An Infinity of Doubles: Into the mirror world of Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger
- Bookshelf
- October 13, 2023
Doppelgangers or doubles have been a fixture in literature from the works of Dostoevsky to Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A characteristic of these “doubling” stories is that they are almost always unsettling. Typically writing on political and economic topics, Naomi Klein takes a more personal turn in her recent book, Doppelganger, while not entirely leaving her outspoken liberal and anti-capitalist positions. Her last books focused on corporations and the manipulative strategies they use to drive interest in their products and increase profitability. She has emphasized that these strategies appear not only in economics but also as tools to control or manipulate people for political gain in what she calls the Shock Doctrine. Her latest book, Doppelganger, turns to corporate tech. But it is more directly an account of her experience being mistaken for the writer and increasingly far right political pundit, Naomi Wolf. This leads to commentary on how technology and the capitalistic playbook have commodified experience. Young people, she argues, as an example, are pressured to construct brands—being so many selves that any attempt at an identity beneath the gameplaying and brand construction only pushes them further into the mirror world, a surreal digital world that extends to everyone; a world of divisive narratives—”us vs. them” logic—that meet society’s superficial needs. Chief among these is the need to make the world sensible; simplifying narratives—racial, class, gender, and political profiling—although socially destructive, are addictively self-affirming in an unsettled world.
Klein goes into some of these simplifying narratives. The way doubles or doppelgangers have now escaped from sci-fi novels and have begun to populate daily life. She begins with virtual doubling, which I’ve already discussed but progressively moves into, what I think is the more interesting dialogue, of doubling throughout history. It is itself a simplifying narrative to suggest that digital technology has remade the world. She however stops short of a claim that I’d support, and I’ll get into later, that digital technology—social media and AI—merely exposes a society that is still dealing with, and unsuccessfully navigating its relationship with an industrializing world. The blame is typically on technology as if a post-tech world could exist and that we would desire it. Before moving to far into my own thoughts I want to return to the book and discuss the other doubles or doppelgangers that largely predate the Internet age.
Other Doubles
Body as double
In a world of increasing complexity and uncontrollable forces, there’s understandably an inward turn to whatever seems controllable. Health, mental and physical, while not entirely controllable, can be improved through lifestyle choices. An observation made elsewhere dating back to the 1940s, or even earlier, is that this shift, attending to physical and mental health, resembles a religious movement as society reckons with secularization. Control becomes precious and sacred in a society uncontrollably influenced; the body, however, may be seen as controllable and is therefore sacred, and a new object of worship.
Child as double
In a related doubling, she discusses children, which as extensions of the body, may challenge any newly discovered (actual or supposed) control over the body through lifestyle changes. When encountering the uncontrollable in children, Klein speculates– the example she gives is autism, herself a mother of an autistic son – it can be self-denying. Klein provides the ongoing debate that vaccines cause autism as an example. Relying on the lengthy research debunking this claim, she wonders if the continued obsession might be linked to doubling; if the body is sacred and controllable, external human causes (for example, medical ignorance or negligence). The book then goes into a fairly lengthy discussion on the author’s Jewish heritage and the history of the Jewish people, establishing as a another double, the ethic double
Can We Ever Leave the Mirror World?
She ends with a broad appeal, though, as a liberal writer, she specifically leans on a liberal audience, writing that liberals often think institutions are immutable. They are built by humans and may be changed by humans. Equally, she continues, identity isn’t fixed. Life is therefore as much about accepting our changing identities as it is recognizing that identity is social, and it is this through this broader, homogenizing identity that inequality becomes unjustifiable. Subsequently, Klein returns to her famous criticism of capitalism when she attributes today’s severe inequality and social unrest to corporate greed and branding.
It’s hard to disagree, as liberal positions are chiefly intellectual, academic positions in support of classical, uncontroversial values. They are positions that become detached from history and periodically bubble up. Klein’s final appeal to the reader may be seen as a popularization of John Rawls’ works.
The political theorist John Rawls thought success in life, contrary to being self-made, resulted from the genetic lottery. Social standing is pure chance. An individual could easily fall into poverty, with the wrong parents or upbringing and resources, as they could fall into riches and prosperity. He then concludes disparities are unfair and claims success or prosperity is in some sense a moral violation that must addressed through a corrective (or welfare) system. Prosperity has a cost so to speak. When an individual steadily climbs the ladder, then, they must elevate their less fortunate counterparts.
However, we end up with a paradoxical solution here; addressing inequality by introducing it elsewhere—acknowledging everyone is equal, and yet some are penalized, constantly reminding us that the differences are very real. Rawls would counter that this position only seems irrational. The individual behind what Rawls called the veil of ignorance recognizes the fragility of their social standing. They could be anyone, occupying the lowest or highest rung. So, his system is rational because it is fair; it’s as fair and as just as it can be, and we must disregard that, yes, this may superficially look like inequality of a different type.
Both Klein’s and Rawls’ view—that people are equal, either through the nameless probabilities of the genetic lottery (Rawls) or the homogenizing influences of Internet culture—is untenable. For example, equality sounds great and desirable but isn’t sufficiently motivating in the real world. The vast majority of people desire a world that seemingly demands inequality.
And this renders Klein’s discussion on the mirror world inadequate, even as she approaches a sociological or psychological commentary rather than blatant bashing of capitalism or tech–on the mirror world inadequate. She discusses the various types of doppelgangers that may fill our lives from the virtual and bodily selves to the ethic self. But she omits the intellectual self, which her writing implicitly supposes.
I characterize this intellectual double as the dream of a Platonic world of facts, truths; here, equality remains accessible. Klein, as well as other liberal thinkers, tend to begin the dialogue, and then, putting Rawls aside for the moment, don’t introduce a solution or offer one that’s circular: The solution, for Klein, is to pursue and celebrate truth and fact. Klein then ends her book by reestablishing the problem.
What is a fact nowadays? What is true? These questions may sound ridiculous, but we exist in a world in which facts are contradicted by other facts. This is because problems are complex, dynamic, and nested. We interact with the world through sleek technological interfaces, giving us the impression that the information at one’s fingertips or from one’s social network is fully representative, complete—factual and true. It however walls-in. Technology actually aggressively complicates by opening metaphorical doors; the technological world is constantly expanding our outlook. It’s instead the human brain that simplifies—that trivializes, and must in the wake of the information overload, focus on the one thing—that may be race, capitalism, nationality, gender, or immigration—to create spaces where the world can finally become sensible again. If it ever was.
This is the intellectual self or double in action. Klein only drives us deeper into the mirror world—even more self-absorbed; even more confident that we are never far from the truth or the facts if we are sufficiently educated, sufficiently intellectual. By adopting this intellectual self or double, we may conveniently deny the truth that’s there’s no way out of the mirror world.
The question should be how do we embrace confusion? How can we wrestle with ambiguity, holding it steady without resolution? The truth is to authentically approach the world as well as other people not as objects of understanding or targets of persuasion but with the humility of a scientist in a complex world or an artist or a poet that disregards facts and honestly and simply says, “The world looks like this to me.” It’s a subtle although powerful shift, because it doesn’t make a strong “Now, prove me wrong” claim. The intellectual double, omitted by Klein, rejects this for obvious reasons. We must be correct. The world must be sensible. The problem is social media. The problem is AI and naïve techno chieftains. The problem is capitalism. These all feed the intellectual double.
As we move deeper into the mirror world, we must realize tech’s virtual worlds don’t mirror – in the sense that they reveal opposites, doubles, or doppelgangers, all of which imply some degree of artifice or illusion. Tech, and AI, renders us in higher resolution, and it suggests the multiplicity never collapses to a singular fact. What we observe is very real; the world and the people that occupy it contain multitudes. It was that way for the poet Walt Whitman, and so it continues to this day.
