Summary of Doppelganger Naomi Klein’s book A Trip into the Mirror World Willie M. Joseph
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
EPILOGUE
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INTRODUCTION The author, who has been writing about corporate power and its ravages for over a decade, refers to her as "Other Naomi." She has been involved in various events, such as the United Nations Climate Summit, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, 9/11, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, during this time, she was overcommitted to writing about the climate change fight and neglected other important things. In June 2021, a "heat dome" descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, Canada, causing over six hundred deaths, an estimated ten billion marine creatures being cooked alive, and an entire town going up in flames. The author's deepest shame lies in the number of podcasts she mainlined, which consumed nearly every interstitial moment in her life. She rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many urgent crises, is at the nexus of several forces that are crucial for helping humans take to the streets in rebellion against hallucinated "tyranny." The author believes that Grounding Space-Faring Billionaires and using their wealth to pay for housing and healthcare, getting off fossil fuels before the future is one protracted heat dome, or sending shark-identified children to elementary school without fearing they will come home with a highly contagious and potentially lethal virus. This book is not about the author's intention to write about the heat dome, but rather about the challenges they face in their pursuit of understanding and combating the global crisis. "Doppelganger" is a term that refers to having a double walking around, which can be profoundly unsettling and alienating. This feeling is particularly acute because the unfamiliar thing becomes you, making you unsure of your true self. Many people grapple with the sense that reality is warping, as they have lost loved ones or trusted intellectuals and commentators. For over twenty years, the author has been preoccupied with the ways large-scale shocks scramble our collective synapses, lead to mass regression, and make humans easy prey for demagogues. The Shock Doctrine, her 2007 book on this topic, explores how post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in various contexts, such as 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and events significantly further back in time. The Covid pandemic has scrambled the author's personal world, as it did all of our worlds. For the first four months, while living in New Jersey, the author was confined to their home with their neuroatypical son, trying to help him learn online and soothe his porous soul. Ambulances picked up neighbors, and the virus tore through their friend group. A state of shock occurs when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have an adequate explanation. Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums, which is why opportunistic players, known as "disaster capitalists," rush into the gap with their preexisting wish lists and simplistic stories of good and evil. Controlling the virus forced many of us, including the author, the very conditions that make humans most vulnerable to states of shock: prolonged stress and isolation. The author's isolation grew more extreme when returning to Canada, where they now live full-time on a rock at the dead end of a street three hours from the closest city. The author explores the concept of doubles and doppelgangers, focusing on the idea that they represent both our highest aspiration and the most repressed parts of ourselves. They find that the appearance of a doppelganger is often chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing, pushing individuals to their limits. Doppelgangers have been understood as warnings or harbingers, as reality starts doubling, indicating that something important is being ignored or denied. This applies to individuals and societies that are divided, doubled, polarized, or partitioned into warring, seemingly unknowable camps. The author's identity crisis is likely unavoidable, as the appearance of one's doppelganger is chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing. They have also explored the push and pull of doppelganger literature and mythology, such as Philip Roth's Operation Shylock novel. They have followed their doppelganger as she burrows deeper into conspiracy plots, investigating her alliances with malevolent men, their rewards, and the deep racial, cultural, and historical fears and denials they feed. The author feels justified in following their doppelganger, as they have been confused with Other Naomi for so long and frequently that it seems only right that they should follow her back. The doppelganger often acts as an unwelcome mirror, showing undesirable aspects of our shared culture, such as the ambient hunger for ever-more fleeting relevance, the disposability of people who mess up, and the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility. Looking at her helped the author see themselves more clearly and better understand the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside. This is an attempt to explore the doppelganger culture, a society where individuals maintain online avatars and create virtual versions of themselves that represent them to others. This culture has led to a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, with tech companies using data troves to train machines to create artificial simulations of human intelligence and functions. The author questions what this duplication is doing to us and how it influences what we pay attention to and what we neglect. The author observes that politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society divided in two and each side defining itself against the other. Race, ethnicity, and gender create dangerous doubles that hover over whole categories of people, casting them as savage, terrorist, Thief, Whore, or Property. This fascist clown state is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and despising. The pandemic has taken humanity somewhere we have not been before, and this difference accounts for the strangeness we have been trying to name. Uncanny people, upside-down politics, and a growing difficulty discerning who and what is real are some of the strangeness we have been trying to name. The author aims to decipher the chaos of doppelganger culture, focusing on escaping its mind-bending confines and finding collective power and purpose.
INTRODUCTION
The author, who has been writing about corporate power and its ravages for over a decade, refers to her as Other Naomi. She has been involved in various events, such as the United Nations Climate Summit, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, 9/11, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, during this time, she was overcommitted to writing about the climate change fight and neglected other important things.
In June 2021, a heat dome descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, Canada, causing over six hundred deaths, an estimated ten billion marine creatures being cooked alive, and an entire town going up in flames. The author's deepest shame lies in the number of podcasts she mainlined, which consumed nearly every interstitial moment in her life. She rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many urgent crises, is at the nexus of several forces that are crucial for helping humans take to the streets in rebellion against hallucinated tyranny.
The author believes that Grounding Space-Faring Billionaires and using their wealth to pay for housing and healthcare, getting off fossil fuels before the future is one protracted heat dome, or sending shark-identified children to elementary school without fearing they will come home with a highly contagious and potentially lethal virus. This book is not about the author's intention to write about the heat dome, but rather about the challenges they face in their pursuit of understanding and combating the global crisis.
Doppelganger is a term that refers to having a double walking around, which can be profoundly unsettling and alienating. This feeling is particularly acute because the unfamiliar thing becomes you, making you unsure of your true self. Many people grapple with the sense that reality is warping, as they have lost loved ones or trusted intellectuals and commentators.
For over twenty years, the author has been preoccupied with the ways large-scale shocks scramble our collective synapses, lead to mass regression, and make humans easy prey for demagogues. The Shock Doctrine, her 2007 book on this topic, explores how post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in various contexts, such as 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and events significantly further back in time.
The Covid pandemic has scrambled the author's personal world, as it did all of our worlds. For the first four months, while living in New Jersey, the author was confined to their home with their neuroatypical son, trying to help him learn online and soothe his porous soul. Ambulances picked up neighbors, and the virus tore through their friend group.
A state of shock occurs when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have an adequate explanation. Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums, which is why opportunistic players, known as disaster capitalists, rush into the gap with their preexisting wish lists and simplistic stories of good and evil.
Controlling the virus forced many of us, including the author, the very conditions that make humans most vulnerable to states of shock: prolonged stress and isolation. The author's isolation grew more extreme when returning to Canada, where they now live full-time on a rock at the dead end of a street three hours from the closest city.
The author explores the concept of doubles and doppelgangers, focusing on the idea that they represent both our highest aspiration and the most repressed parts of ourselves. They find that the appearance of a doppelganger is often chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing, pushing individuals to their limits. Doppelgangers have been understood as warnings or harbingers, as reality starts doubling, indicating that something important is being ignored or denied. This applies to individuals and societies that are divided, doubled, polarized, or partitioned into warring, seemingly unknowable camps.
The author's identity crisis is likely unavoidable, as the appearance of one's doppelganger is chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing. They have also explored the push and pull of doppelganger literature and mythology, such as Philip Roth's Operation Shylock novel. They have followed their doppelganger as she burrows deeper into conspiracy plots, investigating her alliances with malevolent men, their rewards, and the deep racial, cultural, and historical fears and denials they feed.
The author feels justified in following their doppelganger, as they have been confused with Other Naomi for so long and frequently that it seems only right that they should follow her back. The doppelganger often acts as an unwelcome mirror, showing undesirable aspects of our shared culture, such as the ambient hunger for ever-more fleeting relevance, the disposability of people who mess up, and the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility. Looking at her helped the author see themselves more clearly and better understand the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.
This is an attempt to explore the doppelganger culture, a society where individuals maintain online avatars and create virtual versions of themselves that represent them to others. This culture has led to a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, with tech companies using data troves to train machines to create artificial simulations of human intelligence and functions. The author questions what this duplication is doing to us and how it influences what we pay attention to and what we neglect.
The author observes that politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society divided in two and each side defining itself against the other. Race, ethnicity, and gender create dangerous doubles that hover over whole categories of people, casting them as savage, terrorist, Thief, Whore, or Property. This fascist clown state is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and despising.
The pandemic has taken humanity somewhere we have not been before, and this difference accounts for the strangeness we have been trying to name. Uncanny people, upside-down politics, and a growing difficulty discerning who and what is real are some of the strangeness we have been trying to name. The author aims to decipher the chaos of doppelganger culture, focusing on escaping its mind-bending confines and finding collective power and purpose.
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PART ONE Double Life OCCUPIED In November 2011, during the height of Occupy Wall Street, two women in Manhattan were discussing Naomi Klein's views on the protests. The two women were both Jewish and had distinct writerly lanes, with Naomi Klein focusing on corporate assaults on democracy and climate change. The two women had intersected with the protests, and their disagreements began when Wolf claimed that the crackdown on Occupy demonstrated the United States tipping into a police state. Organizers used the "human microphone" to prevent the police from clearing the protest camp, but Wolf claimed the movement had specific demands and that she had figured them out. She turned the results of her surveying into a short list of demands and delivered it to New York governor Andrew Cuomo at a black-tie event organized by Huffington Post. However, Wolf managed to get herself arrested in a burgundy evening gown, which was what the women in the bathroom were referring to when they talked about how "Naomi Klein" did not understand their demands. The bizarre events surrounding Occupy during that eventful fall included rumors of Radiohead performing a free concert, Kanye West and Russell Simmons dropping by, and Alec Baldwin's turn. These bizarre events highlighted the importance of understanding the demands of the protesters and the need for a new generational politics. The women in the bathroom were referring to Naomi Klein's antics as well, as they were just one of many bizarre things swirling around the protests. The author, Avram Wolf, has been a vocal critic of the media and its portrayal of the world. After the Occupy protests, Wolf claimed that the crackdowns on OWS were the first battle in a civil war, marking a definitive tip into totalitarian rule. This claim was made under George W. Bush, who had predicted that he would not allow the 2008 election to take place. Wolf's new focus on abuses of corporate and political power during states of emergency made her feel like a parody of The Shock Doctrine, with all facts and evidence carefully removed. In the decade since Occupy, Wolf has connected the dots between an almost unfathomably large number of disparate bits of fact and fantasy. She has floated unsubstantiated speculations about the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, U.S. troops sent to build field hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, ISIS beheadings of U.S. and British captives, the arrest of Dominique StraussKahn, the results of the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence, and the Green New Deal. Uncovering real conspiracies is the indispensable mission of investigative journalism, but Wolf's theories are not based on actual research. She has also shared remarkable thoughts on Twitter about 5G cellular networks, which have sparked transnational mockery. The author, who wrote The Beauty Myth as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, believed that girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys, holding sex hostage by beauty and its ransom terms engraved in girls' minds early and deeply. Wolf's online writing today is so frenetic and fantastical that it can be startling to read her early words and remember that she clearly loved language, thought deeply about the inner lives of girls and women, and had a vision for their liberation. In the 1990s, Germaine Greer declared The Beauty Myth as the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch. Wolf, a feminist writer, argued that the pressure on women to meet impossible beauty standards during the 1980s put them at a competitive disadvantage with men in their fields. She posited that the "myth" of beauty was invented to drain women's power and focus, keeping them busy with mascara and starvation diets instead of climbing the professional ladder and outperforming their male rivals. Wolf's version of third-wave feminism charted a path to the center, promising the world to white, middle-class, highly educated women like her. She launched herself into the heart of the liberal establishment in New York City and Washington, D.C., marrying a journalist who became a speechwriter for Bill Clinton and a New York Times editor, consulting with political operative Dick Morris, and helping start an institute on women's leadership. The press was drawn to Wolf's writing, which focused on the lives of women who were not her own and whose lives were markedly different from her own. Her work was considered such an authority on all things womanly that during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore hired her to coach him on how to appeal to female voters. However, her reports still sparked mockery, including from Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, who wrote that "Ms. Wolf is the moral equivalent of an Armani T-shirt, because Mr. Gore has obscenely overpaid for something basic." In the new millennium, Naomi Wolf's profile dropped significantly in the early and mid-2000s. In 2005, she published a book called The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See, which depicts herself as a prodigal daughter returning to the wise, paternal fold. Wolf's father, Leonard Wolf, taught her to value the power of the imagination above all, and that "heart" mattered more than facts, numbers, and laws. In The Treehouse, Wolf's father's directive to "Destroy the box" was highlighted, emphasizing the importance of rejecting boxes and being willing to destroy them. She later came out with the patriotically paranoiac End of America in 2007, which focused on the dangers of covert government actions and the ways authoritarianism descends on once free societies. The confusion between Naomi and Wolf began when Wolf started writing about the Green New Deal in 2018, with special conspiracy twists. The author's online mentions filled up instantly, with denunciations and excommunication. The confusion flows both ways, with Wolf maintaining a large and seemingly loyal following across several platforms. For most of the first decade of the confusion, the author's public strategy was studious denial. Even when Wolf started tagging her daily in her tweets about the Green New Deal, she did not engage with her or attempt to address the confusion. The author felt that getting repeatedly confused with someone else confirmed their interchangeability and forgettableness, and that anything to dispel the confusion would only draw attention to it and run the risk of further cementing the unwanted association in people's minds. Doppelgangers in literature and film often raise existential questions about identity and the vulnerability of our self-constructed self to external forces. The idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity, as the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control. In novels and films, doppelgangers signal that the protagonist's life is about to be upended, with the double turning their friends and colleagues against them, destroying their career, framing them for crimes, and often having sex with their spouse or lover. The catch-22 of confronting a doppelganger is that you inevitably end up confronting yourself. For the first few years, getting confused with Naomi Wolf appeared to be a social media issue, but later realized that the problem was more structural than personal. Tech platforms that allowed us to eavesdrop on conversations between strangers and actively encouraged us to seek out those exchanges that mentioned us by name (mentions) were being designed by young men who had gotten unfathomably rich. The first time I heard my name confused with Wolf's was in an eavesdropped conversation taking place in a public restroom. As a frequently graffitied-about girl in high school, this felt both familiar and deeply harrowing. If there is a message to take from the destabilizing appearance of my doppelganger, it is to stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media. ENTER COVID, THE THREAT MULTIPLIER In the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, Naomi Wolf was a frequent source of conspiracy claims, hopping from one theory to another. She focused on the virus, its origins, shutdowns, tests, mask mandates, vaccines, and vaccine verification apps. However, she no longer focused on the virus itself, but rather on its role in an experiment, plot, coup, or act of war designed to turn us into technoslaves and convince us to voluntarily relinquish our freedoms while wiping out large swaths of humanity. Within a year of the pandemic being declared, Wolf became a key node in the networks blasting out this kind of terrifying misinformation, nearly doubling her following on Twitter from the year before to reach 138,000. She portrayed virtually every measure health officials took to control the virus as part of these plots,
with the nefarious goals of grabbing our DNA, sickening us, sterilizing us, killing our babies, tracking our every move, turning children into affectless drones, overthrowing the U.S. Constitution, and eroding the power of the West. Wolf's emergence as a relentless source of Covid-related misinformation yielded real-world results, with her website, DailyClout, and new alliances with Republican state lawmakers pushing legislation barring mask mandates and vaccine passports in dozens of Republican states. Within this global network, a few individuals have played an outsize role, and while they started with Covid, they are rapidly moving to all kinds of other plots supposedly designed to usher in tyranny. This flurry of activity by Other Naomi during the Covid era meant that the stakes of getting confused with her had become significantly higher than they were in Manhattan. Her earlier forays into unfounded conspiracies were frequently offensive and no doubt hurtful to those who she hinted were spies or crisis actors. The Covid pandemic has led to a rise in the "vaccine shedding" theory, which suggests that vaccinated people could infect unvaccinated people with dangerous particles. This theory gained traction during the pandemic when many were deciding whether to trust the shots. Fitness trainer and anti-vax influencer "Glowing Mama" became obsessed with the theory, claiming she was "bleeding between [her] period" because people around her had been vaccinated. In a viral video, Glowing Mama raged about her daughter's grandparents wanting to hold their granddaughter, clearly indifferent to the risks they posed to both the child and her. The appeal of the shedding theory is laid bare as the ultimate tool of projection and absolution. The frequency of identity-confusion events increased, and the internet hive mind enjoyed laughing at what outrageous things Other Naomi had said now. She repeatedly called Covid's severity into question, describing it as a "much-hyped medical crisis," and using emergency orders to strip people of their rights. The internet hive mind has been hounded by Naomi Klein's followers, who accuse her of selling out to the "globalists" and duping the public into believing that masks, vaccines, and restrictions on indoor gatherings are legitimate public health measures. It is a vertiginous thing to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are. The dark doppelganger comedy Dual, starring Karen Gillan, explores the absurdity of Naomi's dilemma. Sarah, diagnosed with a fatal disease, clones herself to save her loved ones from grief. However, her clone becomes competitive and replaces her in all her relationships. When Sarah is misdiagnosed and isn't dying, the only solution is a stylized duel to the death between the doubles. The author, like Sarah, began dueling with her dual by wading into the digital fray with her terse "Keep your Naomis straight" posts. During the Covid pandemic, the author was online more than usual, as social media was one thing she didn't have to give up in the name of the virus. The confusion and confusion got worse during the pandemic, as many people were represented by avatars offering more approximated versions of their physical selves. The barriers between the author and Naomi Wolf became blurred, and their public self shrunk down to a thumbnail-sized photo and Twitter's 280-character limit. The author did not join the Twitter pile-ons simply because what Wolf was saying about Covid was important to dispel, but because they felt less important and like they were disappearing. As the Covid pandemic spread, conspiracy peddlers found a ready audience with a generalized fear of getting seriously ill and possibly dying, as well as real worries about public health measures like stay-at-home orders, school closures, and masking. Wolf and her followers were guilty of trigger-happy posting, but many of the people who attacked Wolf for spreading misinformation were also barely reading what they were posting. This led to a destabilizing conflation between Naomi and Wolf, who were treated as one interchangeable Naomi. The author resisted the truth about this conflation for a long time, arguing that while these distinctions matter to him and no doubt to her, most people couldn't care less. They are both Naomis with a skepticism of elite power and have some of the same targets. For instance, the author was furious when Bill Gates sided with drug companies as they defended their patents on lifesaving Covid vaccines, using the World Trade Organization's intellectual property agreement as a weapon. Naomi Wolf was furious that people were being pushed to get vaccinated at all and boosted conspiracies about Bill Gates using vaccines to track people and usher in a sinister world order. For many people glancing at social media during the boring bits of Netflix shows, they are just a blur of opinionated Naomis saying stuff about states of emergencies and Bill Gates. The author reflects on the increasing confusion and misinformation that has become common in the digital age, particularly on social media platforms like Twitter. Machine learning algorithms imitate patterns, leading to more mistakes and confusion for users. This process of enclosure has changed how we relate to one another and the purpose of those relations. The author cites the metaphorical landscapes of The Matrix and its sequels as examples of how humans have become machine food. The author reflects on the rise of social media platforms, noting that individuals are reduced to data sets, losing their individual character, friendships, language, and sensibility. This reduced version of themselves is easier to confuse with others, making it difficult to maintain personal identity. One year into the pandemic, the author felt speechless and unable to say much about Bill Gates's book on climate change. They considered writing about Gates's interference on Covid-19 health policy and his bias towards corporate profits over human safety. However, they realized that any writing about Gates would likely fuel their Other Naomi problem, as it would blend and blur together, sounding like one big conspiracy. They wondered if Twitter would start suppressing their content and if they would continue to face the same issues. The author found themselves unable to deliver fresh content, unable to maintain their identity and the attention economy demands. They found themselves watching their doppelganger blow back on them, feeling like they were fading away. In the 2013 film adaptation of The Double, Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon, a bureaucrat whose identity is stolen and life destroyed by an unscrupulous and flamboyant look-alike. The protagonist, Simon, wishes to think she's pretty unique, but the reality is that many people are trying to be unique at the same time, using the same preprogrammed tools, writing in the same fonts, and answering the same prompts. This has become a viral meme, circulating on platforms where we compete for uniqueness, authenticity, and, for some, proof that in these unreal times we're still really us. The protagonist's doppelganger trouble could have been avoided if they had made good on their teenage threat to legally change their first name. In Montreal's Jewish community, almost everyone pronounced it "Nye-oh-me," with a flat "eye" on the first syllable that sounded whiny and dreary to the reader's ears. The protagonist's mother, who grew up in a Kosher home in Philadelphia, found herself pregnant and married into a family of communists who agreed with Karl Marx that religion was the opiate of the masses. The protagonist's name appears in the Old Testament's book of Ruth, which tells of an Israelite mother, Naomi, whose husband and two sons die, leaving her with only her sons' widows as kin. When the townspeople greet her old friend by her given name, she tells them to call her Mara, which means "bitter." As the period of double vision continued, the bitterness fading, giving way to more complex and unexpected emotions. Being chronically confused with another person may be humiliating, but it is also an oddly intimate experience. A doppelganger is your trail, your shadow, a bit like in the biblical story from which we derive our name. MY FAILED BRAND, OR CALL ME BY HER NAME Naomi Klein, a prominent digital strategy consultant, was confused by Wolf's actions and believed that Naomi Klein should sue for trademark dilution and brand harm. Brand dilution can be caused by three main causes: stretching capacity too thin, introducing unrelated services or products, and losing control of the brand. Nike had recently sued Lil Nas X and the art collective MSCHF for violating their brand, which led to Nike settling the lawsuit. Klein had a conflicted relationship with the idea of humans behaving like corporate brands. Her first book, No Logo, was a critique against lifestyle branding and the idea that individuals should shape and market themselves as commodities. She considered treating Wolf as a branding problem as off-brand.
In the late 1990s, the idea of personal branding was explored in her book, No Logo, which suggested that everyone should aspire to become CEOs of their own companies. However, this concept was mocked by management consultants and was seen as absurd due to the lack of ad budgets for normal humans. The concept of personal branding began as a ruse, with companies and their management consultants pitching it as a way to gain visibility without actual jobs or stable income. Klein imagined carrying out these truths in interviews, but instead, she was asked if she was a brand. This raises questions about the true nature of branding and its false promises. In the early days of her writing career, the author was accused of being a brand by journalists. She insisted that she was an author and not a brand, as the product was not her. However, she was deliberate about the design and positioning of her book, No Logo, which was designed by Bruce Mau and featured an iconic red, white, and black logo. This approach worked, as No Logo sold over a million copies. The author continued to play with the idea of being an anti-brand brand, wearing simple but consistent clothing and taped up a No Logo logo to her water bottle. This disingenuousness led her to want to be the No Logo girl (the face of an emerging anticapitalist movement) while denying that she cared about building a brand. However, as the 1990s began to wind down and an anti-corporate ethos began to take root, the author had to concede that her book had become a signifier. Marketing students bought it in droves, some to signal their closet revolutionaries and others to get ideas for future campaigns. One of her publishers tried to persuade her to trademark the title, but she refused, fearing that others would profit from it. Within a year, someone else filed for the trademark and used a knockoff No Logo logo to sell golf shirts in Florida, olive oil in Italy, craft beer in the UK, and a seedy restaurant in Geneva, Switzerland. By then, when journalists asked her if she had become a brand, it became no longer credible to feign innocence. Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation, and becoming a brand at age thirty would have locked her into performing this particular version of herself indefinitely. The author, who was once a brand, decided to become a poorly managed brand that broke the rules against dilution and overextension. He declined offers to play the role of a celebrity anti-brand activist in ad campaigns and declined to accompany a feature writer on an upscale shopping trip. Instead, he began working on his next book, which took five years to complete and came out seven years after No Logo. The book focused on the ravages of expanding market logics and corporate power, with the blast zone growing ever larger. The author realized that the choice was largely made for him, as he didn't want to lose all his friends. The age of the influencer was upon us, and Toronto was particularly good at producing this new breed of online celebrity. Talented teens and young adults, many from immigrant families, set up cameras in their bedrooms and wrote, goofed, sang, sewed, painted nails, and gamed their way past cultural gatekeepers. Some, like the Toronto comedian Lilly Singh, made it all the way from YouTube to global stardom. Others burned bright and then seemed to disappear, unable to cope with the algorithms' ever-changing demands for fresh content or the abuse that came with such intense and continuous personal exposure. The Corporate Self is a university course that explores the history and impacts of personal branding. Students, mostly in their early twenties, often remember the concept of being a brand starting in middle school when they were pushed to do extracurricular activities for an "amorphous audience down the road." They were also taught to curate and package themselves through their imagined eyes, which they refer to as "The (Safe for Work) Self." Students describe the crafting of college admission essays as the decisive moment when their private sense of self was subsumed by the imperative to create a consumable, public-facing identity. This process required them to label difficult experiences in specifically marketable ways, turning them into something fixed, salable, and potentially profitable. A partitioning occurred between these young people and this thing they were supposed to become to succeed. Self-branding is another form of doubling, an internal sort of doppelganging. For these students, the doubling required of self-branding did not stop once they got into university. One student shared that one of his first assignments had been to develop a thirtysecond elevator pitch for himself, feeling his soul leave his body. The invocation of souls reminds us that this is not the first generation to shape itself for an omniscient eye. The soul, believed to live beyond the body after death, is often the uncanny harbinger of death. A poorly managed brand is less consequential than a poorly managed soul, but the consequences occur in this realm. The concept of digital doubles, an externalized identity partitioned from one's "real" selves, is becoming a universal form of doppelganging. This triad of partitioning, performing, and projecting is rapidly becoming a universal form of doppelganging, generating a figure who is not exactly us but whom others perceive as us. At best, a digital doppelganger can deliver everything our culture trains us to want: fame, adulation, and riches. However, it is a precarious kind of wish fulfillment that can be blown up with a single bad take or post. The fear of our digital doubles taking over our lives and fooling those around us is also found in Netflix's 2018 movie Cam, which tells the story of an online sex worker who gets locked out of her cam girl account and finds herself facing the ultimate horror in the age of the monetized self. In late 2022, social media was inundated with iridescent, smoothed-out, slimmed-down versions of friends, family members, and online acquaintances who had succumbed to the "magic avatar" craze. Many pointed out how this could go wrong in more nefarious ways: someone other than you could pretend to be you, upload your photos, including ones you would never choose to share, and create their own personal doppelganger to exploit, sexually or otherwise. Stephen K. Bannon, Trump's former campaign manager and chief strategist, is cavalier about the possibility of our digital doubles usurping us. He believes that people take on digital selves that are a more perfected version of themselves and where they can control things in a digital way that they can't control in the analogue world. His goal seems to be to turn reality into a game played with live ammunition. Mark Zuckerberg's plans for the "Metaverse" may lead to confusion and misinformation, as people are represented by personalized animated avatars on social media. In March 2022, South Korea elected Yoon Suk-yeol as its new president, who campaigned with a deepfake version of himself, known as AI Yoon. This digital doppelganger was created by Korean company DeepBrain AI Inc., and it has become a pillar of mass culture. The growing field of "grief tech" aims to take the sting out of death by building "legacy avatars" of living people that can be called upon after their deaths to console the bereaved. Students are troubled by the increasing use of digital doppelgangers on social media, but many feel duty-bound to participate in creating their own digital doubles. Simone Browne's 2015 book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, traces the origins of modern-day branding to the literal branding of African people in the transatlantic slave trade. Browne calls this brutal branding "a biometric technology." Today, biometric identification recruits a permanent part of the body to measure and track, allowing enslavers to track racialized bodies via a permanent, unchangeable marker. Branding today is often seen as an act of empowerment, with individuals now fully in charge of their own commodification. However, the commodification of the self, particularly of Black selves, cannot and should not be separated from the brutality of its past. Branding requires an imperative to relate to our self in the third person, which can be alienating and difficult to separate from oneself. In conclusion, the rise of digital doppelgangers and the growing field of "grief tech" raises questions about the authenticity and trustworthiness of our opinions and identities. MEETING MYSELF IN THE WOODS Doppelgangers in Western art, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite painting How They Met Themselves, are often depicted as a couple in medieval dress encountering another couple who are their mirror image. This concept is exemplified in the painting, which depicts a doppelganger journey. The author confronts themselves and the uncomfortable truth that they still care too much about their image, even if they reject personal branding. Author and theorist bell hooks aimed to navigate the tension between individual selves and collective work. She wrote under her great-grandmother's name,
Gloria Jean Watkins, to honor her and put distance between her everyday identity and her author identity. She also wrote her pen name in lowercase letters to remind readers to focus on the substance of books, not who they are. Hooks believed in the power of naming systems and the need to avoid attaching identity signifiers to our beings. She cautioned readers to avoid using the phrase "I am a feminist" and opt for "I advocate feminism," as it does not engage in the either/or dualistic thinking that is central to all systems of domination in Western society. Revisiting hooks's text in the context of the author's dualistic duel highlights the importance of credit claiming in intellectual and activist life. Quoting is essential to bring in the voices of others and expand the frame, not to narrow it further. In 2014, Bell Hooks launched the Bell Hooks Institute in Berea, Kentucky, a space devoted to her work, artifacts, and ideas. She worried about her own legacy and the potential loss of contributions of Black writers to history. She hoped that someone else would preserve her artifacts, but no one came to the fore. The institute aimed to keep her ideas alive, as her ideas about love as a driving force for politics and breaking down interlocking systems of domination mattered. It is concerning when ideas are conflated with shock doctrine, as they are tools of transformation. Wolf and her fellow travelers have spent years mangling the meaning of the fight against authoritarianism, fascism, and genocide, making serious discussion impossible. Brand dilution and harm are trivial matters, but these crimes and the ability to name them matter a great deal. When important ideas and concepts are distorted, it is important to consider the implications of being surrounded by warped doubles and imposters. Charlie Chaplin's satire about the rise of Hitler, The Great Dictator, serves as a reminder that distance offers no protection when faced with a double threatening to engulf one and their world.
PART ONE
Double Life
OCCUPIED
In November 2011, during the height of Occupy Wall Street, two women in Manhattan were discussing Naomi Klein's views on the protests. The two women were both Jewish and had distinct writerly lanes, with Naomi Klein focusing on corporate assaults on democracy and climate change. The two women had intersected with the protests, and their disagreements began when Wolf claimed that the crackdown on Occupy demonstrated the United States tipping into a police state.
Organizers used the human microphone to prevent the police from clearing the protest camp, but Wolf claimed the movement had specific demands and that she had figured them out. She turned the results of her surveying into a short list of demands and delivered it to New York governor Andrew Cuomo at a black-tie event organized by Huffington Post. However, Wolf managed to get herself arrested in a burgundy evening gown, which was what the women in the bathroom were referring to when they talked about how Naomi Klein did not understand their demands.
The bizarre events surrounding Occupy during that eventful fall included rumors of Radiohead performing a free concert, Kanye West and Russell Simmons dropping by, and Alec Baldwin's turn. These bizarre events highlighted the importance of understanding the demands of the protesters and the need for a new generational politics. The women in the bathroom were referring to Naomi Klein's antics as well, as they were just one of many bizarre things swirling around the protests.
The author, Avram Wolf, has been a vocal critic of the media and its portrayal of the world. After the Occupy protests, Wolf claimed that the crackdowns on OWS were the first battle in a civil war, marking a definitive tip into totalitarian rule. This claim was made under George W. Bush, who had predicted that he would not allow the 2008 election to take place. Wolf's new focus on abuses of corporate and political power during states of emergency made her feel like a parody of The Shock Doctrine, with all facts and evidence carefully removed.
In the decade since Occupy, Wolf has connected the dots between an almost unfathomably large number of disparate bits of fact and fantasy. She has floated unsubstantiated speculations about the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, U.S. troops sent to build field hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, ISIS beheadings of U.S. and British captives, the arrest of Dominique StraussKahn, the results of the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence, and the Green New Deal.
Uncovering real conspiracies is the indispensable mission of investigative journalism, but Wolf's theories are not based on actual research. She has also shared remarkable thoughts on Twitter about 5G cellular networks, which have sparked transnational mockery.
The author, who wrote The Beauty Myth as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, believed that girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys, holding sex hostage by beauty and its ransom terms engraved in girls' minds early and deeply. Wolf's online writing today is so frenetic and fantastical that it can be startling to read her early words and remember that she clearly loved language, thought deeply about the inner lives of girls and women, and had a vision for their liberation.
In the 1990s, Germaine Greer declared The Beauty Myth as the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch. Wolf, a feminist writer, argued that the pressure on women to meet impossible beauty standards during the 1980s put them at a competitive disadvantage with men in their fields. She posited that the myth of beauty was invented to drain women's power and focus, keeping them busy with mascara and starvation diets instead of climbing the professional ladder and outperforming their male rivals.
Wolf's version of third-wave feminism charted a path to the center, promising the world to white, middle-class, highly educated women like her. She launched herself into the heart of the liberal establishment in New York City and Washington, D.C., marrying a journalist who became a speechwriter for Bill Clinton and a New York Times editor, consulting with political operative Dick Morris, and helping start an institute on women's leadership.
The press was drawn to Wolf's writing, which focused on the lives of women who were not her own and whose lives were markedly different from her own. Her work was considered such an authority on all things womanly that during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore hired her to coach him on how to appeal to female voters. However, her reports still sparked mockery, including from Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, who wrote that Ms. Wolf is the moral equivalent of an Armani T-shirt, because Mr. Gore has obscenely overpaid for something basic.
In the new millennium, Naomi Wolf's profile dropped significantly in the early and mid-2000s. In 2005, she published a book called The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See, which depicts herself as a prodigal daughter returning to the wise, paternal fold. Wolf's father, Leonard Wolf, taught her to value the power of the imagination above all, and that heart mattered more than facts, numbers, and laws.
In The Treehouse, Wolf's father's directive to Destroy the box was highlighted, emphasizing the importance of rejecting boxes and being willing to destroy them. She later came out with the patriotically paranoiac End of America in 2007, which focused on the dangers of covert government actions and the ways authoritarianism descends on once free societies.
The confusion between Naomi and Wolf began when Wolf started writing about the Green New Deal in 2018, with special conspiracy twists. The author's online mentions filled up instantly, with denunciations and excommunication. The confusion flows both ways, with Wolf maintaining a large and seemingly loyal following across several platforms.
For most of the first decade of the confusion, the author's public strategy was studious denial. Even when Wolf started tagging her daily in her tweets about the Green New Deal, she did not engage with her or attempt to address the confusion. The author felt that getting repeatedly confused with someone else confirmed their interchangeability and forgettableness, and that anything to dispel the confusion would only draw attention to it and run the risk of further cementing the unwanted association in people's minds.
Doppelgangers in literature and film often raise existential questions about identity and the vulnerability of our self-constructed self to external forces. The idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity, as the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control. In novels and films, doppelgangers signal that the protagonist's life is about to be upended, with the double turning their friends and colleagues against them, destroying their career, framing them for crimes, and often having sex with their spouse or lover.
The catch-22 of confronting a doppelganger is that you inevitably end up confronting yourself. For the first few years, getting confused with Naomi Wolf appeared to be a social media issue, but later realized that the problem was more structural than personal. Tech platforms that allowed us to eavesdrop on conversations between strangers and actively encouraged us to seek out those exchanges that mentioned us by name (mentions) were being designed by young men who had gotten unfathomably rich.
The first time I heard my name confused with Wolf's was in an eavesdropped conversation taking place in a public restroom. As a frequently graffitied-about girl in high school, this felt both familiar and deeply harrowing. If there is a message to take from the destabilizing appearance of my doppelganger, it is to stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.
ENTER COVID, THE THREAT MULTIPLIER
In the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, Naomi Wolf was a frequent source of conspiracy claims, hopping from one theory to another. She focused on the virus, its origins, shutdowns, tests, mask mandates, vaccines, and vaccine verification apps. However, she no longer focused on the virus itself, but rather on its role in an experiment, plot, coup, or act of war designed to turn us into technoslaves and convince us to voluntarily relinquish our freedoms while wiping out large swaths of humanity.
Within a year of the pandemic being declared, Wolf became a key node in the networks blasting out this kind of terrifying misinformation, nearly doubling her following on Twitter from the year before to reach 138,000. She portrayed virtually every measure health officials took to control the virus as part of these plots,
with the nefarious goals of grabbing our DNA, sickening us, sterilizing us, killing our babies, tracking our every move, turning children into affectless drones, overthrowing the U.S. Constitution, and eroding the power of the West.
Wolf's emergence as a relentless source of Covid-related misinformation yielded real-world results, with her website, DailyClout, and new alliances with Republican state lawmakers pushing legislation barring mask mandates and vaccine passports in dozens of Republican states. Within this global network, a few individuals have played an outsize role, and while they started with Covid, they are rapidly moving to all kinds of other plots supposedly designed to usher in tyranny.
This flurry of activity by Other Naomi during the Covid era meant that the stakes of getting confused with her had become significantly higher than they were in Manhattan. Her earlier forays into unfounded conspiracies were frequently offensive and no doubt hurtful to those who she hinted were spies or crisis actors.
The Covid pandemic has led to a rise in the vaccine shedding theory, which suggests that vaccinated people could infect unvaccinated people with dangerous particles. This theory gained traction during the pandemic when many were deciding whether to trust the shots. Fitness trainer and anti-vax influencer Glowing Mama became obsessed with the theory, claiming she was bleeding between [her] period because people around her had been vaccinated. In a viral video, Glowing Mama raged about her daughter's grandparents wanting to hold their granddaughter, clearly indifferent to the risks they posed to both the child and her.
The appeal of the shedding theory is laid bare as the ultimate tool of projection and absolution. The frequency of identity-confusion events increased, and the internet hive mind enjoyed laughing at what outrageous things Other Naomi had said now. She repeatedly called Covid's severity into question, describing it as a much-hyped medical crisis, and using emergency orders to strip people of their rights.
The internet hive mind has been hounded by Naomi Klein's followers, who accuse her of selling out to the globalists and duping the public into believing that masks, vaccines, and restrictions on indoor gatherings are legitimate public health measures. It is a vertiginous thing to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are.
The dark doppelganger comedy Dual, starring Karen Gillan, explores the absurdity of Naomi's dilemma. Sarah, diagnosed with a fatal disease, clones herself to save her loved ones from grief. However, her clone becomes competitive and replaces her in all her relationships. When Sarah is misdiagnosed and isn't dying, the only solution is a stylized duel to the death between the doubles. The author, like Sarah, began dueling with her dual by wading into the digital fray with her terse Keep your Naomis straight posts.
During the Covid pandemic, the author was online more than usual, as social media was one thing she didn't have to give up in the name of the virus. The confusion and confusion got worse during the pandemic, as many people were represented by avatars offering more approximated versions of their physical selves. The barriers between the author and Naomi Wolf became blurred, and their public self shrunk down to a thumbnail-sized photo and Twitter's 280-character limit.
The author did not join the Twitter pile-ons simply because what Wolf was saying about Covid was important to dispel, but because they felt less important and like they were disappearing.
As the Covid pandemic spread, conspiracy peddlers found a ready audience with a generalized fear of getting seriously ill and possibly dying, as well as real worries about public health measures like stay-at-home orders, school closures, and masking. Wolf and her followers were guilty of trigger-happy posting, but many of the people who attacked Wolf for spreading misinformation were also barely reading what they were posting. This led to a destabilizing conflation between Naomi and Wolf, who were treated as one interchangeable Naomi.
The author resisted the truth about this conflation for a long time, arguing that while these distinctions matter to him and no doubt to her, most people couldn't care less. They are both Naomis with a skepticism of elite power and have some of the same targets. For instance, the author was furious when Bill Gates sided with drug companies as they defended their patents on lifesaving Covid vaccines, using the World Trade Organization's intellectual property agreement as a weapon. Naomi Wolf was furious that people were being pushed to get vaccinated at all and boosted conspiracies about Bill Gates using vaccines to track people and usher in a sinister world order.
For many people glancing at social media during the boring bits of Netflix shows, they are just a blur of opinionated Naomis saying stuff about states of emergencies and Bill Gates.
The author reflects on the increasing confusion and misinformation that has become common in the digital age, particularly on social media platforms like Twitter. Machine learning algorithms imitate patterns, leading to more mistakes and confusion for users. This process of enclosure has changed how we relate to one another and the purpose of those relations. The author cites the metaphorical landscapes of The Matrix and its sequels as examples of how humans have become machine food.
The author reflects on the rise of social media platforms, noting that individuals are reduced to data sets, losing their individual character, friendships, language, and sensibility. This reduced version of themselves is easier to confuse with others, making it difficult to maintain personal identity. One year into the pandemic, the author felt speechless and unable to say much about Bill Gates's book on climate change. They considered writing about Gates's interference on Covid-19 health policy and his bias towards corporate profits over human safety.
However, they realized that any writing about Gates would likely fuel their Other Naomi problem, as it would blend and blur together, sounding like one big conspiracy. They wondered if Twitter would start suppressing their content and if they would continue to face the same issues. The author found themselves unable to deliver fresh content, unable to maintain their identity and the attention economy demands. They found themselves watching their doppelganger blow back on them, feeling like they were fading away.
In the 2013 film adaptation of The Double, Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon, a bureaucrat whose identity is stolen and life destroyed by an unscrupulous and flamboyant look-alike. The protagonist, Simon, wishes to think she's pretty unique, but the reality is that many people are trying to be unique at the same time, using the same preprogrammed tools, writing in the same fonts, and answering the same prompts. This has become a viral meme, circulating on platforms where we compete for uniqueness, authenticity, and, for some, proof that in these unreal times we're still really us.
The protagonist's doppelganger trouble could have been avoided if they had made good on their teenage threat to legally change their first name. In Montreal's Jewish community, almost everyone pronounced it Nye-oh-me, with a flat eye on the first syllable that sounded whiny and dreary to the reader's ears. The protagonist's mother, who grew up in a Kosher home in Philadelphia, found herself pregnant and married into a family of communists who agreed with Karl Marx that religion was the opiate of the masses.
The protagonist's name appears in the Old Testament's book of Ruth, which tells of an Israelite mother, Naomi, whose husband and two sons die, leaving her with only her sons' widows as kin. When the townspeople greet her old friend by her given name, she tells them to call her Mara, which means bitter. As the period of double vision continued, the bitterness fading, giving way to more complex and unexpected emotions. Being chronically confused with another person may be humiliating, but it is also an oddly intimate experience. A doppelganger is your trail, your shadow, a bit like in the biblical story from which we derive our name.
MY FAILED BRAND, OR CALL ME BY HER NAME
Naomi Klein, a prominent digital strategy consultant, was confused by Wolf's actions and believed that Naomi Klein should sue for trademark dilution and brand harm. Brand dilution can be caused by three main causes: stretching capacity too thin, introducing unrelated services or products, and losing control of the brand. Nike had recently sued Lil Nas X and the art collective MSCHF for violating their brand, which led to Nike settling the lawsuit.
Klein had a conflicted relationship with the idea of humans behaving like corporate brands. Her first book, No Logo, was a critique against lifestyle branding and the idea that individuals should shape and market themselves as commodities. She considered treating Wolf as a branding problem as off-brand.
In the late 1990s, the idea of personal branding was explored in her book, No Logo, which suggested that everyone should aspire to become CEOs of their own companies. However, this concept was mocked by management consultants and was seen as absurd due to the lack of ad budgets for normal humans. The concept of personal branding began as a ruse, with companies and their management consultants pitching it as a way to gain visibility without actual jobs or stable income.
Klein imagined carrying out these truths in interviews, but instead, she was asked if she was a brand. This raises questions about the true nature of branding and its false promises.
In the early days of her writing career, the author was accused of being a brand by journalists. She insisted that she was an author and not a brand, as the product was not her. However, she was deliberate about the design and positioning of her book, No Logo, which was designed by Bruce Mau and featured an iconic red, white, and black logo. This approach worked, as No Logo sold over a million copies.
The author continued to play with the idea of being an anti-brand brand, wearing simple but consistent clothing and taped up a No Logo logo to her water bottle. This disingenuousness led her to want to be the No Logo girl (the face of an emerging anticapitalist movement) while denying that she cared about building a brand.
However, as the 1990s began to wind down and an anti-corporate ethos began to take root, the author had to concede that her book had become a signifier. Marketing students bought it in droves, some to signal their closet revolutionaries and others to get ideas for future campaigns.
One of her publishers tried to persuade her to trademark the title, but she refused, fearing that others would profit from it. Within a year, someone else filed for the trademark and used a knockoff No Logo logo to sell golf shirts in Florida, olive oil in Italy, craft beer in the UK, and a seedy restaurant in Geneva, Switzerland.
By then, when journalists asked her if she had become a brand, it became no longer credible to feign innocence. Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation, and becoming a brand at age thirty would have locked her into performing this particular version of herself indefinitely.
The author, who was once a brand, decided to become a poorly managed brand that broke the rules against dilution and overextension. He declined offers to play the role of a celebrity anti-brand activist in ad campaigns and declined to accompany a feature writer on an upscale shopping trip. Instead, he began working on his next book, which took five years to complete and came out seven years after No Logo. The book focused on the ravages of expanding market logics and corporate power, with the blast zone growing ever larger.
The author realized that the choice was largely made for him, as he didn't want to lose all his friends. The age of the influencer was upon us, and Toronto was particularly good at producing this new breed of online celebrity. Talented teens and young adults, many from immigrant families, set up cameras in their bedrooms and wrote, goofed, sang, sewed, painted nails, and gamed their way past cultural gatekeepers. Some, like the Toronto comedian Lilly Singh, made it all the way from YouTube to global stardom. Others burned bright and then seemed to disappear, unable to cope with the algorithms' ever-changing demands for fresh content or the abuse that came with such intense and continuous personal exposure.
The Corporate Self is a university course that explores the history and impacts of personal branding. Students, mostly in their early twenties, often remember the concept of being a brand starting in middle school when they were pushed to do extracurricular activities for an amorphous audience down the road. They were also taught to curate and package themselves through their imagined eyes, which they refer to as The (Safe for Work) Self.
Students describe the crafting of college admission essays as the decisive moment when their private sense of self was subsumed by the imperative to create a consumable, public-facing identity. This process required them to label difficult experiences in specifically marketable ways, turning them into something fixed, salable, and potentially profitable. A partitioning occurred between these young people and this thing they were supposed to become to succeed.
Self-branding is another form of doubling, an internal sort of doppelganging. For these students, the doubling required of self-branding did not stop once they got into university. One student shared that one of his first assignments had been to develop a thirtysecond elevator pitch for himself, feeling his soul leave his body.
The invocation of souls reminds us that this is not the first generation to shape itself for an omniscient eye. The soul, believed to live beyond the body after death, is often the uncanny harbinger of death. A poorly managed brand is less consequential than a poorly managed soul, but the consequences occur in this realm.
The concept of digital doubles, an externalized identity partitioned from one's real selves, is becoming a universal form of doppelganging. This triad of partitioning, performing, and projecting is rapidly becoming a universal form of doppelganging, generating a figure who is not exactly us but whom others perceive as us. At best, a digital doppelganger can deliver everything our culture trains us to want: fame, adulation, and riches. However, it is a precarious kind of wish fulfillment that can be blown up with a single bad take or post.
The fear of our digital doubles taking over our lives and fooling those around us is also found in Netflix's 2018 movie Cam, which tells the story of an online sex worker who gets locked out of her cam girl account and finds herself facing the ultimate horror in the age of the monetized self. In late 2022, social media was inundated with iridescent, smoothed-out, slimmed-down versions of friends, family members, and online acquaintances who had succumbed to the magic avatar craze. Many pointed out how this could go wrong in more nefarious ways: someone other than you could pretend to be you, upload your photos, including ones you would never choose to share, and create their own personal doppelganger to exploit, sexually or otherwise.
Stephen K. Bannon, Trump's former campaign manager and chief strategist, is cavalier about the possibility of our digital doubles usurping us. He believes that people take on digital selves that are a more perfected version of themselves and where they can control things in a digital way that they can't control in the analogue world. His goal seems to be to turn reality into a game played with live ammunition.
Mark Zuckerberg's plans for the Metaverse may lead to confusion and misinformation, as people are represented by personalized animated avatars on social media. In March 2022, South Korea elected Yoon Suk-yeol as its new president, who campaigned with a deepfake version of himself, known as AI Yoon. This digital doppelganger was created by Korean company DeepBrain AI Inc., and it has become a pillar of mass culture.
The growing field of grief tech aims to take the sting out of death by building legacy avatars of living people that can be called upon after their deaths to console the bereaved. Students are troubled by the increasing use of digital doppelgangers on social media, but many feel duty-bound to participate in creating their own digital doubles.
Simone Browne's 2015 book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, traces the origins of modern-day branding to the literal branding of African people in the transatlantic slave trade. Browne calls this brutal branding a biometric technology. Today, biometric identification recruits a permanent part of the body to measure and track, allowing enslavers to track racialized bodies via a permanent, unchangeable marker.
Branding today is often seen as an act of empowerment, with individuals now fully in charge of their own commodification. However, the commodification of the self, particularly of Black selves, cannot and should not be separated from the brutality of its past. Branding requires an imperative to relate to our self in the third person, which can be alienating and difficult to separate from oneself.
In conclusion, the rise of digital doppelgangers and the growing field of grief tech raises questions about the authenticity and trustworthiness of our opinions and identities.
MEETING MYSELF IN THE WOODS
Doppelgangers in Western art, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite painting How They Met Themselves, are often depicted as a couple in medieval dress encountering another couple who are their mirror image. This concept is exemplified in the painting, which depicts a doppelganger journey. The author confronts themselves and the uncomfortable truth that they still care too much about their image, even if they reject personal branding.
Author and theorist bell hooks aimed to navigate the tension between individual selves and collective work. She wrote under her great-grandmother's name,
Gloria Jean Watkins, to honor her and put distance between her everyday identity and her author identity. She also wrote her pen name in lowercase letters to remind readers to focus on the substance of books, not who they are.
Hooks believed in the power of naming systems and the need to avoid attaching identity signifiers to our beings. She cautioned readers to avoid using the phrase I am a feminist and opt for I advocate feminism, as it does not engage in the either/or dualistic thinking that is central to all systems of domination in Western society.
Revisiting hooks's text in the context of the author's dualistic duel highlights the importance of credit claiming in intellectual and activist life. Quoting is essential to bring in the voices of others and expand the frame, not to narrow it further.
In 2014, Bell Hooks launched the Bell Hooks Institute in Berea, Kentucky, a space devoted to her work, artifacts, and ideas. She worried about her own legacy and the potential loss of contributions of Black writers to history. She hoped that someone else would preserve her artifacts, but no one came to the fore. The institute aimed to keep her ideas alive, as her ideas about love as a driving force for politics and breaking down interlocking systems of domination mattered.
It is concerning when ideas are conflated with shock doctrine, as they are tools of transformation. Wolf and her fellow travelers have spent years mangling the meaning of the fight against authoritarianism, fascism, and genocide, making serious discussion impossible. Brand dilution and harm are trivial matters, but these crimes and the ability to name them matter a great deal.
When important ideas and concepts are distorted, it is important to consider the implications of being surrounded by warped doubles and imposters. Charlie Chaplin's satire about the rise of Hitler, The Great Dictator, serves as a reminder that distance offers no protection when faced with a double threatening to engulf one and their world.
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PART TWO Mirror World THEY KNOW ABOUT CELL PHONES The author divides the period of the Covid-19 pandemic into two phases: Before Bannon and After Bannon. Before Bannon was a chaotic time for Other Naomi Wolf, who shared her bizarre theories about vaccines, quarantining, and vaccine "shedding" and infertility. She faced suspension and lockouts for violating rules against medical misinformation and was bombarded with abuse and mockery online. After Bannon, in March 2021, Wolf shifted and honed her Covid message, focusing on the prospect of vaccine passports. The World Economic Forum had floated the idea of using vaccine-verification passports for international travel, and Israel and the British government had begun to float the idea. Wolf predicted North America would be next and claimed the world was approaching a "cliff" for human liberty from which there would be no returning. The author's doppelganger has rarely shied away from extreme rhetoric, such as predicting domestic coups and accusing the United States of tipping into "fascism." This intemperance presents a challenge when trying to raise a new alarm. The author acknowledges that she has published over two thousand pages about the climate crisis and is constantly trying to find new ways to express the fact that we are unraveling the fabric that sustains human and other-than-human life. In her "slavery forever" video, Fox News host Rachel Wolf claimed that vaccine verification apps, which some governments unwisely referred to as "passports," were not what they seemed. She declared that the apps were a backdoor attempt to usher in a "CCP-style social credit score system," a reference to China's all-pervasive surveillance net that allows Beijing to rank citizens for their perceived virtue and obedience. The vaccine app was like all that, enslaving a billion people. Wolf explained that the vaccination-status QR codes that would be scanned to gain access to restaurants, theaters, and the like would not merely give health authorities data on a person's presence in these indoor venues but also allow a "tyrannical" state to know who you were gathering with and what you were talking about—not only in those restaurants where the code had been scanned but also in your own living room. Once similar apps came to the United States, she warned that if you do not get vaccinated or are otherwise "a dissident," you will be in a second-class category for the rest of your life. Wolf had previously cast the vaccines themselves as grave health threats, but in these Fox News dispatches, she seemed to be saying that the Covid vaccine itself was beside the point. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed that the technology itself does not send some signal to the government of your location and that the claim the app is listening is really outlandish. There have been instances in Western Australia where police accessed data from vaccine app scans as part of investigations into violent crimes. Governments have been criticized for focusing too much on vaccines and smartphone apps instead of maintaining indoor masking requirements and investing in public health-care systems. This could have included hiring more nurses, providing free at-home rapid tests, providing proper protective gear, and adequate sick leave for all workers. Additionally, there could have been more robust efforts to install high-quality air filters in public spaces, including schools, and hiring more teachers and teacher's aides to reduce the spread of the virus. A disability justice advocate, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, suggested that social, economic, and political technologies could have been used to help people survive and thrive during the pandemic. However, governments rarely considered this ambitious agenda, opting for the easier route of relying on vaccines and verification apps. The most significant measure governments could have taken to stop the spread of new variants would have been to make vaccines free and available to the entire global population at the same time as they were rolled out domestically. However, this would require a waiver of intellectual property protections at the World Trade Organization, which would have facilitated lifting the patents that have allowed a handful of pharmaceutical companies to treat the vaccines as permission to print money. The social costs inside wealthy countries of placing so much of the virus-control strategy on vaccinations and verification apps include marginalizing those who are unhoused and vulnerable, as well as the "viral underclass" who are treated as disposable during times of pandemic. The debates surrounding government-mandated health programs are crucial, as they have been the targets of forced sterilization programs and covert medical experimentation over the past century. The Tuskegee experiment of the 1930s was one of the most notorious examples of this, where hundreds of Black men in Alabama were given placebos instead of the best treatments for syphilis, leading to many dying. In response, public health bureaucracies faced skepticism in their efforts to battle Covid in marginalized communities, making them easy prey for misinformation peddlers like Naomi Wolf. Wolf's new approach to vaccine apps and her use of the term "tech CEO" and "I'm the CEO of a tech company" was a reference to DailyClout, a website that hosted her blogs and videos. She painted a world in which Covid health measures are the front lines in a civilizational war between East and West, using the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a reference. Wolf's website was being turned into a clearinghouse for "model legislation" that activists could use at the state level to block future public health measures and defend the "Five Freedoms." These freedoms include the right to be free of mask mandates, vaccine passports, school closures, emergency declarations, and restrictions on commerce and religious gatherings. Wolf's new messaging resonated with both Fox's audience and a sizable cohort of leftists or progressives who were terrified of the Black Mirror surveillance world she described. Her "slavery forever" YouTube post was met with widespread praise, with many quoting scripture and declaring the vaccines and passports "the mark of the beast." Dr. Wolf, a prominent figure in the tech and surveillance world, has been gaining attention for her controversial "Five Freedoms" campaign and calls for anti-vax civil disobedience. She has appeared on Fox seven times in less than two months and has testified against mask and vaccine mandates at various statehouses. Wolf's message resonated with Steve Bannon, who began hosting her as a regular guest on his podcast, War Room. Bannon's endorsement of Wolf's website and "Five Freedoms" legislation mill led to 100,000 unique visits in April 2021. Wolf's message resonated with many people now listening to her, as they felt that we are living through a revolution in surveillance tech, where state and corporate actors have seized outrageous powers to monitor us. The shift in surveillance tech has led to a lack of understanding of the transformational nature of this shift. The liberal snide quip "Wait until they hear about cell phones" is no longer funny, as people know all about cell phones but don't know what to do about them. The past two decades have seen shocking revelations about the record of our daily and intimate lives becoming the property of others. This includes the Patriot Act, the AT&T whistleblower, Edward Snowden's leaks, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook's sale of user data to third parties, and Pegasus, an Israeli-designed spyware used by governments to gain full access to their opponents' phones. Despite the widespread awareness of the potential misuse of personal data, the response to this extraordinary reality has been muted, with much of it sublimated into ironic humor. Wolf's "Five Freedoms" campaign and calls for anti-vax civil disobedience offer a chance for people to regain their privacy and freedoms. In the Corporate Self course, we explore the surveillance architecture as the shadowy back end of personal branding and identity performance culture. As we accept the premise that we must be online for everything, and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies can hoover up about us. With that data, they create our real digital doppelgangers, not the aspirational avatars many of us consciously create with those carefully curated and filtered photos and posts. The machines have devoured so much of us, gorged on so many of our ways and quirks, and can make credible replicas of us near instantly. The stakes are
distinctly higher now, as personal data is extracted without full knowledge or understanding, sold to third parties, and can influence everything from what loans we are eligible for to what job postings we see. The Faustian bargain of the digital age—free or cheap digital conveniences in exchange for our data—was only ever explained to us after it was already a done deal. This represents an enormous and radical shift not only in how we live but also in what our lives are for. We are all mine sites now, data mine sites, and despite the intimacy and import of what is being mined, the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable. Other Naomi taps into barely submerged fears, which are rooted not in fantasy, but reality. Vaccine passports aren't a social credit system, but social media itself kind of is. Corporate platforms can arbitrarily delete users and cut them off from the web of connections they built with their own words, images, and labor over years. Raising the alarm about the fact that we have outsourced the management of our critical informational pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies, working hand in glove with governments, somehow became the terrain of the Bannonite political right, which points to a dangerous future for human existence. DIAGONAL LINES In early June, the narrator is doing yoga and listening to Steve Bannon's War Room while dealing with back pain. This obsession has become a growing gulf between them, intensifying their isolation and cutting them off from friends and family. They decide to block Twitter and spend the summer helping Avi's campaign and focusing on their son and family. A year later, the narrator's father-in-law, Stephen, has a recurrence of cancer and requests a month with his family on Prince Edward Island. He resolves to spend his time coming back into his lost self, cooking healthy meals, and meaningfully engaging with his family. He also decides not to spend more time on Other Naomi and will return in September. When the island's quarantine ends, the narrator reconnects with his family and realizes that he hasn't thought about her in over two weeks. He has a conversation with his mother-in-law about the book of Ruth, which he believes is about loyalty and the origin story of their name. They agree that it's best not to impose their values on biblical stories and return to their coffees in someone else's sun-drenched kitchen. The conversation is fleeting, and there is no full-blown relapse into the narrator's world. The conversation was fleeting, and it wasn't until another week that they realized that their obsession with Wolf had become a part of their lives. The author recounts their experience of experiencing back pain while driving on a small island with low Covid rates outside New Zealand. They decided to seek professional help and found themselves alone on a two-lane road, surrounded by natural beauty. They realized they had barely been in sixteen months and decided to listen to Steve Bannon's podcast, War Room, which featured a speech by Donald Trump, recorded live, and reactions from Wolf. This elevated status on the podcast marked a major development in the life of Wolf, as it signaled real power and the ability to reach and potentially influence the behavior of millions of people. The author acknowledges that Wolf's elevated status on Bannon's podcast marked a significant development in her life, as it signified real power and the ability to reach and potentially influence the behavior of millions of people. However, the author realizes that this is not that simple. Bannon's War Room has built an explicitly activist media platform, cultivating a feeling that his audience is part of a rolling meeting between a commander and his field generals, reporting back from their various fronts. The show's appeal is its lack of slickness, underlined by Bannon's trademark personal dishevelment, such as dark, rumpled button-down shirts, chaotic waves of gray hair, and blotchy face. It is a show with no spectators, only proud members of the "War Room posse" or soldiers in his "cavalry." Naomi Wolf, a prominent liberal and leftist figure, has been a key player in the political landscape during the Covid pandemic. She joined Trump's class-action lawsuit against Twitter and became one of its most recognizable characters, appearing on War Room nearly every weekday for two weeks. This shift in alliances is significant as it reflects the redrawing of political maps in countries, blurring left-right lines and provoking previously apolitical cohorts to take to the streets. The pandemic has also led to the formation of strange-bedfellow coalitions, manifesting in large protests against lockdowns and health measures that would have made lockdowns unnecessary. These new alliances eventually kicked off the Freedom Convoy, which shut down Ottawa for three weeks and spread to the United States and Europe, branching out from Covid-related grievances to a more general cry for "freedom." These formations bring together various political and cultural strains, such as the traditional right, QAnon conspiratorial hard right, alternative health subcultures, neo-Nazis, parents, and small-business owners. While Wolf is neither a QAnon cultist nor a neo-Nazi, most seem to agree that the pandemic is a plot by Davos elites to push a reengineered society under the banner of the "Great Reset." In Germany, the movement often describes its politics as Querdenken, which means lateral, diagonal, or outside-the-box thinking. It has forged worrying alliances between New Age health obsessives and several neofascist parties, taking up the anti-vaccination battle cry as part of a Covid-era resistance to "hygiene dictatorship." Diagonalism, inspired by the term Querdenken, refers to these emergent political alliances, contesting conventional monikers of left and right, expressing ambivalence or cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and blending convictions about holism and spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties. Right-wing political parties have managed to absorb the unruly passions and energy of diagonalism, folding its Covid-era grievances into preexisting projects opposing "wokeness" and drumming up fears of migrant "invasions." However, it is important for these movements to present themselves as ruptures with politics-as-usual and claim to be something new, beyond traditional left-right poles. Having a few prominent self-identified progressives and/or liberals involved is critical. The role of these progressives is not to renounce the goals of social justice and embrace a hard-right worldview, but to continue to identify as proud members of the left or devoted liberals while claiming that their former comrades and colleagues are the imposters, the fakes. Naomi Wolf, for example, has become particularly practiced at this maneuver. When she first started appearing on right-wing media outlets in 2021, her posture was reticent, anything but defiant. Now, she claims that right-wing shows like Carlson's and Bannon's were the only ones courageous enough to give her a platform. The key message from diagonalist politics is that the very fact that these unlikely alliances are even occurring, that the people involved are willing to unite in common purpose despite their past differences, serves as proof that their cause is both urgent and necessary. This is similar to how evangelical Christians were coaxed by their leaders to set aside the fact that Trump's behavior violated their professed values. The author discusses the rise of feminist author, Jennifer Wolf, who has aligned herself with those waging war on women's freedom. Wolf's actions reflect the values of the attention economy, which have trained many to measure their worth using volume-based matrixes. She joined Facebook in 2008 and fully embraced its self-publishing potentials, sending long, unedited, and often fact-free theories into the world. Wolf is good at the internet, packaging her ideas in listicles for the clickbait age and her website, DailyClout, demonstrating her success in mastering the art of internet monetization. She takes advertising, sells swag with a stylized wolf logo, and charges $3.99 a month for a "premium" membership and $9.99 a month for a "pro" one. She also collects donations, despite it being a business, not a charity. The name Wolf chose for her site is telling because what Wolf turned into over the past decade is something very specific to our time: a clout chaser. Clout is the values-free currency of the always-online age—both a substitute for hard cash as well as a conduit to it. It is understood by the left and the right. The many conspiracies Wolf has floated in recent years are about subjects that were dominating the news and generating heat at the time. Covid-19 marked the first viral pandemic also to be experienced via viral stories on social media, creating "squared virality." This squared virality meant that if you put out the right kind of pandemic-themed content, headlined with tabloid-style teasers, you could catch a digital magic-carpet ride that would make all previous experiences of virality seem leaden in comparison.
Disaster doppelgangers are individuals who profit from the aftermath of crises, such as hurricanes and wars, by mining our attention. These individuals often share over-the-top conspiracy theories about how the disaster was manufactured by a shady cabal to bring in their New World Order/eugenicist agenda. The economic incentives for this kind of online content serve to distract from the real scandals that urgently need our attention. The rise of disaster doppelgangers can be explained by addiction, as seen in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic of doppelganger literature, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Many people have turned into digital-age versions of themselves due to the dopamine-releasing serum they are using during the pandemic. This phenomenon has led to a shift in public figures, such as Naomi Wolf, who has become a superstar within the digital world. The irony of liberal Twitter celebrating Wolf's disappearance is partly due to the way platforms have programmed us with their tools. While some people mute freely, it is unsettled by the ease with which we can turn off other humans. It may be easier to accept that tech companies can do the same and eject people with an automated message. This could also happen in real-world relationships, as seen with Naomi Wolf, who has published thousands of words detailing the family members, neighbors, and friends who effectively deleted her over her Covid antics. In conclusion, disaster doppelgangers are individuals who profit from the aftermath of crises, often using conjecture and clickbait exaggeration to distract from the real scandals that need our attention. MAGA’S PLUS-ONE The author recalls their father's experience as a family doctor and pediatrician at McGill University, where he ran large randomized control trials on the impact of interventions on health outcomes for mothers and babies. The author recalls the horrors of postnatal incontinence and vaginal tearing during the trials, and the one-way glass technology used in medical examination rooms. The author is now a fan of Steve Bannon's show, which often features him watching patients through a mirror and microphone. Bannon is known for his role in pushing the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election and was betrayed by Republican representatives and operatives who refused to overturn Biden's victory. Many listeners organize to ensure that the precinct strategy will be in place to certify another election win by the Democrats. Bannon's deepest skill lies in constructing and expanding the various reflective surfaces in the Mirror World, which includes mirror arguments and political agendas designed to repel arguments deployed by his adversaries. The author's experience with Bannon's show has led to a deep understanding of the Mirror World, where there is a copycat story and answer for everything, often with very similar key words. The author's experience highlights the dangers of allowing one-way mirrors in medical settings and the importance of avoiding such practices in the future. Trump and Vladimir Putin have been masters of mirroring, deflection, and projection, often using the same tactics to make their arguments. This strategy has been evident in their handling of accusations, such as Trump's accusation of sexual assault and Hillary Clinton's press conference with women who had accused Bill Clinton of various crimes. Putin's mirroring is also evident in Russia's illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, where he accuses the Ukrainian government of the exact crimes he is busily committing or considering committing himself. Bannon's mirror tricks include latching onto legitimate fears of surveillance and Big Tech, which were going largely unaddressed in liberal circles. The Covid-19 virus originated from a wet market in Wuhan, but the "lab leak theory" became a key talking point, mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons and anti-Asian racism. Most liberals and leftists didn't bother looking for months, leading to over-the-top conspiracies feeding overcredulity and not questioning enough. Similarly, questions about the safety of new vaccines for pregnant or considering getting pregnant could have been treated more respectfully. Public debates and reliable media should have allowed for concerns about how the vaccines would impact reproductive health and called on medical experts to explain vaccine research methods and vulnerabilities during pregnancy. People have good reasons not to trust both Big Pharma and Big Government, especially in an era of water poisoning, gas companies, Monsanto, and the opioid crisis. Johnson & Johnson, one of the major vaccine makers, has been ordered to pay out billions in legal settlements over alleged harm caused by its prescription medications and talcum powder. The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a lack of coverage of adverse reactions to vaccines, particularly in the context of fertility concerns. This reluctance to provide more information on potential risks has allowed attention-economy hustlers to position themselves as fearless medical investigators, cherry-picking self-reported claims and negative reactions to support their cries of a vaccine "genocide." In April 2022, researchers estimated that a quarter of the one million Americans deaths from Covid-19 could have been prevented with primary series vaccination. The responsibility for this catastrophic loss rests with those who spread dangerous lies about vaccines that are remarkably safe and effective at reducing Covid's severity. The debates surrounding closing schools for in-person learning also suffered under similar polarized logics. The solution should have been to invest in outdoor conservation and recreation programs to help teens and young adults face mental health crises during lockdowns. However, many liberals and progressives opted to defend status quo measures, despite the fact that they could and should have demanded far more. When something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. People who complied with public health measures judged those who did not for their refusal to prioritize the well-being of the immunocompromised and their indifference to the sacrifices made by healthcare workers. When unvaccinated people became ill with Covid, many of them argued that they didn't deserve health care or even declared themselves nonpeople. This has led to a sense of isolation and a growing sense of mutualism among individuals. Steve Bannon, a strategist and strategist, is closely monitoring the issues we are abandoning, the debates we are not having, and the people we are insulting and discarding. He is stitching together a political agenda out of it, called "MAGA Plus," which he believes is the ticket to the next wave of electoral victories. Bannon has a knack for identifying issues that his opponents have neglected or betrayed, leaving themselves vulnerable to having parts of their base wooed away. In 2016, Bannon helped Trump do so by recognizing the betrayals of his rivals and crafting a campaign message out of them. Bannon quickly folded vaccine apps into a basket of issues he calls "Big Tech Warfare," a category that includes not only familiar complaints about social media companies suspending the accounts of high-profile conservatives but also more obscure and even esoteric concerns. He has identified a neglected issue with cross-partisan appeal: many leftists are concerned about the dehumanizing impacts of tech on workers treated as extensions of machines, and the dystopian possibilities of a future in which the rich can buy genetic upgrades for themselves and their kids. Bannon recognized similar neglect happening with Big Pharma, as there was weak resistance among progressives to the way vaccine manufacturers were profiteering from the pandemic. He sometimes plays audio montages of MSNBC and CNN shows being "brought to you by Pfizer"—the clear implication being that they cannot be trusted because they are in the pay of these companies. Rising stars on the right are promising a mix-and-match of bringing back factory jobs, building the border wall, fighting the toxic drug supply, liberating speech from Big Tech, and banning "woke" curricula. This electoral diagonalism has taken root in countries around the world, from Sweden to Brazil. Internationalist left movements have protested outside meetings of the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum in Davos, G8 summits, and the International Monetary Fund for their roles in undermining democracies and advancing the interests of transnational capital. However, these critiques of oligarchic rule are being fully absorbed by the hard right and turned into dark doppelgangers of themselves. Giorgia Meloni, Italy's first female prime minister, is an early partner in Steve Bannon's international populist project, threading her speeches with pop-culture references and railing against a system that reduces everyone to consumers. She blames trans people, immigrants, secularists, internationalism, and the left for a hollowness at the core of modernity. Bannon is not offering his listeners any real alternative to the corporate predation he rails against, but he is fleecing them in more smalltime ways, telling them to buy precious metals, FJB coins, disasterready meals, and towels from his main sponsor, MyPillow. He adopts many of the arguments of what was once a
robust antiwar left to oppose ballooning U.S. military spending in Ukraine and then does everything he can to aim that same sprawling complex directly at China, a surefire recipe for World War III. The arrival of one's doppelganger is a message that something needs attending to, and it feels like this flashing message is something to which a great many of us need to attend. The left often focuses on differences obsessively, finding opportunities to break apart. However, this approach can be unstrategic as the Mirror World is always there to catch and praise those who are being targeted. Bannon's signature move is to reach out to anyone who has recently been exiled by the left or pilloried by The New York Times and offer them a platform. He has even begun to adopt the language of "othering" to describe how liberals treat his listeners. Bannon has made clear efforts to tone down the overt racism of his show, focusing on "inclusive nationalism" and addressing growing numbers of Black and Latino people, particularly men, who are open to voting Republican. Similar attempts at diversifying the hard-right base can be seen in Australia and France, which are still built around hate and division. Bannon's endgame is not hidden, but he promises to run the country for one hundred years for every ethnicity, color, race, and religion. If this approach doesn't pan out in the 2022 midterms, backup plans are in the works. According to a Public Religion Research Institute poll, almost four in ten Republicans believe that true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save their country. To develop a thug caste, leaders send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens. Naomi Wolf, who wrote about this in 2007 on War Room, is now found regularly on the show, hosting a man trying to ensure that thugs will be at every polling station to restore public order. Bannon keeps his composure, knowing that pissed-off, mostly white suburban moms will be at every polling station to restore public order. This approach can help create a more inclusive nationalism and help build support for the left in the face of xenophobic hate and division. RIDICULOUSLY SERIOUS, SERIOUSLY SPEECHLESS The author discusses the confusion caused by the name Naomi Campbell, which has occurred many times in her life. She believes that the name is uncommon enough that the first Naomi a person becomes aware of tends to imprint herself in their mind as a universal Naomi. For the first decade of her public life, television hosts would say, "Coming up next, a conversation with Naomi Campbell." This often led to her developing a self-deprecating schtick, apologizing for disappointing viewers who expected a luminous supermodel to prowl into the studio and ended up with a five-foot-six anticapitalist author instead. In 2004, while reporting on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, she received leaked Carlyle Group documents that seemed to show former secretary of state James Baker III was attempting to use his position as President George W. Bush's envoy on Iraq's debt to pressure the government of Kuwait into making deals with the Carlyle Group. The author played this story for laughs, mainly to fellow journalists, but it is less weird considering Campbell testified at the international war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor. The slippery quality of her name is rarely as helpful as it was on the Baker story, but it is occasionally entertaining. The author aims to explore the concept of doubles and the repressed id in their prose, drawing on Freud's theory of the uncanny, Carl Jung's theories of synchronicity, and works by Poe, Saramago, Dostoyevsky, and Charles Dickens. They also explore real-world examples of writers being tormented by their doubles, such as Graham Greene's 1980 essay collection, Ways of Escape. However, the author finds Philip Roth to be the only author who truly understands the pain of being double-yoked to a clown and potentially contributing to human suffering and death. The author's last encounter with Roth was when they read his book, The Counterlife, at age twenty, and decided not to read another book by him. However, their research led them to Operation Shylock, a doppelganger novel considered his masterwork. The author was annoyed when his research led them to Operation Shylock, which was suddenly all over the news after his death in 2018. Roth had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect his literary and interpersonal legacy, including ending a contract with biographers, putting draconian controls on his archive, and entrusting his story to writer Blake Bailey. Most reviews were glowing, but weeks after the book's release, sexual assault allegations surfaced, and the U.S. publisher took Philip Roth: The Biography out of print. The author wonders what hope the author has of getting their Other Naomi situation under control if Roth failed to protect his name. Operation Shylock, first published in 1993, is a gripping doppelganger book by Philip Roth. The novel follows the protagonist, "Real Roth," who is destabilized after a mental-health breakdown. He discovers that there is a man named "Fake Roth," who believes the creation of Israel was a grave mistake and encourages Israeli Jews to reverse-exodus to Eastern European lands. Fake Roth has even met with European heads of state, passing for the actual Roth. He has even launched a hate-detox program called "Anti-Semites Anonymous," designed for his own anti-Semitic girlfriend, Jinx. Real Roth is convinced that this is dangerous, so he impersonates his impersonator when he travels to Jerusalem. The novel explores the tension between the human desire for uniqueness and the powerful craving to see one's self reflected in another person's being. This tension is explored in doppelganger mystery, which is often overlooked in literature. The 2023 remake of Dead Ringers, starring Rachel Weisz as twin-sister obstetricians, mines the contradictory drives toward individuation and the need for others, repulsion, and love, giving doppelgangers their emotional charge. In Shylock, the author assigns contradictory feelings to two different Roths, Real Roth and Fake Roth. Real Roth is horrified by his doppelganger and confronts him over his identity theft. Fake Roth embraces Real Roth, shedding tears of intimate familiarity. Real Roth is destabilized and unable to share Fake Roth's familial delight in looking into a living mirror. Fake Roth concedes that the author Roth could have a trademark case against him, pointing to a successful case against Johnny Carson against Here's Johnny Portable Toilets. Real Roth does not sue, opting for a wild journey impersonating his impersonator through the West Bank and beyond. Fake Roth's opposition to Israel as a Jewish state and belief in the diaspora as the best place for Jewish culture and ideas came from Philip Roth, not the character. Roth had been attacked as a "self-hating Jew" since his twenties, and his New Jersey characters were too flawed. He expanded his critical gaze from Newark to Israel and the violent radicalization fueling the expansion of Jewish outposts in the Occupied Territories. This skepticism toward Zionism and defense of diaspora as an exciting and legitimate place to be a Jew is a big part of what makes Roth a great writer. Operation Shylock is a novel by David Roth that explores the concept of "pipikism," or bellybuttonism, in modern politics. The author argues that Fake Roth takes Roth's real critiques and makes them fanatical and cartoonish, while performing an over-the-top amalgam of psychosexual neuroses. This leads to confusion with Wolf, who declares every major shock and lesser crisis as a plot against America. The diagonalist alliance Wolf has built with Bannon, which translates into political power at the state level and beyond, will continue to affect countless lives. However, the sheer ridiculousness of Wolf's antics makes it almost impossible to fully take her seriously. Real Roth attempts to exercise control over his "preposterous proxy" by refusing to call him by their shared name and instead renaming him Moishe Pipik, which means "Moses Bellybutton." However, this renaming backfires as Fake Roth remains ensnared in pipikism, which farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, and superficializes everything. The problem with these monstrous clowns is not only that they say foolish things but also that everything they touch becomes foolish, including the powerful language we need to talk about them and what they are doing. The author thinks of these figures as "dumbpelgangers," pipping so many terms and concepts that they risk leaving us all speechless. The author, in Shylock, discusses the ways in which the forces of pipikism have influenced her writings on shock exploitation. She believes that the catalyzing crises were not being manufactured as part of a grand backroom plot to exploit them but were exploited opportunistically to circumvent political opposition to unpopular policies. She questions whether the ways she has asked people to be suspicious of power during moments of shock feed into this mushrooming of conspiracies. During the Covid years, politicians and corporate leaders have repeatedly used shock doctrine strategies, such as the British government creating a "highpriority lane" to produce masks and other pandemic protective gear. The Tory government smuggled in various forms of private care as supposed solutions,
with fears that a fuller auctioning off of Britain's cherished NHS could be in store. In Canada, similar attempts at backdoor health care privatization have been made in several provinces. The author also discusses how large tech companies like Google and Amazon were taking advantage of lockdowns to push a wish list of "no touch" technologies, rapidly rebranding them as "Covid-safe." These trends were underway pre-pandemic but underwent a warp-speed acceleration during the early months of lockdown. The author begins to doubt herself, questioning whether she should not have reported how tech companies were exploiting the crisis and whether she could have done more in all of her shockrelated writings to stress that real emergencies do exist and do require emergency measures. The author finds it difficult to keep talking about actual disaster capitalism without it being sucked into the whirring conspiracy mill, as pipikism has thwarted her. The Mirror World has been undercutting attempts to address real crises such as climate breakdown, mass incarceration, and exploitative working conditions. In 2020, there was widespread belief that the pandemic might be a catalyst for structural changes in societies. This belief deepened when protesters demanded an end to police killings of Black people and a radical reimagining of public priorities and spending. However, just a few months later, much of the sense of possibility evaporated. The idea of treating the pandemic as a portal to something new was being systematically pipiked in the Mirror World by people like the author. The idea of treating the pandemic as a portal to something better, greener, and fairer was getting mixed up and conflated with the conspiracy talk about how "globalist elites" at the World Economic Forum were trying to harness the recovery for their Great Reset. By early 2021, any discussion about how our societies could and should change in response to the reality of overlapping and intersecting crises was immediately shouted down by the diagonalists as being part and parcel of a conspiracy hatched on a Swiss mountaintop by Bill Gates. The effect of this constantly expanding sphere of pipikism is that it is not just more difficult to talk about real examples of disaster profiteering or the need for a Green New Deal. Gradually, it has come to feel as if every idea of any import, every word that might express the magnitude of our moment, has been boobytrapped before it can even be uttered. The problem of speechlessness goes deeper than the continuous abuse that important words are taking in the Mirror World. It may also have to do with a creeping uncertainty about the role words play, their basic utility, and their potential for changing the world. THE FAR RIGHT MEETS THE FAR-OUT In the summer of 2021, the Canadian government dismissed the research on the Mirror World as a U.S. phenomenon. However, the author discovered that a woman named Romana Didulo had declared herself "Queen of Canada," issuing decrees ordering businesses to cease checking for proof of vaccination or face the death penalty. This led to a cluster of protesters holding signs similar to those seen in Other Naomi. The Canadian government had delegated most Covid communications to Dr. Bonnie Henry, a public health officer who was anti-Trump. Infection levels remained low during the first year, and artists painted murals of her. Covid denialism and Great Reset hysteria were circulating in Canada, but it seemed to be cordoned off on the political right. Many voters were leaving the Conservative Party and flocking to the fringe and anti-immigrant People's Party, which had lifted its election talking points straight from the Mirror World. The author warned Avi, who was running with the NDP, that denialism was slicing a diagonal line across borders. He was too busy drafting policy positions on real crises, such as water shortages, skyrocketing rents, high housing costs, inadequate public transit, and logging of oldgrowth forests. The author believed reality was on the ballot, but the situation was not as clear-cut as it seemed. Political canvassing is a challenging task, especially 17 months into a surreal global event. The author and their partner Tak have rung bells and logged only one positive interaction on their clipboard. They arrive at a house with a solar array and an electric car charging in the driveway, where the woman who opened the door is disheveled and embarrassed. They explain that they are here to find out what issues are on their mind ahead of the federal election. The woman is disappointed with the leader of the NDP for selling out to globalists. The author tries to extend a bridge by mentioning her writing career and the NDP's support for big business and bad trade deals. She decides to go with the People's Party. Tak and the author receive warm reception from Punjabi Canadians who appreciate the NDP's support for farmers in India during a mass uprising. They head for the scheduled debrief at the home of a party stalwart, Avi, who had been knocking on doors a few blocks over. Avi tells them the story of a white woman dressed in yoga gear and ready for a fight. She asks Avi about her position on vaccine passports and how she has a strong immune system. Avi agrees, but the concern is that not everyone has a strong immune system, and some people have compromised systems that make the virus more likely to make them seriously ill or even die. In this hippy-dippy West Coast community, the woman's response is that those people should die, and she disappears into a cloud of sandalwood. The author and his friend, Avi, witnessed a growing wave of diagonalism in their rural community during the pandemic. They witnessed a large protest outside a hospital, where demonstrators interfered with patients and hurled abuse at nurses. The protest was part of a coordinated "World Wide Walkout" day against vaccine mandates. The author suggested that they would validate concerns about data and privacy, and focus on regulating tech companies and Big Pharma. They also suggested expanding public health care to include prescription drugs and creating jobs in public health and preventive medicine. However, the author did not expect this level of dialogue to work with some voters. They were shocked by the things they saw and heard from their neighbors, such as lifelong voters for the NDP shrugging off mass death and longtime environmentalists advocating for the right to be unvaccinated. The author believed that the line between "them" and "us" had been blurred, and a poisonous compound had been released in the culture, enmeshed with powerful notions of natural living, bodily strength, fitness, purity, and divinity, alongside their opposites: unnaturalness, bodily weakness, slothfulness, contamination, and damnation. Fitness and alternative health subcultures have historically mixed with fascist and supremacist movements. In the United States, early fitness and bodybuilding enthusiasts were enthusiastic about eugenics and breeding for a superior human form. The Nazi Party was riven with health fads and extreme occult beliefs, which were all marshaled in the project of building an Aryan super race of godlike men. After the horrors of the Second World War, the fascist/fitness/New Age alliance broke apart. The people at the extreme end of this spectrum did not deny Covid outright, but rather they cast the virus as a kind of cleansing or "culling of the herd," mixing in ecofascist beliefs and imagining the pandemic as a means by which the natural world would be rehabilitated from human stresses. This line of thought was rampant in the early days of lockdowns, but now the embrace of a certain amount of human death is becoming more overt and explicitly linked to opposing the vaccines. The idea that pandemics are carrying out the work of a greater power—whether that power is imagined as God or as nature—is integral to the origin myth of the modern world. The surge in ecofascist thought is predictable in our current historical moment, as having two jobs is no guarantee of affording a home and climate breakdown is approaching. Climate justice narratives, such as the belief that people of good conscience can unite and transform societies, are becoming increasingly difficult to believe. Another narrative, which spread faster, suggests that people will suffer, but this requires rationalizing the mass suffering of others. This narrative is based on a historical loop where one group has allowed violence to be inflicted on another group, allowing the beneficiaries to participate or look away. These narratives have been resurgent on the right, evident in the presence of protofascist and authoritarian leaders in countries like Brazil, India, Hungary, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey. These narratives are spreading diagonally from authoritarian conservatives to parts of the green and New Age left, following well-worn neural pathways with long and sinister histories. In New Jersey, early anti-lockdown defiance came mainly from two groups: extremely religious evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jewish neighbors. These groups believed their faith acts as a force field against harm, and failing to follow God's directives for communal prayer posed a greater risk than braving the
aerosol particulates of their fellow believers. Gym rats also defied health orders, organizing demonstrations and demanding the right to lift weights indoors. This connection between extreme faith and extreme fitness emerged when New Age wellness influencers shared Covid conspiracies, which has since become popularized. Body people, including gym owners, yoga teachers, CrossFit instructors, masseuses, mixed martial artists, chiropractors, lactation consultants, doulas, nutritionists, herbalists, menopause coaches, and certified juice therapists, play a significant role in the wellness industry. Many of these professionals are highly trained and knowledgeable about human physiology and have taken Covid seriously. However, some prominent figures in this lucrative sector have gone full-blown Covid-QAnon. The Center for Countering Digital Hate issued a list of twelve individuals responsible for originating roughly 65 percent of the junk claims circulating about Covid and vaccines. These individuals have built personal brands around being experts on women's bodies, such as Christiane Northrup, who wrote Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, and Kelly Brogan, who have built personal brands around being experts on women's bodies. These subcultures have monetized the far-out by having large online platforms and strong personal brands, which they use to sell high-priced retreats, seminars, memberships, newsletters, and tinctures. Small businesses and freelancers who work with or on bodies were among the hardest hit by pandemic lockdowns. Early Covid relief programs were heavily biased toward larger workplaces with many staff employees, and small owner-operated fitness studios often fell through the cracks of government aid. Gym owners took on large personal debts to keep operating under stringent new rules, which led to an economic slaughter. The outrage that was pervasive in the wellness world set the stage for many wellness workers to see sinister elite plots in everything having to do with the virus. The virulence of conspiracies in the wellness world is unclear, but it is clear that the quest for optimal fitness and "vibrant health" turned nasty due to the lockdowns. In The Beauty Myth, feminist writer Wolf argued that the elevated beauty expectations imposed on women in the 1980s were a tax on feminism's successes. In Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Barbara Ehrenreich tracked the ways that the quest for health and wellness became obsessive pursuits in the Reagan and Thatcher era and has only grown in influence since. Ehrenreich argued that this turn was a reaction not to feminism's successes but rather to the failures of revolutionary movements, when the high hopes of the 1960s and '70s slammed into the brick wall of '80s neoliberalism. In this context, many turned their attention toward perfecting the body, with treadmills replacing protest marches and free weights replacing free love. The pressures were far greater for women at the start, but soon enough, even heterosexual cis men would face their own unattainable fitness and beauty standards and myths. The quest for health and wellness in the 1980s was a kind of doubling, where the person dedicating themselves to transformation through diet and fitness has the same self as they wish they could be, always just out of reach. Carmen Maria Machado's story "Eight Bites" explores the relationship between the thin self and the fat self as a form of inner doppelganger, with the narrator being haunted by the fat she shed as a result of the surgery. AUTISM AND THE ANTI-VAX PREQUEL The author discusses their experiences raising a neurodivergent child, T., and the challenges they faced in the autism parent community. They moved to Toronto to be closer to Avi's family and big-city services, but found that services for children like T. were extremely scarce. Early intervention was critical, and there was only one "autism team" serving hundreds of schools. The author sought support groups and met other parents who had managed to make these broken systems work for their kids. Although they found some support groups, they also discovered an industry of strange magical cures, such as vitamin injections, eliminationist diets, and immersive therapy. Some Autism Warrior Parents identified as "war" with the autism in their child and coached each other on horrific treatments. One parent told the author that aggressive early intervention is essential. After their child's diagnosis, the author began reaching out to parents of autistic children for company and guidance. They accepted a chair at Rutgers University in 2018 in part as a Hail Mary, where they learned that the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act were significantly tougher tools than anything they had north of the border. Parents in New Jersey used these laws to push local schools to provide meaningful access for their kids. In summary, the author's experiences in the autism parent community highlight the challenges faced by parents dealing with the unique needs of their children. The "vaccine-autism myth" is a viral narrative that claims childhood immunizations for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) are the cause of autism. This narrative laid the foundation for the anti-Covid vaccine movement. The earlier claims rely on a discredited paper published in The Lancet in 1998, which was retracted by its publisher. However, almost a quarter century after Wakefield's paper first appeared, the myth is more prevalent than ever. It continues to be spread by a global network of Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and documentaries that impersonate investigative journalism. The blame for the spike in misinformation falsely claiming that vaccines cause autism is usually linked with the rise of social media and the fact that junk vaccine science circulates there unchecked for years. Telling parents that children are permanently disabled by routine vaccinations is a sensational message, seemingly made for the attention economy. However, social media only intensified tendencies that were already present. In conversations with autism parents who have gone the vaccine-blaming route, they feel like they have been cheated or wronged. A more pervasive kind of doppelganging—the doubling that can occur between parents and their children—has little to do with Wolf. This part of the doppelganger story has little to do with Wolf but has to do with a more pervasive kind of doppelganging—the doubling that can occur between parents and their children. Procreation has long been viewed as a form of temporal doubling, with the child sometimes given the same name as the father or mother, extending the parent's legacy and fortune into the future. The shame and pathologizing of kids who are different in our culture often stems from the pride taken in children who seem perfect and meet all social standards. This inability to see children as autonomous beings has led to the hiding of disabled children in cruel institutions, as having a child who challenges social standards might mean that one's personal brand is in crisis. Cultural pressures often credit parents for their children's successes and judge them harshly for their children's challenges. However, there are some parents who can't seem to get past the shattering of their fantasies and end up searching for cures, conspiracies, and extreme therapies that seek to "extinguish" behaviors rather than understanding and supporting them. Aaden Friday, an autistic and nonbinary author, argues that many autistic children grow up in environments rife with physical confrontations, rejecting basic medical science, or with parents who demonstrate a complete disregard for their children's autonomy. He calls for respect, listening, and love for autistic children, not just cured cures. The most telling line in Ellenby's piece may be one where she describes her son, having lost the pitched battle, sitting quietly in the auditorium, as "indistinguishable from his peers." This message is a painful one to send to young people whose minds are different: that their existence is a problem for others to solve, a disorder to cure, or at least to hide. Having a child who does not fit conventional definitions of normalcy can be an extraordinary gift, but it is also hard for parents, teachers, and the child navigating a world of machines and buzzing lights. For some parents, this experience triggers deep fears about falling behind in the perfectibility race in this world of so many little mirrors, leading to another race for magic-bullet cures, extinguishment therapies, and often someone to blame. Autism cases have increased dramatically over the past two to three decades, with 1 in every 44 eight-year-olds diagnosed in 2018. This increase is attributed to the expansion of the clinical definition of autism in the 1990s, which included neuroatypical people who would have previously been excluded. Doctors have
also gotten better at recognizing autism in girls, who tend to mask it better, and Black, Indigenous, and Latino boys, who are often disciplined and written off as "troublemakers." Another important factor in the rising numbers is that children born to older parents are more likely to be diagnosed with autism. The vaccine-autism myth has persisted, giving parents who see difference as tragedy something external to blame. Celebrities who moonlight as wellness influencers and momfluencers have helped keep the myth alive, with models like Elle Macpherson and Byron Bay contributing to the spread of misinformation. Jenny McCarthy has done more than any other to popularize the myth, describing her son's autism as a cataclysm that invaded an otherwise perfect life. Eric Garcia, author of We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation, recognizes the connections between autism fearmongering and the rise of autism. Terror of having an autistic child and disability more generally has led to the spread of conspiracy theories and falsehoods about autism. Plandemic, a pseudoscientific documentary that caused significant damage, was created due to its remix of the anti-vax movement's preexisting claims. The Covid "Disinformation Dozen" had their antivax arguments ready and knew how to deploy them, often to convince desperate and scared parents that they would do better to buy whatever high-priced supplement/seminar/health regime they were selling. This convergence of worlds shows more than a shared infrastructure of misinformation; there is also a shared worldview, a shared mindset, and a way of seeing people as either normal or deviant, pure or tainted, successes or failures. English child psychiatrist Lorna Wing expanded the definition of autism, leading to a huge uptick in diagnoses. She developed the idea that autism was not a fixed set of symptoms but a spectrum, presenting in a range of different ways depending on the individual. Her research eventually led to autism being diagnosed as a "spectrum disorder." Wing also had a side interest in the way autistic people were portrayed in folktales, religion, and literature, long before there were medical terms of any kind to describe them. She traced the earliest portrayals of autistic people to Irish and Celtic legends and "the myth of changeling children, left in place of real human babies who had been stolen by fairies." In some stories, families raise the changeling as their own out of fear of punishment from the fairy world, while others recommend torment the doppelganger to entice the fairy parents to return the supposedly stolen human child. Changeling mythology, a form of folklore, often based on actual events and stories about how families treated children with disabilities. These accounts provide hope and escape to an era plagued by birth defects and debilitating infant diseases. Autism Warrior Parents today often put their children through various forms of abuse in the name of a cure, attempting to exorcise the invader and bring back the normal, perfect life they had envisioned for themselves. This mindset is deeply dangerous, playing out inside the family and inflicting on the bodies and minds of vulnerable children. It is bound up in another kind of doppelganger turn, afflicting whole societies. For example, in the early years of Nazi rule, doctors in Austria became interested in studying children who did not conform to the homogenous and supremacist version of the Aryan collective, the Volk. In Vienna, a group of doctors were part of a progressive flowering of child development in what was known as Red Vienna. During this time, Viennese socialists created universal welfare programs designed to alleviate childhood poverty and redress inequality in a systematic way. Many of the new apartment buildings had basic services built into them, including maternal health centers, so that women could get information about infant disease and nutrition from health professionals close to where they lived. The core of this democratic socialist experiment was the radical new idea that children had rights of their own and that the role of education was to unlock their full potential. Children in Red Vienna flourished, and this childcentered society was a European prototype of the New Deal, though with a more explicitly egalitarian goal. Many of the social welfare programs were overseen by doctor turned socialist politician Julius Tandler, who understood that these early-life investments were a way of avoiding criminalization later.
PART TWO
Mirror World
THEY KNOW ABOUT CELL PHONES
The author divides the period of the Covid-19 pandemic into two phases: Before Bannon and After Bannon. Before Bannon was a chaotic time for Other Naomi Wolf, who shared her bizarre theories about vaccines, quarantining, and vaccine shedding and infertility. She faced suspension and lockouts for violating rules against medical misinformation and was bombarded with abuse and mockery online.
After Bannon, in March 2021, Wolf shifted and honed her Covid message, focusing on the prospect of vaccine passports. The World Economic Forum had floated the idea of using vaccine-verification passports for international travel, and Israel and the British government had begun to float the idea. Wolf predicted North America would be next and claimed the world was approaching a cliff for human liberty from which there would be no returning.
The author's doppelganger has rarely shied away from extreme rhetoric, such as predicting domestic coups and accusing the United States of tipping into fascism. This intemperance presents a challenge when trying to raise a new alarm. The author acknowledges that she has published over two thousand pages about the climate crisis and is constantly trying to find new ways to express the fact that we are unraveling the fabric that sustains human and other-than-human life.
In her slavery forever video, Fox News host Rachel Wolf claimed that vaccine verification apps, which some governments unwisely referred to as passports, were not what they seemed. She declared that the apps were a backdoor attempt to usher in a CCP-style social credit score system, a reference to China's all-pervasive surveillance net that allows Beijing to rank citizens for their perceived virtue and obedience. The vaccine app was like all that, enslaving a billion people.
Wolf explained that the vaccination-status QR codes that would be scanned to gain access to restaurants, theaters, and the like would not merely give health authorities data on a person's presence in these indoor venues but also allow a tyrannical state to know who you were gathering with and what you were talking about—not only in those restaurants where the code had been scanned but also in your own living room. Once similar apps came to the United States, she warned that if you do not get vaccinated or are otherwise a dissident, you will be in a second-class category for the rest of your life.
Wolf had previously cast the vaccines themselves as grave health threats, but in these Fox News dispatches, she seemed to be saying that the Covid vaccine itself was beside the point. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all
The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed that the technology itself does not send some signal to the government of your location and that the claim the app is listening is really outlandish. There have been instances in Western Australia where police accessed data from vaccine app scans as part of investigations into violent crimes.
Governments have been criticized for focusing too much on vaccines and smartphone apps instead of maintaining indoor masking requirements and investing in public health-care systems. This could have included hiring more nurses, providing free at-home rapid tests, providing proper protective gear, and adequate sick leave for all workers. Additionally, there could have been more robust efforts to install high-quality air filters in public spaces, including schools, and hiring more teachers and teacher's aides to reduce the spread of the virus.
A disability justice advocate, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, suggested that social, economic, and political technologies could have been used to help people survive and thrive during the pandemic. However, governments rarely considered this ambitious agenda, opting for the easier route of relying on vaccines and verification apps. The most significant measure governments could have taken to stop the spread of new variants would have been to make vaccines free and available to the entire global population at the same time as they were rolled out domestically. However, this would require a waiver of intellectual property protections at the World Trade Organization, which would have facilitated lifting the patents that have allowed a handful of pharmaceutical companies to treat the vaccines as permission to print money.
The social costs inside wealthy countries of placing so much of the virus-control strategy on vaccinations and verification apps include marginalizing those who are unhoused and vulnerable, as well as the viral underclass who are treated as disposable during times of pandemic.
The debates surrounding government-mandated health programs are crucial, as they have been the targets of forced sterilization programs and covert medical experimentation over the past century. The Tuskegee experiment of the 1930s was one of the most notorious examples of this, where hundreds of Black men in Alabama were given placebos instead of the best treatments for syphilis, leading to many dying. In response, public health bureaucracies faced skepticism in their efforts to battle Covid in marginalized communities, making them easy prey for misinformation peddlers like Naomi Wolf.
Wolf's new approach to vaccine apps and her use of the term tech CEO and I'm the CEO of a tech company was a reference to DailyClout, a website that hosted her blogs and videos. She painted a world in which Covid health measures are the front lines in a civilizational war between East and West, using the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a reference.
Wolf's website was being turned into a clearinghouse for model legislation that activists could use at the state level to block future public health measures and defend the Five Freedoms. These freedoms include the right to be free of mask mandates, vaccine passports, school closures, emergency declarations, and restrictions on commerce and religious gatherings.
Wolf's new messaging resonated with both Fox's audience and a sizable cohort of leftists or progressives who were terrified of the Black Mirror surveillance world she described. Her slavery forever YouTube post was met with widespread praise, with many quoting scripture and declaring the vaccines and passports the mark of the beast.
Dr. Wolf, a prominent figure in the tech and surveillance world, has been gaining attention for her controversial Five Freedoms campaign and calls for anti-vax civil disobedience. She has appeared on Fox seven times in less than two months and has testified against mask and vaccine mandates at various statehouses. Wolf's message resonated with Steve Bannon, who began hosting her as a regular guest on his podcast, War Room. Bannon's endorsement of Wolf's website and Five Freedoms legislation mill led to 100,000 unique visits in April 2021.
Wolf's message resonated with many people now listening to her, as they felt that we are living through a revolution in surveillance tech, where state and corporate actors have seized outrageous powers to monitor us. The shift in surveillance tech has led to a lack of understanding of the transformational nature of this shift. The liberal snide quip Wait until they hear about cell phones is no longer funny, as people know all about cell phones but don't know what to do about them.
The past two decades have seen shocking revelations about the record of our daily and intimate lives becoming the property of others. This includes the Patriot Act, the AT&T whistleblower, Edward Snowden's leaks, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook's sale of user data to third parties, and Pegasus, an Israeli-designed spyware used by governments to gain full access to their opponents' phones.
Despite the widespread awareness of the potential misuse of personal data, the response to this extraordinary reality has been muted, with much of it sublimated into ironic humor. Wolf's Five Freedoms campaign and calls for anti-vax civil disobedience offer a chance for people to regain their privacy and freedoms.
In the Corporate Self course, we explore the surveillance architecture as the shadowy back end of personal branding and identity performance culture. As we accept the premise that we must be online for everything, and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies can hoover up about us. With that data, they create our real digital doppelgangers, not the aspirational avatars many of us consciously create with those carefully curated and filtered photos and posts.
The machines have devoured so much of us, gorged on so many of our ways and quirks, and can make credible replicas of us near instantly. The stakes are
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PART THREE Shadow Lands –––––––– CALM, CONSPIRACY ... CAPITALISM In 2007, a truther group in Portland, Oregon, disrupted a speaking tour by displaying a banner declaring 9/11 as an inside job. This led to the conclusion that the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many would like to believe. Some people consume investigative journalism, fact-based analysis, and fact-free conspiracy interchangeably, drawing their own connections and mixing and matching between the three. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards, such as double- and triple-sourcing, verifying leaked documents, citing peer-reviewed studies, coming clean about uncertainties, sharing sections of text with recognized experts, having fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, and handing it over to a libel lawyer. Conspiracy influencers perform what the author calls a doppelganger of investigative journalism, imitating many of its stylistic conventions while hopping over its accuracy guardrails. The end result of being surrounded by this kind of discourse is a reflexive state of continuous disbelief, which the Brazilian professor of philosophy Rodrigo Nunes calls "denialism." This inverted state serves the right and undercuts the left because it displaces the real threats looming on the horizon into distorted, fun-house versions of themselves. Since the Covid-19 global health crisis, we have been inundated with real examples of corporations profiteering off the virus, alongside cynical moves by political leaders to auction off vital services under cover of the emergency. Trillions were spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, only to have workers laid off in droves; billionaires have increased their wealth at a blood-boiling rate, even as they have gouged customers and fueled a cost-of-living crisis. In a just world, we would have been talking about these real and proven scandals around the clock, but most of us didn't, in part because the clock was being run out with the fallout from made-up plots. The author discusses the concept of "pattern recognition" and how it has been used to connect seemingly disparate trends into a logical story about a new iteration of capitalism. The author wrote "The Shock Doctrine" in the years after the September 11 attacks, aiming to provide a sense of orientation and order in the chaos of the world. The author's doppelganger, a radical and anti-establishment writer, describes her mental state as "terrified" and her research into Covid vaccines as "shockingly shocking." She characterizes her public health measures as "petrifying" and warns against using inflated language about vaccinations. The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic. The author argues that when radical and anti-establishment writers and scholars attempt to analyze the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world, they are often dismissed as conspiracy theorists. This is a battle-worn tactic used to bury and marginalize ideas that are inconvenient to those who wield economic and political power. Establishment institutions often fall back on this tactic to counter spiraling Covid misinformation. However, the author argues that believing that certain events or situations are secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces with negative intent does not make one a conspiracy theorist but makes them a serious observer of politics and history. The author argues that studying economic and social systems is crucial for stabilizing the world and understanding its underlying patterns. Systemic forces, such as the capitalist imperative to expand and grow, have led to the doubling of our economic lives and the drive to brand and commodify our identities. This has allowed tech companies to take over our information ecology and build a new economy off our attention and outrage. The elites who benefit from these priorities are also the same ones who bankroll political and media projects devoted to pitting nonrich people against one another based on race, ethnicity, and gender expression, making them less likely to unite based on common economic and class interests. The author believes that capitalism's drive to find new profit sources to enclose and extract brings order and rigor to the prevailing sense that society is rigged against the majority. Without a firm understanding of capitalism's drive to find new profit sources, many will imagine there is a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals pulling the strings. The author's main difference with Wolf is that she is a leftist focused on capital's ravaging of our bodies, democratic structures, and living systems that support our collective existence. Wolf believed in the promise of the liberal meritocracy, but her collapsed worldview led her to see a labyrinth of cabals and conspiracies. Jack Bratich, a Rutgers University communications scholar with a focus on conspiracies, explains that liberal investments in individualism result in thinking of power as residing in individuals and groups rather than structures. Conspiracy culture does not challenge the hyper-individualism at the heart of many crises reaching their breaking points, instead putting all the blame for society's ills on singularly powerful individuals. The Covid crisis has led to a shift in narratives, from hero to villain, as many people have become obsessed with Covid conspiracy theories. Many people, like Wolf, have followed the rules of getting ahead in the broken system, accepting that their comforts and successes were the product of their ingenuity and hard work alone. However, when faced with a crisis that required us to act as more than individuals, families, and nations, it was a shock bigger than Covid itself. The neoliberal era that began in the 1970s has pathologized every hardship and difficulty as a personal failing, while every success is lauded as proof of the relative superiority of the supposedly self-made. This impoverished way of seeing the world and one another has gone on for so long, expressed in various dialects, that the concept of a public good has now become foreign. Our societies, born out of the narrowest definitions of don't-tread-on-me liberty and a staunch commitment to not seeing what's right in front of us as a way of life, struggled to metabolize the Covid shock. This crisis could only be met if we chose to truly see one another, even those laboring and living in the shadows. Governments didn't do nearly as much as they could have and should have built a true infrastructure of care and solidarity during the pandemic, but the period when many governments paid people to stay home and offered Covid testing and vaccination for free represented an extreme and historic deviation from every major public policy trend of the last half century. The Covid pandemic led to a shift in the political and corporate classes, who began to embrace solidarity with the elderly and poor. This change was a stark contrast to the ways capitalism had taught us to neglect one another. The free vaccines were seen as a sign of solidarity, but they also posed challenges for many people, especially in the United States, where health care is often treated as a profit center. The protests also targeted symbols of collective action, such as trade union headquarters in Italy and Australia. These protests were seen as a temporary conglomeration of atomized individuals who saw anything collective as the enemy, set against their individual bodies and families. They declared that they are individual islands, shaped by their own hands alone, and cannot be forced into community or society. Despite these challenges, a critical mass of people held onto a civic and community spirit, going along with the new rules for the better part of two years. This sudden apparition of a social state was a glimpse into another world, a kind of collective flip. Understanding how capitalism shapes and distorts our world can offer some stability, but it does not preclude the presence of real-world, provable conspiracies. Examples include the poisoned water system in Flint, Michigan, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig accident, Volkswagen's conspiracy to cover up emissions, and Exxon's conspiracy to spread doubt about climate change. The term "deep state" has also been used to describe any form of power that posed a barrier to their unfettered and often unconstitutional exercise of power, while deploying it as an easy scapegoat for their failures. In Adam Smith's 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations, he argued that people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices. Mark Fisher further noted that much of what is packaged as
conspiracies today is "the ruling class showing class solidarity." These kinds of conspiracies are real and distinctly seedier than those hatched in antiseptic boardrooms in New York and London to rig prices or fool regulators or sabotage a newly elected socialist government in the Global South. The surface layers of markets that middle-class people in wealthy parts of the planet engage with directly are not the whole story of capitalism; they are its storefront. All of these operations require a level of extraction from their workers, shoppers, and users, but they also sit on top of more hidden parts of the supply chain, zones of hyper-exploitation, human containment, and ecosystem poisoning that are not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run. For the purposes of this map, we can call them the Shadow Lands. They are the mangled and dense understory of our supposedly frictionless global economy. The Shadow Lands are linked to real conspiracies, such as physical and sexual abuses committed by supervisors, guards, and soldiers. These abuses thrive in the Shadow Lands because they can, and this requires conspiratorial cover-ups to protect the perpetrators and consumers who conspire to keep themselves ignorant and innocent. Power and wealth conspire to protect themselves in public and private, under the spotlight, and in the shadows. NO WAY OUT BUT BACK Naomi Wolf's account of her experiences in New York City highlights the importance of courage and the power of standing up against discrimination. She recounts her experience at the Walker Hotel in Tribeca, where she was able to stand up against the discriminatory rules at a coffee shop called Blue Bottle, a boutique chain that sold coffee and overnight oats for $6. Wolf's actions were not about the war on the planet or the war on the United States, but rather about her own bravery in refusing to comply with the city's mandates. Wolf's actions led her to post her story on social media, causing the police to not intervene. She then attempted to protest at Grand Central Station, where she was directed to a different waiting area reserved for unvaccinated people. Despite her fear of handcuffs, she was arrested for her second courageous stand. Wolf's account also highlights the fact that despite her claims to be living under a biofascist regime, she never was living under a coup d'état. New York mayor Eric Adams had already announced that the city would be lifting vaccine mandates for indoor dining as long as Covid levels remained low. This temporary health measure was temporary, and the increasing digitization of daily life deepened preexisting inequalities. Wolf's use of the term "lunch counter" in her account is designed to remind readers of the bloody sit-ins at actual lunch counters in the 1960s, such as the Greensboro Four's protest in Greensboro, North Carolina. By invoking lunch counters and referencing earlier moments in U.S. history with "forced separate accommodations" and discriminatory rules, Wolf puts herself in the same league as the Greensboro Four and Rosa Parks. Racial role-playing is a common practice among the anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and anti-lockdown movement, which has historically drawn parallels between vaccine mandates and structures of racial oppression. This movement has claimed to be standing up against crimes committed against racial and religious minorities since the Crusades, such as slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, Jim Crow, and apartheid. In 2021, activist Steve Bannon compared the anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and anti-lockdown movement to Black liberation movements, claiming they were victims of a new human hierarchy in which they were "second-class citizens" and faced "medical apartheid." Some protesters held signs that said MANDATE = SLAVERY, while others protested their district's vaccine mandate by showing up for work in blackface. This kind of racial role-playing is prevalent among the diagonalists, who often claim that Covid measures have ushered in a new era of political obedience. However, this story ignores the fact that millions of people took to the streets in 2020 to demand a radical reallocation of resources away from mass incarceration and militarized policing and toward educational, housing, and health infrastructure and services that would begin to close the wealth and investment gaps that treat Black communities as de facto second class. In June 2022, Wolf staged a more successful publicity-seeking stunt in Salem, Oregon, where she found one of the only restaurants in the city that still required proof of vaccination for indoor dining. She filmed herself lecturing the restaurant's Black manager, claiming that the vaccine requirement was "absolutely discrimination." This continued for a painfully long time, with many of her followers making fake reservations and deliberately driving down the restaurant's ratings. Many of the responses combined themes of fatphobia, antiBlack racism, conspiracy, and claims of genetic superiority, with special hatred reserved for the Black Lives Matter posters in the window. The relationship between diagonalists and other major movements of our time raises questions about whether they are running on non-intersecting tracks or engaging in a warped-mirror dialectic. While vaccine passports were in effect, people who had not gotten the shot felt like victims of discrimination or social pariahs. Many well-off white women believed that being outside the Covid health consensus conferred on them a powerful kind of victim status. This is not an entirely outlandish thing to believe at this stage of neoliberal capitalism, which has transformed identity-based oppression from a basis for solidarity and shared analysis to its own form of currency. In nations whose economies were built on the back of enslaved Black people's labor and whose very existences are owed to the stealing of lands from Indigenous peoples through campaigns of horrific violence, torture, famine, and forced relocation, the past is our collective, unshakable, omnipresent shadow. Only in spasms of reckonings like the one that followed George Floyd’s murder does the dominant culture manage to look with anything more than furtive glances at these foundational crimes. As conservatives and liberals mirror one another, each claiming the mantle of truth and righteousness, this unreckoned-with history and present are a large part of whiteness’s shadow world, the truth that is simultaneously known and repressed. The diagonalists are attempting to outrun the long shadow of the past by absorbing the language and postures of the oppressed, including the fact that our young countries are built on top of burned villages and graveyards. In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in British Columbia announced that it had found the probable graves of 215 children on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The schools were part of a cultural genocide that decimated the Indigenous population of the Americas by more than 90% after European contact. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) called on the Canadian government to launch a full investigation into deaths and possible murders in the schools. The TRC identified 3,201 children who died in residential schools between the 1880s and the late 1990s. Justice Murray Sinclair, chairman of the TRC, estimated that the true number may be closer to 25,000. However, Ottawa dragged its feet, and some First Nations undertook their own searches, even under the eerie quiet of Covid isolation. With the aid of ground-penetrating radar, the soil was giving up its secrets, confirming with Western science the bitter truths that survivors and their descendants already knew. Canada's objective for the schools was not education but ending Indigeneity as an identity. The white and Christian supremacy that underpinned the residential school system also served national economic and political interests. The truth about the unmarked graves sparked waves of rage, grief, and solidarity across Canada, leading to the passing of a motion stating that the residential school system met the United Nations' definition of genocide. The discovery of the graves of Indigenous children in British Columbia led to a national excavation and a shift in the narrative of Canadian history. The foundational crimes of the colonial project were exposed, forcing Canadians to confront their past and seek justice. The announcement of the graves occurred in late May, and Canada Day was canceled in 2021, with other cities marking the day with Every Child Matters murals and official expressions of grief and contrition. Indigenous friends and neighbors expressed cautious hope that deep learning might be happening. Norman Retasket, a survivor of the Kamloops school, observed that his stories would have been seen as "fiction" three years ago, but now they are believed. Mike Otto, a white trucker, small-business owner, and father living near the graves, decided to show non-Indigenous Canadians solidarity with their efforts to seek justice from the government, court system, and church. He created the We Stand in Solidarity Convoy, a trucker convoy that passed in front of the burial grounds, made offerings, and left. The convoy was met with cheers and celebrations, with many members of the Secwépemc Nation welcoming the trucks with ceremonial drumming, warrior songs, and burning sage. These events were meaningful in the part of the world where the author lives, as they demonstrate non-Indigenous people taking Indigenous death as a collective crisis rather than shunting off the quest for justice and reparation. However, the four-hundred-vehicle convoy of June 2021 has
been largely forgotten, even in Canada. In 2022, Canadian truckers protested against Covid vaccination requirements, leading to a call for an end to public health restrictions. The convoy, which included small business owners, ex-cops, ex-soldiers, vegan cookbook authors, and evangelical Christians, aimed to convince the governor general to dissolve Trudeau's government. The convoy gained international attention, with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Joe Rogan celebrating them as working-class heroes. Copycat convoys were also on the move from Washington, D.C., to Wellington, New Zealand. The Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act, which allowed for repressive tactics like freezing supporters' bank accounts. The convoys featured snowball fights, beer kegs, pot in the air, Jericho Marchers, street sermons, and signs of political discombobulation. Many convoy supporters attempted to portray the racist elements as isolated, but the connections run deep. Pat King, one of the convoy's most outspoken leaders, was an open racist who referred to Indigenous culture as a "disgrace" and organized a similar convoy to oppose immigration and climate action. He claimed the goal was to depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race and infiltrate the education systems to manipulate it. THE NAZI IN THE MIRROR The HBO miniseries "Exterminate All the Brutes" by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck explores the violent history of the world, including the massacres, holocausts, and political assassinations that led to European colonization in the Americas and racial apartheid in the United States. Peck's title, inspired by the 1992 book "Exterminate All the Brutes," is a doppelganger story, arguing that the dominant story about Hitler and the Holocaust is incorrect. Instead, Peck argues that the Holocaust was an intensified expression of the same violent colonial ideology that ravaged other continents at other times. The Nazis then applied that ideology within Europe itself. The story begins in Europe in the centuries leading up to the Spanish Inquisition, the burnings at the stake, and the bloody expulsions of Jews and Muslims. It then crosses the Atlantic and plays out on a vastly larger scale in the genocide of Native Americans and the Scramble for Africa before looping back to Europe during the Holocaust. This challenges the story of the Second World War as one of heroic anti-fascist Allies united against the monstrous Nazis. Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck also discusses how Hitler drew inspiration for his genocidal regime from British colonialism and various structures of racial hierarchy pioneered inside North America. For instance, Hitler remarked that concentration camps were not invented in Germany but were invented by the English. The Nazis were heavily influenced by the United States, where the first eugenics-based law to mandate involuntary sterilization was passed in Indiana in 1907. This led to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of would-be parents whose genes were deemed threats to the overall pool. The Nazis took this precedent and radically expanded it, with an estimated 400,000 people sterilized during their rule. James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, documents many of the Nazis' American debts in chilling detail. He argues that the legal contortions the United States had developed to deny full citizenship rights based on race helped inspire the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which would legalize stripping German Jews of their citizenship and denying them political rights, while banning sex, marriage, and reproduction between Aryans and Jews. They found templates for the new Jewish ghettos they created partly by studying the systems of legalized segregation developed under Jim Crow laws and those for Native reservations; South Africa's apartheid system also provided key inspiration. Many Nazis were students and fans of the American frontier mythology, which was translated into an imperative to conquer and seize lands to the east of Germany. As the war went on, the scale and speed of death was unprecedented, but the Nazis' killing spree took state-sponsored hate to new extremes. Martinican author and politician Aimé Césaire charged that Europeans tolerated "Nazism before it was inflicted on them." The Holocaust, once considered a singular event, has been reinterpreted as a part of a larger narrative of enlightenment and modernity. The Holocaust was not a singular event, but rather a part of a larger narrative of colonial violence. The Holocaust was not a singular event, but rather a part of a larger narrative of enlightenment and modernity. The Holocaust was not a singular event, but a part of a larger narrative of enlightenment and modernity Lindqvist's point is that European world expansion and the defense of extermination created habits of thought and political precedents that led to new outrages, culminating in the Holocaust. One of the hardest habits of thought to shake is the reflex to look away, not seeing what is in front of us and not knowing what we know. The Mirror World and its increasingly belligerent war on history pose a deep threat to the collective unconscious. The door to the Shadow Lands was cracked open, and truths were flying out that would no longer be contained. The revelation of unmarked school burial grounds in Kamloops in 2022 was criticized by conservative ideologue Tom Flanagan as "the biggest fake news story in Canadian history" and a case of "moral panic." The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others Is this part of what we are seeing? Are increasingly violent conspiracy theorists in the Mirror World afraid of being rounded up, treated as secondclass, occupied, and culled because they know that these are the genocidal behaviors that created and sustain their relative but increasingly precarious privileges? If the truths of the Shadow Lands—past, present, and future—are ever fully revealed and reckoned with, then it can only result in a dramatic role reversal, with the victims becoming the victimizers? THE UNSHAKABLE ETHNIC DOUBLE The author discusses the confusion surrounding Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf, a controversial figure in the world of digital doubles and personal brands. She believes that the confusion is due to anti-Semitism, as people often mistakenly identify with the same person. Others, such as Jeet Heer and Hannah Arendt, argue that one must defend themselves as a Jew when attacked, not as a German or a world citizen. The author's mother suggests that the author has been fooling herself by lumping Wolf and her into a cultural stereotype of the striving Jewess. This is exemplified in the works of Ludwig Börne and Philip Roth, who both end up being cast as the Jews' eternal doppelganger. Prejudice works by creating a double of every person who is part of the despised group, threatening to swallow them up. This double means that whoever you are, whatever identity you have fashioned for yourself, will always stand in as a representative of your despised group. You are not you; you are your ethnic/racial/religious double, and you can't shake that double because you did not create it. Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "The Anti-Semite and Jew," argues that the Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew, as it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew. This concept is explored in Joseph Losey's 1976 film, Mr. Klein, which tells the story of a wealthy Parisian art dealer who is mistaken for a Jew with the same name and gradually becomes ensnared with his own unshakable ethnic double. The invisible double, a concept that has been present in historically hated groups, is a pervasive issue that affects various aspects of life. In the United States, being Black requires a constant feeling of "two-ness," which can lead to a lethal racial double. Facial recognition software has automated these doublings, often leading to wrongful arrests and upended lives. In Europe, boats of Black migrants continue to be left to drown, with their dangerous doubles overtaking them before they even reach dry land. Other forms of racial doubling also ebb and flow on geopolitical tides. After the September 11 attacks, the figure of the Muslim terrorist became a double for all Muslim men, making everything from studying engineering to going to the airport perilous. The anti-Chinese scapegoating during the Covid era has cast an ominous shadow over Asian life, with roughly one-third of Asian Americans reporting changing their daily routines to avoid being targeted by hate crimes. The Jewish double, particularly Hasidic Jews, are easy targets for street violence. A secular Jew like me, who was born during a time of Holocaust education and collective contrition, has been largely protected from direct encounters with Jew-hatred. However, I am now unsure if fear of my Jewish shadow is the real reason I complain so bitterly about my too-Jewish name and obsessively straighten my wavy hair. It is possible that the post-Holocaust lull in open Jew-hatred is coming to a close, as anti-Jewish hate crimes have been on the rise since Trump. The Great
Replacement theory, which suggests Jews are eternal Shylocks, may have contributed to this trend. However, the need for perfect likenesses can easily obscure commonalities and short-circuit potential solidarities. Anti-Semitism has its roots in antiquity, with Hellenistic resentments of Jewish self-segregation and perceived clannishness. However, it became inescapable in the Christian world due to the New Testament's powerful cosmology of doubles. Jews are associated with Satan, leading to centuries of smears and libels, including claims of kidnapping Christian children for secret rituals. This old form of Jew-hatred peaked with the Reconquest of Spain and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492. The association of Jews with satanism justified their second-class status, restricting them from owning agricultural land and participating in key trades. Jews have been the subjects and targets of the most persistent conspiracy theory of the last two and half centuries. An international Jewish conspiracy stands accused of colluding to undermine Christian values, weaken Christian states, seize Christian property, and control the media. These stories are currently coursing and combining in our culture, lending an ancient and sinister energy to the invisible ethnic double that we Jews carry around. Anti-Semitism has played a specific purpose for elite power: it acts as a buffer, directing anger to middle managers, court Jews, and scheming Jews. This is why anti-Semitism is sometimes referred to as "the socialism of fools," as peddlers of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories offer juicy tales of satanic evildoers acting outside normal boundaries of societies and economies. In Europe, when multiethnic groups of workers and peasants began to build power from below, anti-Semitic propaganda often followed. Rootless Jewish devils were pitted against the rooted, ethnically pure Christian citizens of nation-states where Jews were never fully accepted. These methods have recurred throughout the centuries because they work to blast apart nascent alliances and coalitions of working people and safeguard the interests of the wealthy and powerful. The failed Russian Revolution of 1905 was a tragic example of this. Workers and peasants across the Russian empire staged strikes and revolts, including inside the military, challenging the monarchy and the rule of Nicholas II. The revolution was led by a multiethnic and diverse alliance, with one of its key factions being the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist party with tens of thousands of members and hundreds of local councils and defense militias. One of the Bund's core principles was doi'kayt, or "hereness," the idea that Jews belonged where they lived and should fight for greater rights and increased justice as Jews and workers alongside non-Jewish members of their class. Russia's elites fought back in two ways: offering concessions and unleashing a virulent campaign of anti-Semitic hate that painted the 1905 revolt as a plot by seditious Jews to rule over Christians. Anti-Jewish mobs staged bloody pogroms in 660 towns and cities, with the worst taking place in Odessa. Historian Robert Weinberg described some of the atrocities in The Russian Review, highlighting the importance of ethnic divisiveness in suppressing revolutionary movements. Jewish socialists and communists in the 19th and early 20th centuries had a stake in the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Marxism emerged from the same soil that fertilized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which would eventually produce Weimar and Nazi Germany. These revolutionaries had grander aims than simply denying their enemies the potent weapon of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. They dedicated their lives to enacting socialism in the real world, making political education accessible to working people. Despite the ongoing debates over the Jewish Question, there was no consensus among Jewish intellectuals on what to do about the persistence of anti-Semitism. Some debated whether Jews should strive for full equality in Christian societies, or if the goal should be revolutionary transformation of those societies accompanied by full Jewish assimilation into the liberated proletariat. Others argued that Jewish assimilation could be a trap, eliding the need for European Jews' distinct culture and language to be protected within a multiethnic, multinational workers' society. The Bundists, with their tens of thousands of working-class members devoted to "hereness," regularly debated the Zionists, mocking them for their "thereness." The Bund held fast to the belief that Jews would be free when everyone was free, not by building a militarized ghetto on Palestinian land. Rosa Luxemburg, who had sparred with the Bund, advocated a universalism unbound by her Jewish identity, focusing on a vision of human solidarity that transcended identity and national borders. The debates over the Jewish Question did not end due to one faction winning the argument or capturing the hearts and minds of the majority of Jewish people. The debates were crushed by terror, with betrayal and abandonment foreclosing on one possibility after another. Jews were annihilated in the lands where the Nazis gained control and Jewish workers' movements staged strikes and organized self-defense leagues. Stalin took command of the Soviet Union, waging ruthless war on his rivals and attempting to cover over his atrocities by unleashing the hounds of anti-Semitism once again. The United States and Canada offered little safe harbor to boats filled with desperate Jewish refugees coming from Europe. Many key players advancing a different vision for the Jewish people died violently, such as Rosa Luxemburg, who was shot by German paramilitary officers and thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal in 1919. Abram Leon, a Belgian leftist, studied the Nazis' use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories during the Nazi occupation and wrote a scholarly treatise about the uses of anti-Semitism to the global capitalist project.
PART THREE
Shadow Lands
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CALM, CONSPIRACY ... CAPITALISM
In 2007, a truther group in Portland, Oregon, disrupted a speaking tour by displaying a banner declaring 9/11 as an inside job. This led to the conclusion that the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many would like to believe. Some people consume investigative journalism, fact-based analysis, and fact-free conspiracy interchangeably, drawing their own connections and mixing and matching between the three.
Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards, such as double- and triple-sourcing, verifying leaked documents, citing peer-reviewed studies, coming clean about uncertainties, sharing sections of text with recognized experts, having fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, and handing it over to a libel lawyer. Conspiracy influencers perform what the author calls a doppelganger of investigative journalism, imitating many of its stylistic conventions while hopping over its accuracy guardrails.
The end result of being surrounded by this kind of discourse is a reflexive state of continuous disbelief, which the Brazilian professor of philosophy Rodrigo Nunes calls denialism. This inverted state serves the right and undercuts the left because it displaces the real threats looming on the horizon into distorted, fun-house versions of themselves.
Since the Covid-19 global health crisis, we have been inundated with real examples of corporations profiteering off the virus, alongside cynical moves by political leaders to auction off vital services under cover of the emergency. Trillions were spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, only to have workers laid off in droves; billionaires have increased their wealth at a blood-boiling rate, even as they have gouged customers and fueled a cost-of-living crisis. In a just world, we would have been talking about these real and proven scandals around the clock, but most of us didn't, in part because the clock was being run out with the fallout from made-up plots.
The author discusses the concept of pattern recognition and how it has been used to connect seemingly disparate trends into a logical story about a new iteration of capitalism. The author wrote The Shock Doctrine in the years after the September 11 attacks, aiming to provide a sense of orientation and order in the chaos of the world. The author's doppelganger, a radical and anti-establishment writer, describes her mental state as terrified and her research into Covid vaccines as shockingly shocking. She characterizes her public health measures as petrifying and warns against using inflated language about vaccinations. The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.
The author argues that when radical and anti-establishment writers and scholars attempt to analyze the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world, they are often dismissed as conspiracy theorists. This is a battle-worn tactic used to bury and marginalize ideas that are inconvenient to those who wield economic and political power. Establishment institutions often fall back on this tactic to counter spiraling Covid misinformation. However, the author argues that believing that certain events or situations are secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces with negative intent does not make one a conspiracy theorist but makes them a serious observer of politics and history.
The author argues that studying economic and social systems is crucial for stabilizing the world and understanding its underlying patterns. Systemic forces, such as the capitalist imperative to expand and grow, have led to the doubling of our economic lives and the drive to brand and commodify our identities. This has allowed tech companies to take over our information ecology and build a new economy off our attention and outrage. The elites who benefit from these priorities are also the same ones who bankroll political and media projects devoted to pitting nonrich people against one another based on race, ethnicity, and gender expression, making them less likely to unite based on common economic and class interests.
The author believes that capitalism's drive to find new profit sources to enclose and extract brings order and rigor to the prevailing sense that society is rigged against the majority. Without a firm understanding of capitalism's drive to find new profit sources, many will imagine there is a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals pulling the strings.
The author's main difference with Wolf is that she is a leftist focused on capital's ravaging of our bodies, democratic structures, and living systems that support our collective existence. Wolf believed in the promise of the liberal meritocracy, but her collapsed worldview led her to see a labyrinth of cabals and conspiracies.
Jack Bratich, a Rutgers University communications scholar with a focus on conspiracies, explains that liberal investments in individualism result in thinking of power as residing in individuals and groups rather than structures. Conspiracy culture does not challenge the hyper-individualism at the heart of many crises reaching their breaking points, instead putting all the blame for society's ills on singularly powerful individuals.
The Covid crisis has led to a shift in narratives, from hero to villain, as many people have become obsessed with Covid conspiracy theories. Many people, like Wolf, have followed the rules of getting ahead in the broken system, accepting that their comforts and successes were the product of their ingenuity and hard work alone. However, when faced with a crisis that required us to act as more than individuals, families, and nations, it was a shock bigger than Covid itself.
The neoliberal era that began in the 1970s has pathologized every hardship and difficulty as a personal failing, while every success is lauded as proof of the relative superiority of the supposedly self-made. This impoverished way of seeing the world and one another has gone on for so long, expressed in various dialects, that the concept of a public good has now become foreign.
Our societies, born out of the narrowest definitions of don't-tread-on-me liberty and a staunch commitment to not seeing what's right in front of us as a way of life, struggled to metabolize the Covid shock. This crisis could only be met if we chose to truly see one another, even those laboring and living in the shadows. Governments didn't do nearly as much as they could have and should have built a true infrastructure of care and solidarity during the pandemic, but the period when many governments paid people to stay home and offered Covid testing and vaccination for free represented an extreme and historic deviation from every major public policy trend of the last half century.
The Covid pandemic led to a shift in the political and corporate classes, who began to embrace solidarity with the elderly and poor. This change was a stark contrast to the ways capitalism had taught us to neglect one another. The free vaccines were seen as a sign of solidarity, but they also posed challenges for many people, especially in the United States, where health care is often treated as a profit center.
The protests also targeted symbols of collective action, such as trade union headquarters in Italy and Australia. These protests were seen as a temporary conglomeration of atomized individuals who saw anything collective as the enemy, set against their individual bodies and families. They declared that they are individual islands, shaped by their own hands alone, and cannot be forced into community or society.
Despite these challenges, a critical mass of people held onto a civic and community spirit, going along with the new rules for the better part of two years. This sudden apparition of a social state was a glimpse into another world, a kind of collective flip.
Understanding how capitalism shapes and distorts our world can offer some stability, but it does not preclude the presence of real-world, provable conspiracies. Examples include the poisoned water system in Flint, Michigan, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig accident, Volkswagen's conspiracy to cover up emissions, and Exxon's conspiracy to spread doubt about climate change.
The term deep state has also been used to describe any form of power that posed a barrier to their unfettered and often unconstitutional exercise of power, while deploying it as an easy scapegoat for their failures.
In Adam Smith's 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations, he argued that people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices. Mark Fisher further noted that much of what is packaged as
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PART FOUR Facing the Real UNSELFING The author shares their experience of fainting after their mother's first stroke, a moment they felt like they were witnessing. They had previously focused on the deepening climate crisis and its narrative arc, which suggested that a Marshall Plan, New Deal, or World War II-scale mobilization could avert the worsening situation. However, Decade Zero was a short-lived concept, and by 2020, it was clear that there was still time to avert catastrophic climate change but needed to cut global pollution in half in a decade. The author also worked on the campaign to make Bernie Sanders the Democratic nominee for U.S. president, recognizing the urgency for transformational climate action and the need to fight big polluters. However, the pandemic hit, and the author's hope for a better future was dashed. One year into the pandemic, the author noticed a squirrel conversing with a neighbor, hoping for a chance to reassess collective priorities and living ways. However, the greatest cause of their despair was the growing mass movements that had grown rapidly in recent years, leading to conflict and mistrust. Online clout often determined movement leadership, and few ways to hold leaders accountable, leading to the spread of conflict and mistrust. The predatory corporate logics that earlier left iterations recognized as enemies were now deeply embedded in the arteries that connected us, our habits of mind, and our cells. The author reflects on the concept of doppelgangers and their messages, which are ways of not seeing ourselves, one another, and the world. They argue that our current situation is characterized by mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities, which are driven by who and what we cannot bear to see in our past, present, and future. The author identifies the "second body" as the one enmeshed with wars, whales, genocides, and the Shadow Lands for its comforts and conveniences. We avoid these bodies because we do not want to be bodies like that, participate in mass extinction, consume food marred by suffering, and live in a less alive, less wonderous, and more frightening world. James Baldwin, a Black man in the United States, reflects on the double projected onto him as a Black man in the United States, which ultimately led to his own death. Many forms of doubling are ways of not looking at death/trouble, and death feels close to us today. The author suggests that we must stop averting our gaze and face our second bodies and mortal bodies in a sustained way, rather than throwing up partitions, performances, and projections to hide from them. They suggest that it would take to stop running and to know what we already know. Another example is Adam McKay's film Don't Look Up, which mirrors the contradictions of our high-stakes moment in planetary history. We are trapped inside economic and social structures that encourage us to obsessively perfect our minuscule selves, even as we know we are in the last years when it might still be possible to avert an existential planetary crisis. Climate scientists, like David Bowman and Charlie Veron, have recognized the intimate relationship between humans and their under-cared-for planet. They argue that humans are not just the center of the universe, but also that the world wasn't made just for them. The climate crisis can be understood as a surplus of self, as people who exploit the planet put themselves first. This journey to unselfing may hold the key to our collective survival, as it means that our role on earth is not just to maximize our advantage in our lives, but to maximize (protect, regenerate) all of life. The idea that each one of us has a look-alike means that no one is quite as special or unique as we might have imagined ourselves to be. This revelation is often told as a horror story within capitalism's hall of mirrors, but it can also teach us that connections and solidarities are available to all of us. We have kin everywhere, some looking like us, some looking nothing like us, and yet still connected to us. François Brunelle's doppelganger art project, I'm Not a Look-Alike!, offers a model for surrender, not to sameness but to interconnection and enmeshment. The pandemic tried to teach us that no one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another. Rejecting this truth for long enough will lead to the Mirror World, where you declare yourself a "sovereign citizen," accountable to no one and nothing. The confusion with Other Naomi has died down, and the author realizes that it has helped them achieve freedom from the tyranny of their own self. By creating a crisis in their personal brand and showing how grim it is to spend their life chasing clout, Other Naomi has left them feeling significantly calmer, and as John Berger taught, "calm is a form of resistance." Self-involvement is a story where the self takes up too much space, and it is essential to confront the material and collective crises that we face. This requires taking action to create a world that does not require Shadow Lands and is not predicated on sacrificial people, ecosystems, and continents. This starts by naming the systems that have carved out the Shadow Lands, such as capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Teaching these words and their true meanings to the people in our lives so they can better understand and fight against these issues. The shift to confronting and reimagining structures requires collaboration and coalition, even uncomfortable coalitions. Change requires collaboration and coalition, as seen in the wave of unconventional union organizing at corporations like Amazon and Starbucks, movements organizing debtors into quasi-unions, and investments in communal alternatives. However, none of these changes will happen fast enough until more people figure out how to soften the borders around their individual selves and various identity groups to allow for a coming together in common cause. Doppelgangers warn us that it will be a struggle to overcome the tension between separation and distinctness and unity and community. The problem lies in our culture's bias toward one tendency over the other, with the scramble for separateness being richly rewarded and encouraged in our zero-sum economy, while the urge to act in solidarity and mutual aid with others is discounted and disappeared when not actively punished. This bias against solidarity is particularly dangerous in the present moment, as fascist doppelgangers grow bolder and connect people with ideas about the supremacy of their race to fixations about the supremacy of their immune systems and the perfection of their kids. The defense of our identities and broader ethnic/racial/gender identity groups is not serving us all well, as every story of triumph for the fascist right is also a story of fragmentation, sectarianism, and stubborn refusal to make strategic alliances on the anti-fascist left. Conspiracy theories are symptoms of confusion and powerlessness that keep us divided, but they are not the only things that keep us divided. We must loosen the grip on various forms of proprietary pain and selfhood, reaching toward many different forms of connection and kin, toward anyone who shares a desire to confront the forces of annihilation and extermination and their mindsets of purity and perfection. Faced with the ultimate doppelganger threat—the flip into fascism that is already well underway in many parts of the world—this ability to melt some of the hard, icy edges of identity will be important to any hope we have of success. We must hold onto those realities and build on a shared interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth while constructing new structures that are infinitely more fair and more fun. Moving together across seemingly intractable barriers is easier said than done than said. Stuck in the realm of words, we will never run out of reasons to fracture. But when we take action to change material circumstances, tensions do not disappear but are often balanced by the recognition of shared interests, the pleasures of camaraderie, and, occasionally, the thrill of victory. Struggle helps us see each other, break from individualism and the particularities of our identities, and create the potential and possibilities of uniting. Collective organizing expands the sense of the possible by expanding the possible "we." It persuades participants that their pain is not the result of failure of character or insufficient hard work, but rather the consequence of economic and social systems designed to produce cruel outcomes. When enough people start believing that, it is an awakening in the truest sense of the word—a new group identity is constructed in real time, one wider and more spacious than what existed before. When a person is confronted by their doppelganger, they become unfamiliar to themselves, which can be transcendent. When we come together in movements working for the scale of change demanded by our times, it changes us, making us braver, more hopeful, more connected, and able to feel love toward
people we barely know. As our actions integrate with our beliefs, we have less need for the various doubles our culture offers up disguised as a good life. The allure of disappearing into our digital avatars wanes, as Marx said of religion, as there is less pain and dissonance to escape. The power represented by the idea of standing up and fighting beyond the narrowest conception of self and identity is altered in the roar of the crowd. However, an electoral campaign is too fleeting and unstable a container to hold a message as important as "Not me. Us." The figure of the doppelganger recurs in the culture in part because the idea of having duplicate selves stands in for the vast potentialities that our lives hold. The idea of our duplicates walking around stands in for the roads not taken, who might we be if the choices that determined our lives had been slightly or radically different.
PART FOUR
Facing the Real
UNSELFING
The author shares their experience of fainting after their mother's first stroke, a moment they felt like they were witnessing. They had previously focused on the deepening climate crisis and its narrative arc, which suggested that a Marshall Plan, New Deal, or World War II-scale mobilization could avert the worsening situation. However, Decade Zero was a short-lived concept, and by 2020, it was clear that there was still time to avert catastrophic climate change but needed to cut global pollution in half in a decade.
The author also worked on the campaign to make Bernie Sanders the Democratic nominee for U.S. president, recognizing the urgency for transformational climate action and the need to fight big polluters. However, the pandemic hit, and the author's hope for a better future was dashed.
One year into the pandemic, the author noticed a squirrel conversing with a neighbor, hoping for a chance to reassess collective priorities and living ways. However, the greatest cause of their despair was the growing mass movements that had grown rapidly in recent years, leading to conflict and mistrust. Online clout often determined movement leadership, and few ways to hold leaders accountable, leading to the spread of conflict and mistrust. The predatory corporate logics that earlier left iterations recognized as enemies were now deeply embedded in the arteries that connected us, our habits of mind, and our cells.
The author reflects on the concept of doppelgangers and their messages, which are ways of not seeing ourselves, one another, and the world. They argue that our current situation is characterized by mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities, which are driven by who and what we cannot bear to see in our past, present, and future.
The author identifies the second body as the one enmeshed with wars, whales, genocides, and the Shadow Lands for its comforts and conveniences. We avoid these bodies because we do not want to be bodies like that, participate in mass extinction, consume food marred by suffering, and live in a less alive, less wonderous, and more frightening world.
James Baldwin, a Black man in the United States, reflects on the double projected onto him as a Black man in the United States, which ultimately led to his own death. Many forms of doubling are ways of not looking at death/trouble, and death feels close to us today.
The author suggests that we must stop averting our gaze and face our second bodies and mortal bodies in a sustained way, rather than throwing up partitions, performances, and projections to hide from them. They suggest that it would take to stop running and to know what we already know.
Another example is Adam McKay's film Don't Look Up, which mirrors the contradictions of our high-stakes moment in planetary history. We are trapped inside economic and social structures that encourage us to obsessively perfect our minuscule selves, even as we know we are in the last years when it might still be possible to avert an existential planetary crisis.
Climate scientists, like David Bowman and Charlie Veron, have recognized the intimate relationship between humans and their under-cared-for planet. They argue that humans are not just the center of the universe, but also that the world wasn't made just for them. The climate crisis can be understood as a surplus of self, as people who exploit the planet put themselves first. This journey to unselfing may hold the key to our collective survival, as it means that our role on earth is not just to maximize our advantage in our lives, but to maximize (protect, regenerate) all of life.
The idea that each one of us has a look-alike means that no one is quite as special or unique as we might have imagined ourselves to be. This revelation is often told as a horror story within capitalism's hall of mirrors, but it can also teach us that connections and solidarities are available to all of us. We have kin everywhere, some looking like us, some looking nothing like us, and yet still connected to us.
François Brunelle's doppelganger art project, I'm Not a Look-Alike!, offers a model for surrender, not to sameness but to interconnection and enmeshment. The pandemic tried to teach us that no one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another. Rejecting this truth for long enough will lead to the Mirror World, where you declare yourself a sovereign citizen, accountable to no one and nothing.
The confusion with Other Naomi has died down, and the author realizes that it has helped them achieve freedom from the tyranny of their own self. By creating a crisis in their personal brand and showing how grim it is to spend their life chasing clout, Other Naomi has left them feeling significantly calmer, and as John Berger taught, calm is a form of resistance.
Self-involvement is a story where the self takes up too much space, and it is essential to confront the material and collective crises that we face. This requires taking action to create a world that does not require Shadow Lands and is not predicated on sacrificial people, ecosystems, and continents. This starts by naming the systems that have carved out the Shadow Lands, such as capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Teaching these words and their true meanings to the people in our lives so they can better understand and fight against these issues.
The shift to confronting and reimagining structures requires collaboration and coalition, even uncomfortable coalitions. Change requires collaboration and coalition, as seen in the wave of unconventional union organizing at corporations like Amazon and Starbucks, movements organizing debtors into quasi-unions, and investments in communal alternatives. However, none of these changes will happen fast enough until more people figure out how to soften the borders around their individual selves and various identity groups to allow for a coming together in common cause.
Doppelgangers warn us that it will be a struggle to overcome the tension between separation and distinctness and unity and community. The problem lies in our culture's bias toward one tendency over the other, with the scramble for separateness being richly rewarded and encouraged in our zero-sum economy, while the urge to act in solidarity and mutual aid with others is discounted and disappeared when not actively punished. This bias against solidarity is particularly dangerous in the present moment, as fascist doppelgangers grow bolder and connect people with ideas about the supremacy of their race to fixations about the supremacy of their immune systems and the perfection of their kids.
The defense of our identities and broader ethnic/racial/gender identity groups is not serving us all well, as every story of triumph for the fascist right is also a story of fragmentation, sectarianism, and stubborn refusal to make strategic alliances on the anti-fascist left. Conspiracy theories are symptoms of confusion and powerlessness that keep us divided, but they are not the only things that keep us divided. We must loosen the grip on various forms of proprietary pain and selfhood, reaching toward many different forms of connection and kin, toward anyone who shares a desire to confront the forces of annihilation and extermination and their mindsets of purity and perfection.
Faced with the ultimate doppelganger threat—the flip into fascism that is already well underway in many parts of the world—this ability to melt some of the hard, icy edges of identity will be important to any hope we have of success. We must hold onto those realities and build on a shared interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth while constructing new structures that are infinitely more fair and more fun.
Moving together across seemingly intractable barriers is easier said than done than said. Stuck in the realm of words, we will never run out of reasons to fracture. But when we take action to change material circumstances, tensions do not disappear but are often balanced by the recognition of shared interests, the pleasures of camaraderie, and, occasionally, the thrill of victory.
Struggle helps us see each other, break from individualism and the particularities of our identities, and create the potential and possibilities of uniting.
Collective organizing expands the sense of the possible by expanding the possible we. It persuades participants that their pain is not the result of failure of character or insufficient hard work, but rather the consequence of economic and social systems designed to produce cruel outcomes. When enough people start believing that, it is an awakening in the truest sense of the word—a new group identity is constructed in real time, one wider and more spacious than what existed before.
When a person is confronted by their doppelganger, they become unfamiliar to themselves, which can be transcendent. When we come together in movements working for the scale of change demanded by our times, it changes us, making us braver, more hopeful, more connected, and able to feel love toward
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EPILOGUE WHO IS THE DOUBLE? The author has questions for the author, who is a young feminist author, about her alliance with Steve Bannon and his fascist allies, the thousands of people who have died of Covid, her gun, her followers' actions against a Black-owned restaurant in Oregon, her concerns about Roe v. Wade, and her actions after speaking out about Palestine. The author requests an interview with Wolf, who is known for her farright views and her ability to speak her truth. In January 1991, the author was invited to speak at a college where Wolf had just released her book, The Beauty Myth. The author was transfixed by Wolf's talk, which focused on the pressures on Black and Asian women to conform to Eurocentric beauty ideals. The author's friend challenged Wolf about her lack of attention to the pressures on Black and Asian women to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards. However, the author's magnetism was due to Wolf's persona, which was young, confident, and conventionally beautiful. She was like a pot-smoking older sister who had come of age in the freewheeling 1970s, whereas the author was teens in the glossy 1980s. Wolf's book, A Big Book about Big Ideas, was a significant contribution to the feminist movement. The author, a student journalist, was inspired by Naomi Wolf's work and the way she defended patriarchy. She was adamant about her ability to write a book of ideas and command an international audience. Wolf's approach was a powerful one, as she was able to gain the author's trust and intimacy. The author was in the middle of a similar assault, having published an article about Israeli human rights abuses in their campus newspaper. Wolf encouraged the author to write a story, which was later published in a feminist journal called Fireweed. The author's first professional publication was published in Fireweed, which opposed Israel's occupation and colonization of Palestine. Wolf explained that the author's guardedness was due to the male gaze, which she believed was the reason for her self-consciousness. The author's experience with Wolf and her work serves as a reminder of the power dynamics between individuals and the power of their own experiences. The author reflects on her relationship with feminist activist Ruth Wolf, who she lost touch with after her work with her. Wolf was known for provoking emotional reactions from undergrads, and her intense energy and high expectations for her students could bring young women to tears. Despite her loss, the author still felt a sense of revelation about what an author could be. When she dropped out of university at 26, she wrote a book about anti-democratic corporate power and the nascent movements in opposition. Despite rejection letters from publishers and an editor expressing a preference for memoirs of eating disorders, Wolf's influence remained strong. The author reflects on her mother's role in her life, surrounded by courageous feminists and teachers. She wonders if she owes Wolf silence, respect, or lifelong loyalty. The author argues that identity is not fixed, and it is fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating this doubling is part of what it means to be human, but living a good life is about what we make together. She is named after Naomi, the one who did what it took to survive.
EPILOGUE
WHO IS THE DOUBLE?
The author has questions for the author, who is a young feminist author, about her alliance with Steve Bannon and his fascist allies, the thousands of people who have died of Covid, her gun, her followers' actions against a Black-owned restaurant in Oregon, her concerns about Roe v. Wade, and her actions after speaking out about Palestine. The author requests an interview with Wolf, who is known for her farright views and her ability to speak her truth.
In January 1991, the author was invited to speak at a college where Wolf had just released her book, The Beauty Myth. The author was transfixed by Wolf's talk, which focused on the pressures on Black and Asian women to conform to Eurocentric beauty ideals. The author's friend challenged Wolf about her lack of attention to the pressures on Black and Asian women to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards.
However, the author's magnetism was due to Wolf's persona, which was young, confident, and conventionally beautiful. She was like a pot-smoking older sister who had come of age in the freewheeling 1970s, whereas the author was teens in the glossy 1980s. Wolf's book, A Big Book about Big Ideas, was a significant contribution to the feminist movement.
The author, a student journalist, was inspired by Naomi Wolf's work and the way she defended patriarchy. She was adamant about her ability to write a book of ideas and command an international audience. Wolf's approach was a powerful one, as she was able to gain the author's trust and intimacy. The author was in the middle of a similar assault, having published an article about Israeli human rights abuses in their campus newspaper. Wolf encouraged the author to write a story, which was later published in a feminist journal called Fireweed.
The author's first professional publication was published in Fireweed, which opposed Israel's occupation and colonization of Palestine. Wolf explained that the author's guardedness was due to the male gaze, which she believed was the reason for her self-consciousness. The author's experience with Wolf and her work serves as a reminder of the power dynamics between individuals and the power of their own experiences.
The author reflects on her relationship with feminist activist Ruth Wolf, who she lost touch with after her work with her. Wolf was known for provoking emotional reactions from undergrads, and her intense energy and high expectations for her students could bring young women to tears. Despite her loss, the author still felt a sense of revelation about what an author could be. When she dropped out of university at 26, she wrote a book about anti-democratic corporate power and the nascent movements in opposition. Despite rejection letters from publishers and an editor expressing a preference for memoirs of eating disorders, Wolf's influence remained strong.
The author reflects on her mother's role in her life, surrounded by courageous feminists and teachers. She wonders if she owes Wolf silence, respect, or lifelong loyalty. The author argues that identity is not fixed, and it is fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating this doubling is part of what it means to be human, but living a good life is about what we make together. She is named after Naomi, the one who did what it took to survive.
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