is always opportunity for others.
They see broken lives excluded and alone as a resource to be exploited.
An animal that is abused enough will learn to fear the whole world and then along comes the huckster saying the whole world is actually out to get them. And like *that* the job is already done. The grifter just needs to point them in the right direction to funnel their anger and rage for the grifter's own profit.
Bingo-bango: Instant cult.
Cults say: "Everybody outside the in-group is bad and accepting them is treason". And then people who internalise that message and spread it begin to wonder why they start feeling even more excluded from their families and society.
So they run to the in-group. Because it's all they have left.
That's not coincidence. It's social engineering. It's by design.
Certain figures on social media want you tribal, they want you separated and afraid. They'll get people repeating angry hot takes about women and LGBT that will distance friends and loved ones from those people. And then get those people to blame their loved ones for their own isolation.
This is why I call it a cult machine. Because a cult will use the exact same type of social pressure to exploit and prey on people. It isolates you and then offers you a kind hand and then convinces you that kind hand is the only hand that matters.
Abusive people follow the exact same type of behaviour.
And so we're seeing the rise of the new age conspiracy guru. Not theorists, not anymore, because they don't really have theories. You see, theories can be disproved. That's why we call them a THEORY. Conspiracy gurus can never be disproved. They have tangential connections and vague accusations to justify every contradiction in their beliefs, every fault in their ideals, every mistake in their reporting. They have conjecture to hand-wave away all their wrong-doing while painting their enemies as ever-growing impossible armies of all-powerful shadows.
And this is all just a part of our Doppelganger culture. We have met the enemy and it is us.
The war on terror is over and the terror has won.
After I finished reading this book, I naturally wanted to check out how the conspiracy factory has responded to Klein's work.
It should be noted that the harshest criticisms I've found regarding this book come from discussions by people who clearly didn't read it at all.
They spent the majority of their critique talking about Klein being okay with big pharma when she openly criticises these companies in the first half of the book. She even criticises the desire to turn every discussion of vaccines and the origins of the covid virus into a binary discussion of "if you have any doubts you must be in bed with Steve Bannon".
But a lot of the people that 'just want to ask questions' don't want anybody asking questions about them or their ideas. How convenient.
They have completely embraced their own reflexive, reactionary argument where any challenge to their beliefs and bias (moderate or otherwise) becomes a wholesale endorsement of the Illuminati and Satanism and any other wild accusation they can whip out of their ass.
And this reflects Klein's own criticism of this kind of weird Doppelganger culture where online outrage merchants appropriate arguments and discussions on important topics, omit a large part of the context of those discussions and then twist them to justify bizarre accusations and their own mirror world logic.
Usually at the expense of the real victims.
And at the very whiff of dissent the Doppelganger culture has raced online to prove Klein one hundred percent correct.
10/10
Doppelganger is the latest from Naomi Klein author of the Shock Doctrine, No Logo and This Changes Everything.
Compared to her previous works it's a much more personal discussion of her own sense of dread hunting a political shadow twin as they descend into the realms of quackery and grifting buffoonery. But it also encompasses a cultural analysis of the last 3 years and a greater over-all look at how power structures in general work and how the nature of those systems create doubling cultures.
Worlds built upon shadow worlds like sedimentary layers in a rock.
Naomi takes you into the dizzying mirror-land of her own Doppelganger, a former feminist turned rabid anti-vaxxer.
Naomi is so often confused for her twin, that she even gets consistent hate mail from people believing they are one and the same. The effect feels like a combination of political nightmare, emotional turmoil, social media's most toxic elements and trauma combining to create an intense sense of dissociation.
The Doppelganger is a feeling that you're seeing somebody else living your life, twisting it and corrupting it. The name comes from a mythological creature that's found in literally hundreds of cultures that can either take your place, represent your own hubris and comeuppance or even embody a sense of self-loathing.
Or all of the above.
Much like the fairy Changelings, the Doppelganger can also be a figure that's deeply seated in
discrimination of people with mental illness or autism or disabilities. "The evil twin" was a convenient a way to explain children that were neurodivergent and to justify hatred and ostracization of people with behavioural differences. It was easier to say "my loved one was replaced by an evil duplicate" rather than face the reality that your child was different.
And a lot of discrimination of autism and disabilities and conspiracy theories surrounding mental illness in the modern era are still deeply seated in this ancient and superstitious form of demonisation.
By invoking the myth of the Doppelganger to define modern culture, Klein perfectly describes the almost otherworldly sense of horror of seeing people you know get captured in the online cult factory that is social media. Where more and more professional outrage merchants and grifter parasites latch onto political movements like zebra mussels and capsize important issues and discussions with frenzied conspiracies and bloated semantic pollution.
But I think this discussion of the Doppelganger is even more useful in this book to describe a person's personal struggles with their own sense of identity in the face of a world where identity itself has become a commodity.
Where every person is being 'twinned' by the design of social media, seeing their identity as potential brands and trying to control the value of those brands. Where people have become so entangled in media, it's now become a part of them like a new growth, or tumor, which was predicted in David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Where being a teenager online is now a dizzying combination of growing up and trying to find your place in the world, while at the same time being your own PR and HR department trying to negotiate for every mistake you make.
A culture where billionaires demand you pay them money to confirm you exist, so you can create free content on their social media platforms. Making a sense of self into a luxury.
This particular brand of hell was predicted by the late anime filmmaker Satoshi Kon and his films Perfect Blue (which deals with seeing your own identity/celebrity become a dangerous Doppelganger) and Paprika (where technology allows a woman to live as her own artistic expression and where corporations move towards the commodification of dreams and internal psyche). A large part of the isolation of modern identity also was predicted in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's horror film PULSE where the rise and overvalued state of online identity becomes like a tomb, where people cut themselves off from the real world and exist only through representation so much, they become living ghosts.
There's also the continuing rippling effect covid has had on identity (both online and off).
For a lot of wealthy people covid was a disturbing time stuck in their large houses and large apartments when they had to order food.
It was a period where podcasters and comedians wanted to have 'debates' about the value of science and vaccination while not knowing the difference between adverse effects and side effects. Where people who did not know the difference between aerosols and gases told everybody that masks don't work. Which is a lot like that one episode of Friends where Joey claims to be fluent in French while being unable to say anything but "Loop-de-boop!".
For these people covid was a joke. And discussing it was a hobby. But while these entitled people sat around debating how to stop the plague? Many workers, disabled people and their families were fed to the plague.
The poor, the disabled, the front-line workers were shoved into the SARS equivalent of a Wicker Man.
A mass ritual sacrifice that people felt 'must happen' so the culture can return to a sense of normalcy. But like the actual Wicker Man, that sacrifice was a symbolic gesture. So many people who lost loved ones for 'the greater good' have come to realise those sacrifices were publicity stunts. Promotional ads.
This created its own mirror-land where one half of the culture saw covid as not a big deal, because they were protected, insulated, while the other half has been cut to pieces, enraged, decimated and are looking for one outlet or another to vent their anger.
Being disabled I can tell you there is a massive sense of betrayal in my community towards every single political party, not just due to how the disabled have been abandoned by everybody (and even justified being put on 'no revive' lists) during covid but who abandoned them.
I know many people in my community who seethe about discussions of possible mass slaughter of minority groups and the potential rise of fascism, when in their eyes, that mass slaughter and that rise has already happened.
Three years running. In fact.
Those death tolls aren't a possible reality, they are a significant reality that have already effected millions of people. That didn't need to happen. And many of the people who claim to want to fight back against that kind of systematic decimation of the underprivileged on both the right and the left, have already proven they will do absolutely nothing when it arrives.
Because it arrived and they did nothing.
If anything, they cheered it on from the sidelines.
Klein herself notes how she had discussions with people who once voted NPD (the more left-wing party in Canadian politics) who openly expressed how disabled people and people who are immunocompromised (like myself) should die.
This opinion wasn't rare, if anything it was mainstream. All over podcasts and social media. Radio personalities went on-air to demand that people like me should step into the strike zone and take one for the team.
And the disabled and the immunocompromised and the poor did die. They did sacrifice. They were culled. And they continue to die to this day.
How many millions are gone? And to what end?
Did all of those sacrifices bring a close to Covid? No. Did they bring back everybody's normal life? No. Did they bring about a great herd immunity? No. Did they save anybody's small business? No. Did they lower the price of food or make housing more affordable? No.
All for nothing.
Meanwhile the professional outrage merchants, the podcaster class, the protected and spoiled social media celebrities fiddled, and mastur-debated and dismissed our deaths with casual, uncaring and unimpressed hand waves.
"Let the poor and disabled fall. We have bigger political problems like cancel culture and bathroom discussions and endless, meandering conversations about JK Rowling's hot-takes and whether Martin Scorsese should like Marvel superheroes."
It is no wonder that such a current cultural divide has given rise to so much anger. And there are so many people looking to take advantage of it.
There are three horsemen of the personal apocalypse: The Guru, The Conspiracy Addict and the Self-Styled Truth-Seeker. And all of them have been hungrily feeding off the rage of the victims of covid.
People not looking to fix any social ill, but looking to inflame hatred for their own benefit. Validating people's fears and insecurities and anger when nobody else will. Listening to their feelings that nobody wants to hear. Because trauma burns bridges and isolates. And just like with disaster capitalism, what is personally devastating for some is always opportunity for others.
They see broken lives excluded and alone as a resource to be exploited.
An animal that is abused enough will learn to fear the whole world and then along comes the huckster saying the whole world is actually out to get them. And like *that* the job is already done. The grifter just needs to point them in the right direction to funnel their anger and rage for the grifter's own profit.
Bingo-bango: Instant cult.
Cults say: "Everybody outside the in-group is bad and accepting them is treason". And then people who internalise that message and spread it begin to wonder why they start feeling even more excluded from their families and society.
So they run to the in-group. Because it's all they have left.
That's not coincidence. It's social engineering. It's by design.
Certain figures on social media want you tribal, they want you separated and afraid. They'll get people repeating angry hot takes about women and LGBT that will distance friends and loved ones from those people. And then get those people to blame their loved ones for their own isolation.
This is why I call it a cult machine. Because a cult will use the exact same type of social pressure to exploit and prey on people. It isolates you and then offers you a kind hand and then convinces you that kind hand is the only hand that matters.
Abusive people follow the exact same type of behaviour.
And so we're seeing the rise of the new age conspiracy guru. Not theorists, not anymore, because they don't really have theories. You see, theories can be disproved. That's why we call them a THEORY. Conspiracy gurus can never be disproved. They have tangential connections and vague accusations to justify every contradiction in their beliefs, every fault in their ideals, every mistake in their reporting. They have conjecture to hand-wave away all their wrong-doing while painting their enemies as ever-growing impossible armies of all-powerful shadows.
And this is all just a part of our Doppelganger culture. We have met the enemy and it is us.
The war on terror is over and the terror has won.
After I finished reading this book, I naturally wanted to check out how the conspiracy factory has responded to Klein's work.
It should be noted that the harshest criticisms I've found regarding this book come from discussions by people who clearly didn't read it at all.
They spent the majority of their critique talking about Klein being okay with big pharma when she openly criticises these companies in the first half of the book. She even criticises the desire to turn every discussion of vaccines and the origins of the covid virus into a binary discussion of "if you have any doubts you must be in bed with Steve Bannon".
But a lot of the people that 'just want to ask questions' don't want anybody asking questions about them or their ideas. How convenient.
They have completely embraced their own reflexive, reactionary argument where any challenge to their beliefs and bias (moderate or otherwise) becomes a wholesale endorsement of the Illuminati and Satanism and any other wild accusation they can whip out of their ass.
And this reflects Klein's own criticism of this kind of weird Doppelganger culture where online outrage merchants appropriate arguments and discussions on important topics, omit a large part of the context of those discussions and then twist them to justify bizarre accusations and their own mirror world logic.
Usually at the expense of the real victims.
And at the very whiff of dissent the Doppelganger culture has raced online to prove Klein one hundred percent correct.
10/10
May 6, 2024
This book was quite chaotic tbh. I agreed with Naomi Klein on a lot of her leftist politics and appreciate her critical thinking, though the organization of this book was a mess. To me, Doppelganger felt like a bunch of disjointed musings about politics, meandering psychology takes, and reflections about COVID-19 thrown together into a book. She bases this book on how she is often mistaken for Naomi Wolf, a writer who’s also a white Jewish woman, though Wolf has leaned into right wing conspiracy theories and Klein has stayed on the political left. Unfortunately, the observations about Wolf didn’t seem like a strong enough logical or emotional foundation – sometimes it felt like an analysis of Wolf, sometimes it felt like an exploration of right wing beliefs in general, but neither avenue impressed me too much.
Three stars because even though the structure of this book was mid to me, Klein did raise some great points/experiences, like her critique of Zionism and her experience of getting the message from a publisher that they wanted to publish women’s stories about their eating disorders/bodies but not women’s takes on political issues. I think I prefer Klein’s other work more.
Three stars because even though the structure of this book was mid to me, Klein did raise some great points/experiences, like her critique of Zionism and her experience of getting the message from a publisher that they wanted to publish women’s stories about their eating disorders/bodies but not women’s takes on political issues. I think I prefer Klein’s other work more.
April 26, 2024
This should be required reading. Too many good points to try and summarize in a review. All I'll say is that I really appreciated her rigorous attention to detail and facts, blended with her personal examination and willingness to call out herself to showcase how we might move forward and change as a collective.
Read
December 30, 2023Fascinating. Naomi Klein starts from the point of her frequent confusion with Naomi Wolf (remember: Klein fine, Wolf oof) and spins it out brilliantly into a discussion of our through-the-looking-glass politics where words and facts can be Humpty Dumptied however people like, we double ourselves and mirror our enemies. (Or, rather, people who should not be our enemies because the binary is dangerous.) Very readable, very thoughtful, seriouly researched, and makes a lot of excellent points both about the broad sweep of where we are now, and the specifics of what we the individual can do. (We can't solve the climate crisis individually, but we can combine. And we can deal with our own relationship with social media rather than letting it define us.
October 11, 2023
Things were going so well. Klein gave me a smart analysis of post-truth America (and to some extent Canada.) She connected some things and addressed the failure of the Left and Center to honor the real (and justifiable) fears of technology (especially the cooptation and commodification of our identities), the unimaginable profits that drug companies made from Covid, and many other things. That failure left a vacuum that people like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, hundreds of YouTube, Insta, X, and TikTok influencers, and Klein's doppelganger herself the sad sack lunatic Naomi Wolf had the opportunity to fill, and boy did they seize that opportunity. As recently as yesterday I was singing its praises. And then we got where it was always going -- Capitalism is the real villain, and Zionism, and the Patriarchy. Sigh. My disappointment with this is even greater than it was with the last Matthew Desmond book, Poverty By America.
I don't want to get into a rant here, but I am going to say two things. Capitalism is flawed, it leads to all sorts of bad ends. but it is not "failing us on every front that matters" as Klein says. I teach in a graduate program with a lot of foreign students, many of whom come from countries that are not technically capitalist nations. Many come from countries in Europe that are Socialist or Socialist adjacent. These students are always bright, often brilliant, and generally committed to making the world better and they all want to come here for a reason. Capitalism is not a zero-sum game, the bad things it brings do not obviate the good and great things it brings. The second thing is that Zionism is also flawed, the Palestinian people suffer as a result of certain elements of Zionism, but Zionism can be redefined. Like Capitalism, Zionism has led to things bad and good, but none of those obviate the need for a Jewish homeland. Just because we are paranoid does not mean they're not trying to kill us. The support of BDS from a Jew is sheer self-loathing.
Finally, Klein's choice to bring all of the terrible things happening in post-truth America together as an attack on Capitalism ends up sounding like a nonsensical illogical conspiracy theory. The student surpasses her doppelganger. Well, doesn't surpass her, but she joins her.
The first 60% of this is really good. Then it plummets into a lefty conspiracy theory intended to dent a righty conspiracy theory. A 3.5. I am going to go with a 4-star, but I may end up going to a 3-star. (ETA -- time healed me. Time made me angrier about Klein's missed opportunity here. 3 stars it is.)
I don't want to get into a rant here, but I am going to say two things. Capitalism is flawed, it leads to all sorts of bad ends. but it is not "failing us on every front that matters" as Klein says. I teach in a graduate program with a lot of foreign students, many of whom come from countries that are not technically capitalist nations. Many come from countries in Europe that are Socialist or Socialist adjacent. These students are always bright, often brilliant, and generally committed to making the world better and they all want to come here for a reason. Capitalism is not a zero-sum game, the bad things it brings do not obviate the good and great things it brings. The second thing is that Zionism is also flawed, the Palestinian people suffer as a result of certain elements of Zionism, but Zionism can be redefined. Like Capitalism, Zionism has led to things bad and good, but none of those obviate the need for a Jewish homeland. Just because we are paranoid does not mean they're not trying to kill us. The support of BDS from a Jew is sheer self-loathing.
Finally, Klein's choice to bring all of the terrible things happening in post-truth America together as an attack on Capitalism ends up sounding like a nonsensical illogical conspiracy theory. The student surpasses her doppelganger. Well, doesn't surpass her, but she joins her.
The first 60% of this is really good. Then it plummets into a lefty conspiracy theory intended to dent a righty conspiracy theory. A 3.5. I am going to go with a 4-star, but I may end up going to a 3-star. (ETA -- time healed me. Time made me angrier about Klein's missed opportunity here. 3 stars it is.)
July 7, 2023
Naomi Klein has a doppelganger - one that is an avid pusher of conspiracy theories. Engaging with the idea of the doppelganger in popular culture and academia, Klein uses it to determine why society is experiencing such vicious swings into false narratives, and how the difference between the traumatised and traumatiser has become so muddied. This thoughtful and intimate narrative offers a thorough shakedown of the most surreal parts of modern life, and an explanation of how everyday people have been consumed in insidious ways.
An exciting new insight into our post-pandemic world.
An exciting new insight into our post-pandemic world.
June 18, 2024
BOOK OF THE YEAR for me! Winner of the inaugural Women's Prize for non-fiction. (UK)
This is the Book of the year for me! I can't rave enough about it.
Naomi Klein gets confused often with Naomi Wolf, a former lefty feminist, now, a right-wing nutjob, and conspiracy theorist promoter, anti-vaxxer, gun lover. Both are named Naomi, both are Jewish, Wolf is American, Klein is Canadian.
A bit of personal history: Before I deleted my Twitter account, I used to be on it a lot - mainly for news and politics. Occasionally, I used to correct people who confused and tagged Klein when they were referring to Wolf. At some point, in 2019, I was live chatting with Wolf on YouTube, as she took on a conservative Australian government representative and I was delighting in a Twitter pile-on. I was retweeting and exchanging views with Wolf on Twitter. When Covid hit I started nnoticing all sorts of weird posts and stances that made me uncomfortable. Not so slowly, she became more unhinged, full-blown coo-coo, I remember laughing at her posts about clouds, I thought she was mocking other people's ridiculous tweets, only to discover she was serious. I promptly unfollowed her.
Doppelganger covers so many topics: our public, social media persona, tribalism, fascism, climate change, capitalism, tribalism, racism, right-wing nationalism, Jewish entity and Zionism, Gaza, Autism, techno feudalism, colonialism.
Klein is a genius, unlike other egomaniacal so-called geniuses, she is a thoughtful, kind human.
Just in case my quickly penned thoughts don't make it clear - you should read this book.
This is the Book of the year for me! I can't rave enough about it.
Naomi Klein gets confused often with Naomi Wolf, a former lefty feminist, now, a right-wing nutjob, and conspiracy theorist promoter, anti-vaxxer, gun lover. Both are named Naomi, both are Jewish, Wolf is American, Klein is Canadian.
A bit of personal history: Before I deleted my Twitter account, I used to be on it a lot - mainly for news and politics. Occasionally, I used to correct people who confused and tagged Klein when they were referring to Wolf. At some point, in 2019, I was live chatting with Wolf on YouTube, as she took on a conservative Australian government representative and I was delighting in a Twitter pile-on. I was retweeting and exchanging views with Wolf on Twitter. When Covid hit I started nnoticing all sorts of weird posts and stances that made me uncomfortable. Not so slowly, she became more unhinged, full-blown coo-coo, I remember laughing at her posts about clouds, I thought she was mocking other people's ridiculous tweets, only to discover she was serious. I promptly unfollowed her.
Doppelganger covers so many topics: our public, social media persona, tribalism, fascism, climate change, capitalism, tribalism, racism, right-wing nationalism, Jewish entity and Zionism, Gaza, Autism, techno feudalism, colonialism.
Klein is a genius, unlike other egomaniacal so-called geniuses, she is a thoughtful, kind human.
Just in case my quickly penned thoughts don't make it clear - you should read this book.
September 18, 2023
My head is spinning…
Can I classify this book as a conspiracy theory? I find it really hard to believe that enough people who were fans of Naomi Klein mistook Naomi Wolf’s words to be hers (I never even heard of Ms. Wolf until I read this book). That’s like saying people kept confusing George Bush for George Saunders. Instead of defining what a doppelgänger is, she should’ve looked up what a reach is.
Also, Ms. Klein’s take on the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine are ironic for someone whose bread and butter is researching shock states and conspiracy theories. How can she be so naive?
Can I classify this book as a conspiracy theory? I find it really hard to believe that enough people who were fans of Naomi Klein mistook Naomi Wolf’s words to be hers (I never even heard of Ms. Wolf until I read this book). That’s like saying people kept confusing George Bush for George Saunders. Instead of defining what a doppelgänger is, she should’ve looked up what a reach is.
Also, Ms. Klein’s take on the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine are ironic for someone whose bread and butter is researching shock states and conspiracy theories. How can she be so naive?
March 7, 2024
A lot of very interesting stuff in here but I often found myself wishing Klein would just drop the doppelganger idea; clearly the book needed a more marketable hook than ‘how people choose to align themselves politically and how this has shifted post-Covid’ but it really does feel extremely tenuous at times. So much ground is covered, and plenty of it, while solid and sensible, doesn’t contain any revelatory ideas, and that goes double for the woolly conclusion.
June 13, 2024
Yet, the further along I have gone on this journey into a world of doubles, the more it led me back to where I began. 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). I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history-with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. 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 us.
Winner of the Women’s Prize for non-fiction.
The Jewish-Canadian author Naomi Klein who originally became known for her debut non-fiction book “No Logo”, published when she was only 29 and which became something of an anti-corporate-capitalism/brand-centric-consumer-culture manifesto for the anti-globalisation movement; and who since then has continued her path in the left-wing activist movement confronting and exposing the three evils of colonialism, neo-liberalism and capitalism including “Shock Doctrine” (on disaster capitalism) and “This Changes Everything” (on climate change).
She is not to be confused with
The Jewish-American author Naomi Wolf who originally became known for her debut non-fiction book “The Beauty Myth” published when she was only 29 and which became something of an anti-patriarchy/beauty industry manifesto for the third wave feminism movement; but who since then (and particularly in recent years) has taken a rather drastic swerve into right-wing conspiracy theory confronting such evils as mask mandates, vaccine passports and lockdowns.
Except she is.
Repeatedly.
Which confusion between two superficially very similar but almost politically opposite people has given this book both its title and concept.
Naomi Klein investigates the world of the other Naomi: what might have lead her to conspiracy theories; why do they appeal to such a wide group of the population; why does the pandemic seem to have given a particular prominence to some of these ideas; what does Steve Bannon gain from his increasingly close relationship with Naomi Wolf and vice-versa.
But at the same time she explores the idea of the double – frequently (perhaps rather too frequently as it can feel a little forced) returning to ideas of the other/mirrors and so on. I did though enjoy the more literary references: Daisy Hildyard’s “The Second Body” is one such text she uses, another key is Philip Roth’s “Operation Shylock” whose “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous” becomes something of a leitmotif for the book.
And I particularly enjoyed this aside about why people seem to like having doppelgangers despite it challenging their uniqueness (which is normally seen as a key tenet of our late capitalism, early social media culture): It reminds me of something I read by the philosopher Helena de Bres, who las a twin sister. She expressed "pity for those who suffer the almost unimaginable misfortune of being born into this world alone."
In terms of the more political content:
She decries anti-vax propaganda but gives only brief mention to vaccines not preventing transmission or masks not really protecting the wearer (to be fair there is some acknowledgement of the rate but still present side effects and that suppressing mention of them only fuelled conspiracies) – but instead prefers a deflection onto criticising pharma for keeping patents and West for hoarding vaccines as that more fits her anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism agenda. There is no limited mention of the long lasting adverse consequences of lockdown.
I enjoyed her exploration of “Diagonal lines“ and “diagonal alliances” of what would have normally been seen as polarised views (Bannon and Wolf a classic example here) and particularly her discussion of the conspiracy theory fuelled mix of extreme right wing defence of liberties with traditionally left wing health or spirituality obsessives which has tended to be electorally captured by far right parties in what she later cleverly dubs “the far right [meets] the far out” and earlier a
Her own earlier experience, due to her son, in the world of autism of anti-vac (MMR) acts a nice precursor for much of what emerged during the pandemic (particularly in the US).
One of Klein’s biggest issues with the Wolf comparison is that although both write often polemical books hers is bounded in fact and analysis
It's clear that some people consume investigative journalism, fact-based analysis, and fact-free conspiracy interchangeably, drawing their own connections and mixing and matching between the three. From the researcher's perspective, the differences between the genres should be glaring. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: double- and triple-source, verify leaked documents, cite peer-reviewed studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of text with recognized experts to make sure technical terms and research methods are correctly understood, have fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a libel lawyer (or in the case of my books, multiple lawyers in different territories). It's a slow, expensive, careful process, but it gets us as close as we know how to something we all used to agree was proof that something was true. Conspiracy influencers perform what I have come to think of as a doppelganger of investigative journalism, imitating many of its stylistic conventions while hopping over its accuracy guardrails. Wolf is an impresario of the technique:
I found this argument part convincing – Klein to me does seem to approach her work with a pre-determined lens – in particular that all of the world’s issues stem from colonialism and capitalism – and then use words like fact/check/prove for views filtered through that lens.
Further this is pretty much a tautology: – we are in a world with boundaries largely defined by colonialism and capitalism is pretty well the only functioning system in the world other than in China (one area which seems to unite the two Naomi’s in fear) so that almost all the world’s problems (and all its breakthroughs) can be traced to them.
Klein argues that most conspiracy theories are in some ways not wrong in the result of what they are seeing, but incorrect in their diagnosis – seeing a sinister conspiracy in what is just the logical outworking of unfettered capitalism.
There is, of course, a difference between a system doing what it was designed to do, no matter the human costs, and secret cabals of nefarious individuals interfering with an otherwise fair and just democracy. That, I have always believed, is one of the core reasons for the left to exist: to provide a structural analysis of wealth and power that brings order and rigor to the prevailing (and correct) sense that society is rigged against the majority, and that important truths are being hidden behind pat political rhetoric. Because we cannot change what we do not under-stand. And because the system is rigged, and most people are indeed getting screwed-but without a firm understanding of capitalism's drive to find new profit sources to enclose and extract, many will imagine there is a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals pulling the strings.
She also though posits (although Klein would I think use the word shows or even proves) that some of drivers of conspiracy theories are those trying to draw attention form these issues or at best being unwilling to face them – and so instead drawing attention to “another” to be vilified.
In a provocative section she argues (proves) that not just did Hitler draw almost all of his policies and approaches from colonialism (and particularly the treatment of either enslaved or indigenous “savage” populations) but that much of what Q-Anon is alleging (replacement theory, institutionalized child abuse, pandemic and/or vaccine deaths are their fears that things like Manifest Destiny, Residential schools and smallpox – will be visited on them) – she goes on to consider Israel/Palestine as an example. In the one level I could say this is a classic Godwin’s Law example of where online discourse inevitably heads - big it’s actually very well written and argued.
The book ultimately contains very few prescriptions – she does argue for “unselfing” (similar I feel to Rawls “veil of ignorance”) but seems to ignore the motivations for why someone would consider others before themselves (she is very dismissive of religion). There is an appeal to 1920s Red Vienna – like so many left wing commentators she seems to be buried either in the past or an idealistic future: it was no surprise to me when reading the book to find she was an enthusiastic Corbyn backer – even in 2019. She does not refer to this but she treats Tony Blair – also known as the only Labour politician to win an UK election for some 50 years now - as some kind of right win stooge.
My review feels like it has a lot of criticisms but really that is to the book’s credit I think as it does not shy from strongly held and expressed opinions and was always engrossing to read.
Want to read
May 24, 2024trippy
October 5, 2023
The most important book I’ve read this year. Articulates the various thoughts and feelings I’ve had throughout the past couple years and expands upon them. It stands as a unique call to action as the government turns into a doppelgänger of itself and the far right threatens to turn whatever is left of this democracy into an authoritarian hellscape.
July 3, 2024
🏆 Winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.
My feelings on this book are . . . mixed.
Check out my Women's Prize Deep Dive on BookTube at Hello, Bookworm.📚🐛
"The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you."
Naomi Klein is an accomplished leftist author, professor, and social activist who is regularly confused online with Naomi Wolf, a right-wing conspiracist and anti-vaxxer. This led Klein to deep dive into Wolf’s world of right-wing politics, conspiracy theories, and strategic misinformation.
I think three of the most important revelations she makes in this book are:
[1] Right-wing politicians’ and pundits’ proclivity to flip the script any time they’re at risk of having their egregious or corrupt behavior exposed. They intentionally accuse the other party of the same behavior, thereby distracting their constituents.
[2] Concerted efforts by right-wing figures to undermine or dissolve the potency of important words like "genocide" or "holocaust".
[3] Klein highlights how democrats are continually dividing into smaller and smaller groups because of minor differences, thereby weakening the party to everyone’s detriment.
It's clear that this is an important book, but I wanted more from it. A stronger call to action followed by some tips on first steps would have been most welcome.
Nonetheless, it's a worthwhile read.
My feelings on this book are . . . mixed.
Check out my Women's Prize Deep Dive on BookTube at Hello, Bookworm.📚🐛
"The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you."
Naomi Klein is an accomplished leftist author, professor, and social activist who is regularly confused online with Naomi Wolf, a right-wing conspiracist and anti-vaxxer. This led Klein to deep dive into Wolf’s world of right-wing politics, conspiracy theories, and strategic misinformation.
I think three of the most important revelations she makes in this book are:
[1] Right-wing politicians’ and pundits’ proclivity to flip the script any time they’re at risk of having their egregious or corrupt behavior exposed. They intentionally accuse the other party of the same behavior, thereby distracting their constituents.
[2] Concerted efforts by right-wing figures to undermine or dissolve the potency of important words like "genocide" or "holocaust".
[3] Klein highlights how democrats are continually dividing into smaller and smaller groups because of minor differences, thereby weakening the party to everyone’s detriment.
It's clear that this is an important book, but I wanted more from it. A stronger call to action followed by some tips on first steps would have been most welcome.
Nonetheless, it's a worthwhile read.
January 11, 2024
What if you are constantly confused with someone else, someone with some superficial similarities but quite different opinions? That is what has happened to Naomi Klein - she is often confused with Naomi Wolf. Once upon a time, Wolf was quite mainstream - she wrote the white feminist book, “the Beauty Myth”. However, Wolf has fallen into a mirror world, full of conspiracies and anti-vaxxers.
Klein explores the topic of doppelgängers in fiction and reality, she follows Wolf’s move from center left to the far right, into a mirror world of distorted facts and full of fallacies. It’s a genre defying book, and a great commentary of the current world at large.
Klein explores the topic of doppelgängers in fiction and reality, she follows Wolf’s move from center left to the far right, into a mirror world of distorted facts and full of fallacies. It’s a genre defying book, and a great commentary of the current world at large.
January 25, 2024
Will end up in the top of my best of 2024-list.
Ik vind dit immers het belangrijkste boek van deze tijd. Niet minder dan dat.
Laat je niet misleiden door de premisse van het boek (over dubbelgangers Naomi Klein en Naomi Wolf). Het gaat véél breder en dieper dan dat.
Want wat een vloedgolf aan (zelf)kritische inzichten en verheldering rond digitalisering, Corona-controverse, welness-industrie, rechtspopulisme, nieuw fascisme, klimaat, neoliberalisme, Israel-Palestina, pharma, complotdenken. Los van het feit dat Klein écht goed kan schrijven, is het lang geleden dat ik nog eens het gevoel had een handleiding te aanschouwen van onze tijd. Het leest als een bijbel voor links, die zich weliswaar tien jaar te laat openbaart. Eén van de passages die me het meest trof was de conclusie dat men zich aan (extreem)rechtse zijde vastbijt in enkele hete hangijzers en daar een onontwijkbare common ground van (vaak valse) 'waarheden' in opbouwt versus hoe we aan progessieve, linkerzijde over een scala aan thema's nuanceren en discussiëren tot we elke positionering als een eenheid totaal verliezen. We hebben nieuwe realistische, maar constructieve, eenduidige, ambitieuze verhalen nodig om dit mentaal en digitaal gif te kunnen bevechten. En dit boek kan helpen.
Ik vind dit immers het belangrijkste boek van deze tijd. Niet minder dan dat.
Laat je niet misleiden door de premisse van het boek (over dubbelgangers Naomi Klein en Naomi Wolf). Het gaat véél breder en dieper dan dat.
Want wat een vloedgolf aan (zelf)kritische inzichten en verheldering rond digitalisering, Corona-controverse, welness-industrie, rechtspopulisme, nieuw fascisme, klimaat, neoliberalisme, Israel-Palestina, pharma, complotdenken. Los van het feit dat Klein écht goed kan schrijven, is het lang geleden dat ik nog eens het gevoel had een handleiding te aanschouwen van onze tijd. Het leest als een bijbel voor links, die zich weliswaar tien jaar te laat openbaart. Eén van de passages die me het meest trof was de conclusie dat men zich aan (extreem)rechtse zijde vastbijt in enkele hete hangijzers en daar een onontwijkbare common ground van (vaak valse) 'waarheden' in opbouwt versus hoe we aan progessieve, linkerzijde over een scala aan thema's nuanceren en discussiëren tot we elke positionering als een eenheid totaal verliezen. We hebben nieuwe realistische, maar constructieve, eenduidige, ambitieuze verhalen nodig om dit mentaal en digitaal gif te kunnen bevechten. En dit boek kan helpen.
October 2, 2023
Those of us who were involved in the US/UK left electoral movements of 2015-2020 knew that if we lost our long shot at power, very bad and very weird things would happen, and so they have, intensified a thousandfold by the pandemic and global warming's increasing obviousness. Few writers on the left have been able to zoom out of our failure and its consequences with any kind of perspective, and have mostly either dropped out altogether (ahem) or have opted for hepcat sectarianism. This book gradually expands out from its - let's be honest, hysterically funny - basic premise into one of the very few serious analyses of the bizarroland we're now in. It also lays out some possible - if very tough - paths out of it. Easily Klein's best book and quite extraordinarily good by anyone's standards.
June 14, 2024
Read for octofinals BTprize. Review in April
Winner of the Women's Prize for non-fiction 2024
is also on the BookTube prize. (results in October 2024 for that prize). It is presently in the Semifinals round. Out of the six books I read for the BT prize I put this as one of the top two. It was aced out of first by ThunderClap--by personal favorite (see review).
I did enjoy reading this book. It is a good one and I'm always looking for how the younger set (anyone less than 50 years for me) Is responding to the present political atmosphere. I figured that Ms. Klein being a Canadian author I might hear a new take on how the internet is effecting all we learn and mislearn. The background on her experience with being mistaken for another commentator frequently seen on the internet was for me the best part of the story. What dropped it down for me was the over emphasize on Covid and how it was handled: isolation, masks, protective gear and government mandates. This seemed to me to take over more than 1/2 of the book and once past that I found the rest of the book more relevant to present concerns. (As a medical person I don't think we will ever know what was the best way through the pandemic and personally I've read and heard enough about the various view points and feel no closer to a truth about it and did not feel this book shed much new light on this subject.)
Ms. Klein is an excellent writer and for political commentary her prose is easy to read and most understandable and personally made a lot of sense even in the areas I didn't always agree. I am always open to hearing how the world is seen by others and for this I would highly recommend this book. I had both the print and audio which Ms. Klein narrates and she does an excellent job.
Winner of the Women's Prize for non-fiction 2024
is also on the BookTube prize. (results in October 2024 for that prize). It is presently in the Semifinals round. Out of the six books I read for the BT prize I put this as one of the top two. It was aced out of first by ThunderClap--by personal favorite (see review).
I did enjoy reading this book. It is a good one and I'm always looking for how the younger set (anyone less than 50 years for me) Is responding to the present political atmosphere. I figured that Ms. Klein being a Canadian author I might hear a new take on how the internet is effecting all we learn and mislearn. The background on her experience with being mistaken for another commentator frequently seen on the internet was for me the best part of the story. What dropped it down for me was the over emphasize on Covid and how it was handled: isolation, masks, protective gear and government mandates. This seemed to me to take over more than 1/2 of the book and once past that I found the rest of the book more relevant to present concerns. (As a medical person I don't think we will ever know what was the best way through the pandemic and personally I've read and heard enough about the various view points and feel no closer to a truth about it and did not feel this book shed much new light on this subject.)
Ms. Klein is an excellent writer and for political commentary her prose is easy to read and most understandable and personally made a lot of sense even in the areas I didn't always agree. I am always open to hearing how the world is seen by others and for this I would highly recommend this book. I had both the print and audio which Ms. Klein narrates and she does an excellent job.
October 23, 2023
330 pages and this lady never realized she just needs to log off the internet
December 5, 2023
4.5
I have found myself doing more and more audio this year and I am so pleased I committed to listening to Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World as read by the author Naomi Klein. This book gave me much more to think about than just raising the question of if I had ever mistaken Naomi Klein for Naomi Wolf. For future reference I found this useful to remember :
If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.
To be fair I hadn't really been aware of how far down the rabbit hole Wolf had gone and so a lot of this came as a bit of a shock. Wolf is just one in long list of once left-wing idealists who have been lost to the "Shadowlands" as Klein refers to the alt-right conspiracy world presided over by the likes of Steve Bannon. This is a fascinating and astute analysis of the forces at play. The framework of the Doppelganger risks being stretched in places but ultimately its an interesting lens to discuss so many important issues.
I don't know if I expected Naomi Klein to offer much in the way of solutions to the vast problems of climate change, inequality and the proliferation of fact-free conspiracy theories but by the end despite Naomi sounding so calm I was feeling a little "oh well, I may as well just give up trying" about the whole situation.
Still its a great non-fiction audio experience
I have found myself doing more and more audio this year and I am so pleased I committed to listening to Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World as read by the author Naomi Klein. This book gave me much more to think about than just raising the question of if I had ever mistaken Naomi Klein for Naomi Wolf. For future reference I found this useful to remember :
If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.
To be fair I hadn't really been aware of how far down the rabbit hole Wolf had gone and so a lot of this came as a bit of a shock. Wolf is just one in long list of once left-wing idealists who have been lost to the "Shadowlands" as Klein refers to the alt-right conspiracy world presided over by the likes of Steve Bannon. This is a fascinating and astute analysis of the forces at play. The framework of the Doppelganger risks being stretched in places but ultimately its an interesting lens to discuss so many important issues.
I don't know if I expected Naomi Klein to offer much in the way of solutions to the vast problems of climate change, inequality and the proliferation of fact-free conspiracy theories but by the end despite Naomi sounding so calm I was feeling a little "oh well, I may as well just give up trying" about the whole situation.
Still its a great non-fiction audio experience
September 21, 2023
Bro soooo sophomoric, so self-indulgent, so paternalistic, and utterly representative of the vanity of the white left. All of these “revelations” have been made by black people for at least a century, and if you had the humility to listen to us about who our allies are, you wouldn’t be shocked about the state of America. Furthermore, infuriatingly, there’s that same incessant refrain of “I just can’t talk to x arch conservative relative/friend/coworker anymore.” Well no self-respecting black person ever could excuse that racism. From our vantage point, there are no doppelgängers in the rest of the world. You are the same
September 23, 2023
Well, this one left me puzzled. On one hand, we have a well-known Naomi Klein who made herself known from her reporting on capitalism and evil corporations. On the other hand, we have Naomi Wolf, who is a real person, but who has totally different opinions from Klein on literally everything. The problem is... or rather Kleins' problem is, that people often confuse these two, which is harmful for her career. I fully understand her frustration and feel sorry for her. But MY problem here is that this feels like it's all about bashing Wolf and Bannon by the way. If these two won't sue her that would be a miracle, because I sure would.
And because of this everything that Klein wants to say in this book gets somehow lost, washed away. There are some interesting parts, but these are rare and small, it would be fantastic if she could expand her thoughts and reflections. But no, she just keeps going back to Wolf.
Dear Naomi... please rewrite this, because it's worth it.
And because of this everything that Klein wants to say in this book gets somehow lost, washed away. There are some interesting parts, but these are rare and small, it would be fantastic if she could expand her thoughts and reflections. But no, she just keeps going back to Wolf.
Dear Naomi... please rewrite this, because it's worth it.
September 7, 2023
Fantastic..full review to come
November 18, 2023
This book didn't need to be written.
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