Doppelganger

Introduction: Off-Brand Me

Summary Points

Encountering My Doppelganger

Ignoring Multiple Serious Events

Personal Neglect Due to Obsession

Delving Into Doppelganger’s World

Impact of the Pandemic

Research on Doubles and Doppelgangers

Societal Implications

Confronting Dangerous Systems

The Larger Implication of Doppelgangers

1. Occupied

Summary Points

Naomi Klein Mistaken for Naomi Wolf

Occupy Movement Anecdotes

Naomi Wolf's Controversial Claims

Initial Reaction and Subsequent Attention

Wolf's Evolution from Facts to Imagination

Personal and Professional Impact

Strategy of Denial and Confronting Doppelgangers

The Impact of Social Media

2. Enter Covid, the Threat Multiplier

Summary Points

A Lot of People Are Saying

Early Impact and Reaction

Confusion and Consequences

The Shock Doctrine

Digital Age and Algorithm Impact

Personal Displacement

Book of Naomi

3. My Failed Brand, or Call Me by Her Name

Highlights from Kindle

be careful about falling in love with your projection; it could well overtake you.
If countless numbers of us are doubled, all partitioning and performing ourselves, it becomes harder for anyone to know what is real and what and who can be trusted.
In that state of literal thoughtlessness (i.e., an absence of thoughts of one’s own), totalitarianism takes hold. Put differently, we should not fear having voices in our heads— we should fear their absence.

Summary Points

Brand Dilution and Personal Branding

No Logo Era and Anti-Branding

The Rise of Influencers and Digital Doubles

Historical Context and Implications of Branding

Brand Maintenance and Modern Challenges

Influencer Culture and Authenticity Battles

4. Meeting Myself in the Woods

Summary Points

Meeting Myself in the Woods

Small Names, Big Ideas

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Wolf and the Feminist Movement

The Great Dictator

5. They Know About Cell Phones

Highlights from Kindle

Like so much else in our culture, from abusive labor practices to climate breakdown, the burden of pandemic response was shifted from the collective to the individual,
“I’d rather see an ad for cute shoes that I am going to like than see ads for a bunch of ugly stuff I don’t want,” one student said in an early class. In our discussions, we came to call this the “cute shoes problem” because it encapsulates one of the main reasons why surveillance capitalism and the AI revolution were able to sneak up on us with so little debate. Many of us do appreciate a certain level of automated customization, especially algorithms that suggest music, books, and people who might interest us. And at first, the stakes seemed low: Is it really a big deal if we see ads and suggestions based on our interests and tastes? Or if chatbots help clear our email backlogs?

Summary Points

Vaccine Passport Controversy

Pandemic Control Policies and Public Health

Detriments to Vulnerable Populations

Wolf's Identity and Influence

Exploiting Tech Fears

Digital Doppelgangers

Addressing Big Tech Concerns

Political Dynamics and Mirror World

6. Diagonal Lines

Highlights from Kindle

“Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse
The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality— we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.
This, obviously, is gonzo stuff, the kind of thing that makes me feel smug and superior, like those cell phone jokes. But here, once again, is the trouble: many of Wolf’s words, however untethered from reality, tap into something true. Because there is a lifelessness and anomie to modern cities, and it did deepen during the pandemic— there is a way in which many of us feel we are indeed becoming less alive, less present, lonelier. It’s not the vaccine that has done this; it’s the stress and the speed and the screens and the anxieties that are all by-products of capitalism in its necro-techno phase. But if one side is calling this fine and normal and the other is calling it “inhuman,” it should not be surprising that the latter holds some powerful allure.
My doppelganger may well still think Bannon is the devil, but perhaps she thinks it’s better to serve by his side than to keep getting mocked in a place that sells itself as heavenly but that we all know is plenty hellish in its own right.

Summary Points

Summer at Prince Edward Island

Biblical Comparison

Unexpected Engagement

Doppelganger's Influence

Impact on Relationships

Mirror World

Conspiracies and Attention Economy

7. MAGA’s Plus-One

Highlights from Kindle

It is as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. This has happened on so many issues that I sometimes feel as if we are tethered to each other as reverse marionettes: their arm goes up, ours goes down. We kick, they hug. There are also uncomfortable ways we have begun to imitate each other.
For instance, Bannon has a dedicated “transhumanism” correspondent whose sole role appears to be to scare listeners with accounts of the many ways that technology companies dream of an “upgraded” humanity aided by implants, robotics, and gene splicing.
But it’s not a great secret that plenty of people routinely go too far, turning minor language infractions into major crimes, while adopting a discourse that is so complex and jargon-laden that people outside university settings often find it off-putting— or straight-up absurd.
Bannon, who has done as much as anyone in contemporary times to unleash the floodgates of xenophobic hate in the United States, has even begun to adopt the language of “othering” to describe how liberals treat his listeners. This is key, he says, to why he has been forced to build the Mirror World, with its mirror social media and mirror currency and mirror book publishing. Because his people were being “othered.” But no more. “Never again will they be able to other you, disappear you  
 That’s what the Chinese Communist Party did, that’s what the Bolsheviks did, that’s what the Nazis did,” Bannon told his listeners right before Christmas 2021 (he was trying to sell them FJB coins). And he added, “Nobody in this audience will ever do that to anyone. You wouldn’t think of it. You would say ‘that’s not fair.’”
The horror of the society that flips fascist from within— without the aid of a foreign invasion— lies precisely in this unsettling feeling of familiarity. When that ferocious force is conjured up to wage war on a portion of the domestic population, there are no outsiders to blame. It’s the nice, normal people down the street who turn out to be capable of monstrosity— monstrousness is revealed as the evil twin of nice, the doppelganger of normal.

Summary Points

One-Way Glass

Reverse Marionettes

Bannon's Strategies

Inclusive Nationalism

Warrior Moms

Naomi Wolf's Transformation

8. Ridiculously Serious, Seriously Speechless

Highlights from Kindle

In Operation Shylock, Roth mines the tension between the profound human desire for uniqueness and the equally powerful craving to see one’s self reflected in another person’s being.
I know that the diagonalist alliance Wolf has built with Bannon, as it translates into political power at the state level and beyond, will continue to affect countless lives, and dramatically for the worse. Yet despite this obvious gravity, the sheer ridiculousness of Wolf’s antics— the time-travel tweets, the VACCINE INVESTIGATION TEAM T-shirts, the promiscuous and continuous Holocaust analogies— make it almost impossible to fully take her seriously. Or, put another way, Wolf may be a joke, but she’s not a funny one. And yet, if I’m honest, my doppelganger has me on the edge between laughter and tears almost all the time!
Then, after a couple of decades of watching policy makers ignore his books and the library of others, not to mention the careful work of thousands upon thousands of increasingly panicked climate scientists, he came to the conclusion that, while words help, it’s “movements of people who change the world.”
That is the real source of my speechlessness in this unreal period: a feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them. In recent years, left social movements have won huge victories in transforming the way we talk about all kinds of issues— billionaires and oligarchic rule, climate breakdown, white supremacy, prison abolition, gender identity, Palestinian rights, sexual violence— and I have to believe that those changes represent real victories, that they matter. And yet, on almost every front, tangible ground is being lost. Changing the discourse did not prevent the world’s ten richest men from doubling their collective fortunes from $ 700 billion to $ 1.5 trillion in the first two years of the pandemic; it did not stop police forces from increasing their budgets while teachers have to pay for basic supplies out of pocket;
This is far more scathing than what Greta used to do at such esteemed gatherings. She used to scold. She used to plead. She used to cry. And though she was harsh to the leaders listening to her, her words still implied a kind of faith in them. But it would seem that Greta no longer believes in that theory of change. She has come to the place at which so many of us have arrived: the realization that no one is coming to save us but us, and whatever action we can leverage through our cooperation, organization, and solidarities.
But there was a bigger picture that I didn’t quite see, and that was the all-out war on meaning that this new stage of progressive-cloaked capitalism represented. In the end, what mattered most about those campaigns was the boldness with which they were broadcasting that, from here on out, nothing means anything anymore: if MLK and Gandhi and Bob Dylan can all be conscripted as neoliberal shills, then absolutely anything and anyone can be severed from their contexts and made to mean their precise opposite.
the scroll that scrambles the narrative structures of argument and story in favor of a never-ending thought confetti of “this” and “this” and “this” and “look over there.”
I appreciated Greta’s “Blah, blah, blah” speeches because they precisely captured the pervasive feeling of speechlessness, far better than my own impotent and sullen silences in this period. Greta had found a way not only of critiquing language but also of protecting language: she was mocking their words, and what happens to her words in their ears, but she was also saving her words for spaces where they still might matter, where they still can be married with principles and actions, where people are not merely performing for cameras. Soon, she would be detained by police while joining other activists who were attempting to block the expansion of a coal mine in western Germany.

Summary Points

Ridiculously Serious, Seriously Speechless

A Surly Ghost Enters the Scene

Pipikism and Dumbpelgangers

The Screen New Deal

The Green New Reset?

Beyond Blah, Blah, Blah

9. The Far Right Meets the Far-Out

Highlights from Kindle

That ecofascist thought would surge in our particular historical moment is, sadly, predictable. We live in a time when having two jobs is no guarantee of affording a home and many of our governments consider bulldozing homeless encampments to be a viable policy solution. Meanwhile, every day brings us closer to a future of climate breakdown that, if it is not slowed and reversed, will surely lead to the culling of large parts of our and other species, hitting the most vulnerable first and worst. The process is already well underway. Being alive in a knife-edge moment like this, being forced to be complicit in it, while our so-called leaders fail so miserably to act, unavoidably generates all kinds of morbid symptoms. Inevitably, people reach for narratives to make sense of this reality. Among such narratives is the one that the climate justice movement has been telling for years— the same one Avi was running on: people of good conscience, across all the lines meant to divide us, can band together, build power, and transform our societies into something fairer and greener, just in the nick of time. But that story is getting harder to believe with each day that goes by. So, another narrative, this one spreading much faster, goes like this: I’ll be okay, I’m prepared, with my canned goods and solar panels and relative place of privilege on this planet— it’s other people who will suffer. The trouble with that narrative, though, is that it requires finding ways to live with and rationalize the mass suffering of others. And that’s where the stories and logics that cast other people’s deaths as an unavoidable form of natural selection, perhaps even a blessing, come into play.
Throughout the pandemic, there have been doctors and alternative health practitioners who have made these kinds of arguments not as an alternative to vaccines, masks, and prescription medications, but as important complements to them. Dr. Rupa Marya, for instance, has been highly critical of Covid conspiracy theorists, calling anti-science attitudes “a leading cause of death in the U.S.” But she also sees plenty that needs fixing in the medical status quo, which is why, along with Raj Patel, she coauthored Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Justice. She and Patel acknowledge that the wellness gurus are absolutely right when they say we live in a culture that makes people sick as a matter of course— but rather than presenting individual peak wellness as the high-priced solution, they advocate for “deep medicine”: structural changes that would detoxify our world and make healthy choices accessible to all.

Summary Points

Anecdotes from the Campaign Trail

The Intersection of Wellness and the Far Right

Wellness Culture’s Evolution during Covid

Economic and Social Pressures

Long-standing Conflicts in Pandemic Narratives

Campaign Reflections and Outcomes

10. Autism and the Anti-Vax Prequel

Summary Points

Autism and the Anti-Vax Prequel

The Lancet

The Child as Double

The Washington Post

Frontline

Take Yours and Bring Me Mine!

Palaces for Children

Hans Asperger Finds His Shadow Side

Both This and That

Does He Mirror?

The Off-Ramp

11. Calm, Conspiracy 
 Capitalism

Highlights from Kindle

For me, the reason to study and read and write about economic and social systems, and to attempt to identify their underlying patterns, is precisely because it is stabilizing. This kind of system-based work is akin to laying a strong foundation for a building: once it is in place, everything that follows will be sturdier; without it, nothing will be safe from a strong gust of wind. Yes, our world is still confusing after we understand this— but it is not incomprehensible. There are always systemic forces at play, and a great many of them have to do with the core capitalist imperative to expand and grow by seeking out new frontiers to enclose.
The accelerated need for growth has made our economic lives more precarious, leading to the drive to brand and commodify our identities, to optimize our selves, our bodies, and our kids.
That same imperative set the rules (or lack thereof) that allowed a group of profoundly underwhelming tech bros to take over our entire information ecology and build a new economy off our attention and outrage.
interfering with an otherwise fair and just democracy. That, I have always believed, is one of the core reasons for the left to exist: to provide a structural analysis of wealth and power that brings order and rigor to the prevailing (and correct) sense that society is rigged against the majority, and that important truths are being hidden behind pat political rhetoric.
And because the system is rigged, and most people are indeed getting screwed— but without a firm understanding of capitalism’s drive to find new profit sources to enclose and extract, many will imagine there is a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals pulling the strings.
A basic, underlying logic of the advertising industry, especially when targeting women, is that we buy more stuff when we feel insecure. But playing on those insecurities does not constitute a plot to keep us down, as Wolf was suggesting— it’s just an example of plain old capitalism doing its thing, finding new and novel ways to commodify every aspect of life.
I am a leftist focused on capital’s ravaging of our bodies, our democratic structures, and the living systems that support our collective existence. Wolf is a liberal who never had a critique of capital; she simply wanted women like her to be free from bias and discrimination in the system so that they could rise as individuals.
“Liberal investments in individualism result in thinking of power as residing in individuals and groups rather than structures. Without an analysis of capital or class they end up defaulting to the stories the West tells itself about the power of the individual to change the world. But hero narratives easily flip into villain narratives.”
We were not, and never were, self-made. We are made, and unmade, by one another.
What is this strange drive to reveal the nonhidden? Maybe it’s that, in liberal democracies that still pay lip service to social equality (or at least “equity”), there is something profoundly unsatisfying about how open our global elites are about the power they believe they have a right to wield over the rest of us.
In every case, they take up the mantle of solving the world’s problems— climate breakdown, infectious diseases, hunger— with no mandate and no public involvement and, most notably, no shame about their own central roles in creating and sustaining these crises.
In Hildyard’s conception, our complicity in wars fought with our tax dollars to protect the oil and gas that likely warms our homes, cooks our food, and propels our vehicles, and in turn fuels extinction, is not separate from us; it’s an extension of our physical beings. “This second body,” she writes, “is your own literal and physical biological existence— it is a version of you.” A less visible dimension of our embodied selves.

Summary Points

Conspiracy Culture & Investigative Journalism

Covid-19 and Its Socio-Economic Impact

Shift to Community Expectations During Covid

Real Conspiracies Amid Capitalism

Unmasking Elites in Liberal Democracies

Our Dual Existence and Involvement

Haunting Awareness of Global Inequities

12. No Way Out but Back

Highlights from Kindle

Surely, by laying claim to that abrupt loss of status, that would raise her status— which, let’s face it, is not an entirely outlandish thing to believe at this stage of neoliberal capitalism, which has done a fine job of transforming identity-based oppression from a basis for solidarity and shared analysis (the original intention of identity politics) to its own form of currency.
Canada’s Parliament then unanimously passed a motion stating that the residential school system met the United Nations’ definition of genocide.
“An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought,” James Baldwin wrote. However, “to accept one’s past— one’s history— is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”

Summary Points

Naomi Wolf's Anti-Vaccine Mandate Protests

Controversial Comparisons to Civil Rights Movement

Reactions and Racial Injustice

Kamloops Indian Residential School Revelations

Indigenous Solidarity Convoy

Freedom Convoy and Racial Reckonings

13. The Nazi in the Mirror

Highlights from Kindle

“And if the inferior race must perish, it is a gain, a step toward the perfecting of society which is the aim of progress,” Mr. Travers explains in Conrad’s novel The Rescue, a distillation of the mindset that drowned whole continents in blood, and that was certainly at work here in Canada, in those so-called schools with secret cemeteries. Within this mindset, genocide is not a crime; it’s merely a difficult but necessary stage, one blessed (for the believers) by God or (for the rationalists) by Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” A “great replacement” theory if ever there was one.
What Du Bois and CĂ©saire tried to tell us is that culture, language, science, and economy are no protection against genocide— all it takes is sufficient military force wielded by a power willing to denounce your culture as savage and declare you brutes.
When Lindqvist wrote “Exterminate All the Brutes,” it was the early 1990s, and the climate crisis was barely in his sightlines. He did not yet know that European powers and their settler colonial states would spend the next three decades effectively deciding to let continents where those “inferior races” reside burn and drown because, once again, the alternative interrupted the flow of limitless wealth accumulation. We must now ask this: What if full-blown fascism is not the monster at the door, but the monster inside the house, the monster inside us— even we whose ancestors have been victims of genocide?

Summary Points

The Nazi in the Mirror

The Mirror Shatters

Modern Reflections and Consequences

14. The Unshakable Ethnic Double

Highlights from Kindle

In truth, any number of identity-based divisions can be marshaled to perform this function: Jews versus Blacks, Blacks versus Asians, Muslims versus Christians, “gender critical” feminists versus transgender people, migrants versus citizens. This is the playbook used by Trump and the other pseudo-populist strongmen the world over: throw some minor economic concessions to the base (or at least claim to do so), unleash the dogs of race and gender-based hatreds, and preside over a rapid upward transfer of wealth, alongside an authoritarian concentration of power.
In this time of great pipiking, what moves me most about Leon’s short life is his faith in ideas. Even surrounded on all sides by mass slaughter, even under such extreme personal circumstances, he still managed to believe that words and analysis and research mattered, that they still had the power to break an evil spell. Even if those words were too late to matter for him.
Because, though it may be tempting, Israel-Palestine cannot be written off as a confounding ethnic conflict between a set of intransigent Semitic twins. It is, instead, the latest chapter in that story of the construction of the modern world, a world that is now on fire. A world that was born in fire. A story in which we are all implicated, wherever we live. It began in the lead-up to the Inquisition, with the burnings, torture, and then expulsion of Muslims and Jews; continued with the bloody conquest of the Americas and the ransacking of Africa for riches and human fuel to power the new colonies; wreaked colonial havoc in Asia; and then returned to Europe for Hitler to distill all of the methods forged in these earlier chapters— scientific racism, concentration camps, frontier genocide— into his Final Solution.

Summary Points

The Power Outage and Mother's Caution

Confronting Racial and Ethnic Doubling

Historical and Modern Anti-Semitism

Jewish Double in Contemporary Society

Anti-Semitic Conspiracies and Historical Misuse

Jewish Attraction to Leftist Ideologies

Narratives and Responses to the Jewish Question

Wolf's Transformation and Public Criticism

The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and Zionism

The Narrator's Exploration and Encounters

15. Unselfing

Highlights from Kindle

The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision).
We avoid because we do not want to be bodies like that. We do not want our bodies to participate in mass extinction. We do not want our bodies to be wrapped in garments made by other bodies that are degraded, abused, and worked to exhaustion. We do not want to ingest foods marred by memories of human and nonhuman suffering. We do not want the lands we live on to be stolen and haunted. We do not want the children we love to live in a world that is less alive, less wonderous, more frightening. How could we? It is all so unbearable. No wonder we work so hard to look away. No wonder we erect those walls, literal and psychological. No wonder we would rather gaze at our reflections, or get lost in our avatars, than confront our shadows.
we are all trapped inside economic and social structures that encourage us to obsessively perfect our minuscule selves even as we know, if only on a subconscious level, that we are in the very last years when it might still be possible to avert an existential planetary crisis.
Some of the climate scientists whose work I most respect have come around to an understanding that there is an intimate relationship between our overinflated selves and our under-cared-for planet.
There is an urgency to this, as Veron points out. Because “the people who are the exploiters of this planet are people who put themselves first”— unable to unself even for a moment.
Put a little differently, the climate crisis can be understood as a surplus of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere; it can also be understood as a surplus of self— a result of all the literal and figurative energy it takes to perform and perfect the selves fortunate enough to live outside the Shadow Lands.
We are here not just to make sure we as individuals survive, but to make sure that life survives; not to chase clout, but to chase life.
Self-involvement, however it manifests— my doppelganger’s megalomania, my various neuroses, your fill-in-the-blank— is a story in which the self takes up too much space, just as the story of Judeo-Christian Western civilization puts the human (read: white, male, powerful human) at the center of the story of life on this planet, with all of it created for our species. None of it is true. Whether we are loving ourselves too much or loathing ourselves too much— or, more likely, doing both— we’re still at the center of every story. We’re still blotting out the sun.
All of which is why, over the course of this now concluding journey, I have come to embrace Naomi confusion as an unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego. I could never quite get the hang of nonattachment before this; but I think, thanks to her, I have.
The shift to confronting and reimagining structures requires something else: a recognition that this work is not something we can do on our own, as individuals, with a charity donation or an equity and diversity training, or a performance of virtue on social media. Indeed, a central reason why so many of us cannot bear to look at the Shadow Lands is that we live in a culture that tells us to fix massive crises on our own, through self improvement. Support labor rights by ordering from a different store. End racism by battling your personal white fragility— or by representing your marginalized identity group in elite spaces. Solve climate change with an electric car. Transcend your ego with a meditation app. Some of it will help— a bit. But the truth is that nothing of much consequence in the face of our rigged systems can be accomplished on our own— whether by our own small selves or even by our own identity groups. Change requires collaboration and coalition, even (especially) uncomfortable coalition. Mariame Kaba, a longtime prison abolitionist who has done as much as anyone to imagine what it would take to live in a world that does not equate safety with police and cages, puts the lesson succinctly, one passed on to her by her father: “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.”
But none of these changes will happen fast enough until more of us figure out how to soften the borders around our individual selves and around our various identity groups to allow for a coming together in common cause.
But when power and wealth and weaponry and information technology are concentrated in so few hands, and those hands are willing to deploy them for the most venal and reckless of ends, splintering is tantamount to surrender. Up against oligarchy, all we have is the power latent in our capacity to unite.
We must hold on to 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.
As Marx said of religion, doubles are our opiates; we have less need for them when there is less pain and dissonance to escape.
Simpson’s formulation calls on us to reckon with the sickened and impaired state of our world, but not to use that as an excuse to walk away in search of perfection. On the contrary, when we are surrounded by need, we are called upon to become better caretakers.
If we fail to build infrastructures of care, the cruelties and derangements of the Covid era will be only the barest glimpse of the barbarism to come.

Summary Points

Unselfing

This Changes Everything

Feel Like Coral, Like Fish

The Double

Struggle Between Care and Uncare

Double Vision

Highlights from Kindle

A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self. It’s about what we make together.

Summary Points

Metaphysical Doubt and Questions for Wolf

Attempt to Interview Wolf

Early Interaction with Wolf

The Impact of Wolf's Words

Post-Interview Relationship

Influence and Divergence

Reflection on Identity and Loyalty