Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Part One begins with a quote from Judith Butler.

Other Naomi is Naomi Wolf, once a figurehead of feminism in the 1990s. Klein understands why people often get them mixed up: She and Wolf both write books with a political angle, though their main subjects differ. They both have wavy brown hair and are both Jewish. In 2011, Klein hears two women confuse her for Wolf in a public bathroom. Wolf has recently argued that the government’s response to the Occupy Wall Street protests is “the first battle in a civil war” (24) between Obama’s government and the American people. She believes this marks a shift toward totalitarianism and fascism.

Klein finds Wolf’s conclusions dubious. Wolf’s current writings seem like a parody of The Shock Doctrine, expressing similar ideas with fewer facts. People have started confusing Wolf’s reactionary conclusions with Klein’s work. For instance, Klein sees the Green New Deal as a crucial step in the fight against climate change; Wolf sees it as “yet another elite-orchestrated cover for “fascism” (25). Klein agrees that official stories should be investigated and verified, but she condemns Wolf’s conclusions and assumptions for their lack of research.

In the 1990s, Wolf made a name for herself as a feminist writer. Her feminism generally centered white, heterosexual, middle-class women like herself, ignoring any discussions about the intersections of race, class, and sexuality in feminist discourse. She gradually moved away from her feminist roots toward other topics. In The Treehouse (2005), she argued that imagination was more important than facts. In The End of America (2007), she rejected feminism in favor of patriotism. From 2007 onwards, Klein and Wolf wrote about many of the same topics, but they usually came to different conclusions. More and more people started to confuse Klein for Wolf, lamenting, “I can’t believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened to her??” (31).

Klein tries to ignore the connection between herself and Wolf. She does not want to contribute to the confusion. A doppelganger can “raise existentially destabilizing questions” (32) and reveal the precarious nature of the self. Despite her discomfort, Klein tries not to worry: the confusion is mostly online. Things written online seem like “graffiti written […] on an infinitely scrolling restroom wall” (34). This perspective changes when COVID-19 hits.

Wolf has been promoting conspiracy theories for a while, but when the COVID-19 pandemic starts, all of her conspiracy theories center on the virus. She argues that COVID-19 is a deliberate plot to control and commit genocide against a large portion of the global population. She spreads misinformation on social media and on her website, The Daily Clout. Her most notorious piece of misinformation is that the COVID-19 vaccines “shed” onto those who are unvaccinated, making them sick. Many people believe this conspiracy theory. Wolf takes the idea that health is communal and subverts it, arguing that vaccinated people are putting the unvaccinated at risk.

Klein and Wolf get mixed up with increasing frequency, much to Klein’s annoyance; she frequently has to point out that she is “Not that Naomi” (39). Klein is particularly frustrated because she feels that Wolf has taken her ideas and “fed them into a bonkers blender” (40). Klein wonders if she is trying to battle her doppelganger (as so often happens in doppelganger media) when she gets obsessed with Wolf and her ideas. Klein’s sense of self is further complicated by the isolation of the pandemic. She reaches out to social media to connect with people, but social media is full of Wolf and her ideas. Klein feels as if she is disappearing, her identity blurring in the unreal space of the online world.

Misinformation spreads at an alarming rate during the pandemic because so many people are afraid. Those sharing misinformation online rarely take the time to actually read what they are sharing, which furthers the confusion between Klein and Wolf. Both women criticize power structures, so they sometimes have the same targets (like Bill Gates), though their reasoning is very different. Wolf claims that vaccine mandates are equivalent to the Nazi policy of forcing Jewish people to wear yellow stars. Someone credits Klein with this claim, which she finds particularly upsetting.

By speaking up and denying that she is the one making these claims, Klein ends up further training algorithms to conflate her with Wolf. She finds that she is often speechless in the wake of online Klein/Wolf confusion, while Wolf is constantly speaking and writing about increasingly bizarre topics. Klein thinks about doppelganger media, wherein the doppelganger sometimes replaces the original. She wishes she had changed her first name, as she wanted to do as a teenager. She did not like being called Naomi, which means “pleasant” or “pleasing” in Hebrew.

Someone suggests that Klein sue Wolf for “trademark dilution and brand harm” (51) because of the constant confusion between them. Klein struggles with the idea of having a personal brand. When Klein published her first book, No Logo (1999), people often asked her why she was criticizing brands when she herself had become a brand. She insisted that she was a writer, not a brand. In hindsight, she realizes that she did brand her book and dress it up “in capitalism’s own shiny clothing” (55) so that it would sell. Social media requires personal branding because users must build online personas to appeal to an audience. Although Klein did become a brand after No Logo, she was a poorly managed one: By writing all her later books about different topics, she effectively killed her own brand consistency.

Self-branding is a kind of doppelganging: The online persona or brand is a double of the original. Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud developed the idea of the evil twin, an externalized double “onto which all of [one’s] sins and wrongdoings are projected” (61). The digital double is the inverse of the evil twin: It is an idealized identity that has been excised of all wrongdoings and flaws. The idealized identity is a vehicle designed to deliver all the successes that society trains people to desire, including fame, wealth, and adoration.

The digital double is precarious, however, because it can also be doubled; many people have had their identities stolen online. The fear of digital doubles is increasing due to the ever-growing presence of online platforms that encourage people to build virtual identities. AI technologies can now create deepfake clones of people, from politicians to celebrities. Although branding is often described as a form of empowerment, it is actually a violent process wherein the individual must partition the self and engage in “an internal doubling that is inherently alienating” (67).

Sometimes, the self-brand fails, which can be disastrous. This happened to Naomi Wolf. In 2019, Wolf was promoting her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. She appeared on a live radio show, during which the host revealed that the main premise of her book was false. She had misunderstood the phrase “death recorded,” which appeared in many historical documents, believing that it meant that several dozen men in the 19th century were executed for sodomy. The radio host revealed that “death recorded” actually meant that the men had been found guilty, but had then been released. Additionally, some of the cases Wolf presented as consensual sex between men were actually cases of child sex abuse; her work therefore contributed to homophobic rhetoric conflating gay men’s sexuality with pedophilia.

Wolf’s US publisher immediately dropped the book, and her public image took a significant hit; she was no longer considered a trustworthy researcher. This incident profoundly destabilized Wolf, pushing her to build a new audience among conspiracy theorists less concerned with truth and accuracy.

The painting How They Met Themselves by Dante Gabriel Rossetti depicts a man and a woman meeting their doubles. Klein realizes that by confronting her double in Wolf, she has in fact been confronting herself. She uses bell hooks’s theories of identity to explore how to resist becoming a brand. hooks argues that one should resist the phrase “I am a feminist,” and instead say “I advocate feminism” (74). By decentering the phrase “I am,” people can resist branding themselves. Klein acknowledges that she has not always taken hooks’s advice. Although it is common for theorists to self-quote and restate their own ideas in an attempt to reify their identities and brands, their ideas should matter far more than their brands.

Klein is concerned with people conflating her ideas with Wolf’s not because she is concerned about her brand, but because she knows that her ideas are in danger. Her ideas about shock doctrine, for instance, are a “framework that has given people some language to guard against profiteering and attacks on democracy during confusing periods of emergency” (76). Wolf’s ideas, on the other hand, twist Klein’s in ways that distort their original meaning, draining leftist ideas of their power and credibility. Wolf and her followers have contributed to misunderstandings of what it means to fight fascist ideology at a time when society is “in dire need of a robust anti-fascist alliance” (76). To better understand how important ideas get distorted and made absurd, Klein turns her attention to Steve Bannon.