Our Mirror Selves: Naomi Klein's Doppelgänger

Another take on social media (and other things)

I recently read Naomi Klein’s book Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s so good that one of my favorite podcasts about BAD books (If Books Could Kill) did an episode on it as an example of a good book, because it’s that good.

Dopplegänger could have been a very different book, as it’s about Naomi Klein’s own doppelgänger, Naomi Wolf. Wolf wrote a very famous (and, in many ways, still wonderful) book called The Beauty Myth that is a feminist classic and catapulted Wolf to stardom in the 90s. She was a cultural icon and ubiquitous presence in media and print, even becoming an image consultant for Al Gore during his presidential run.

Wolf’s downfall was as precipitous as her rise. In 2019 she was publicly called out in an interview for misunderstanding easily Google-able terms in the research she’d done for a new book, a misunderstanding that was so extreme that it meant her book was not only wrong, but actually upheld the dangerous stereotypes she purported to combat (you can hear the whole story and the actual interview—which will make you want to curl up and die—in the podcast I linked to).

After that, Wolf was canceled. Her book was pulped, she couldn’t publish with any of the liberal media and news sites to which she was used to having open access, and her earlier works were gone over with a fine-toothed comb by people looking to find more lazy, incorrect research. And find it they did, with many former fans of her work disavowing her publicly.

So Klein’s book could have been a comeuppance. It could have been easy and fun—a book about a Goliath crashing to the ground. A book that gave its reader sticks, to join in on poking a felled cultural giant.

And Wolf deserved to have her work scrutinized! She’d been almost hilariously lazy (listen to the podcast!) in her research and she’d long since become more of a Public Figure than an actual academic. Indeed, she’d actively courted the former over the latter, like so many of her 90s feminist peers (heyyyyy Germaine Greer).

But Naomi Klein does something so much more interesting, challenging, and rewarding than join in the mockery.

Klein is also a progressive and a public figure who writes book. She (obviously) shares the same first name as Wolf. They’re both around the same age (Klein is younger, but by less than a decade). They’re both attractive brunettes, of Jewish heritage, and while, as Klein’s mother points out, “Your brain should be able to handle more than one Naomi,” apparently the majority of internet users can’t achieve this singular feat (a propensity that Klein’s mother views as a byproduct of anti-semitism, which is hard to argue with).

The internet’s collective inability to determine between Naomis means that Klein is regularly confused with Wolf on social media. So much so that Klein’s followers gleefully warn her when “the other Naomi” is acting up.

And boy howdy, did she act up! Klein traces Wolf’s trajectory from liberal darling (The Guardian! The New Yorker!) to… Steve Bannon? Yes, Steve Bannon, after Wolf became an ardent anti-vaxxer during the pandemic and then embraced other conspiracy theories.

What Klein refuses to do, however, is to fall into the same narratives as so many who gleefully watched Wolf’s move to the right. It’s easy to think, “she has lost her damned mind.” I have thought that, myself. For I loved The Beauty Myth. Raised in a superficial culture and surrounded by women who were perpetually dieting and wouldn’t leave the house without makeup, The Beauty Myth was the first time I encountered any pushback against the idea that being thin and beautiful should be my priority in life. Therefore Wolf popping up with Bannon, of all people, felt incredibly sad.

Klein’s goal, however, isn’t to shame. It’s to hold up mirrors. Mirrors abound in her book, and are linked to the dopplegänger, which is (obviously) her great theme in Dopplegänger. She subtitles the book “a trip into the mirror world,” because her main argument is that what we currently call the left and the right are mirror images of each other. When we step between these mirrors (like Alice, through the looking glass), we’re into a distorted world of fake news, conspiracy theory, and language games. But it’s the holding up of mirrors that is more interesting.

For Klein explores how the left helps to create the right, and vice versa. And much of what she looks at is how we publicly perform our roles, as members of our group, whatever that group may be.

Here’s where social media comes in. For while this book isn’t only about social media and the creation of self in the media age, it’s one of its major themes. Like the artist at the art museum, from my previous newsletter, Klein knows that “it wasn’t built for me,” the “me” here being humanity. Instead, it was built to sell things. And we’re most likely to buy stuff when we’re scared (of aging, of being fat, of violence, of Covid, of bears, of dying).

Fear also makes us buy into conspiracy theories, especially when the powers that be aren’t doing much, or anything, about things that should legitimately scare us. Klein does a beautiful job of illustrating how conspiratorial thinking can be understood as legitimate fear, misplaced. For example, very few of us will argue with the fact we have a broken health care system. But what do you do when you know this to be true and yet neither political party has done anything about that fact, and has instead told you that a) we have the greatest healthcare in the world and/or that b) any other vision for healthcare is communism? It’s easy to see that as the conspiracy, and to look for better answers. Answers the algorithms are happy to serve up in ever more extreme forms.

She also uses Wolf as an example of what happens when we cancel people: we push them through the mirror. Wolf always had a penchant for conspiracy, and I read a wonderful article (I can’t remember where, now) about how The Beauty Myth is a conspiratorial work at its best—because the conspiracy at the heart of it (patriarchy and capitalism) is real. Don’t get me wrong—Wolf deserved to be called out for what was execrable research. But the sheer glee which with people pursued her was suspect. How much, after all, was that glee driven by creating re-tweetable, shareable, and click-baitey content for financial or reputational remuneration, rather than trying to change systems?

For Wolf’s disgrace was an opportunity to question who gets published and why. To think through how public discourse could be better. To give publishing in its current incarnation—a world more interested in searching social media for its next “star” than pursuing quality—a good flailing. Instead, we roasted Wolf on social media. And these roasts were always so much fun to witness and the roasters were hilarious. I remember gleefully cackling at a few jokes made at Wolf’s expense, myself. But Klein warns us of the danger of igniting such kindling:

[A]ll of those baser impulses have been greatly exacerbated by a culture that places limitless value on attention and money, while creating information tools that seem designed to turn every person’s screwup into an opportunity for public shaming, mockery, abandoment, and humiliation on a scale previously unimaginable. (336)

It’s not entirely surprising, Klein warns, that someone like Wolf would become a powerful and influential tool for the right, given her treatment by the left.

In many ways, this book almost reads like the sort of conspiratorial novel written by Dan Brown. I felt, as I was reading it, like I was mentally creating one of those “serial killer maps” in a thriller, with the strings and the newspaper clippings and the messily scribbled notes, all made up of this spiderweb of Klein’s insights and arguments. It feels vast and the way Klein’s brain works is so beautiful because it’s both laser pointed and sharp, and yet so generous. She sees the systems and the absurdities, but she also sees the people. She understands that we’re all, as the stoics knew, fucked up and fallible. That because we have to be the heroes of our own stories and we can make our stories public (indeed, it can feel like we have to make our stories public), that we can so easily fall for our own bullshit, especially when we can easily google a phrase or two and be told our bullshit is brilliance. Meanwhile, the systems we have to rely on are legitimately letting us down, and it’s only natural to look for certainty when so much feels unstable. She can see how we’re all really just trying to survive, in a technological landscape and attention economy built to game our brains and bring out the worst in us, to encourage us to consume and dispose both material objects and, more chillingly, other people.

I could go on, because I loved this book so much. Just seeing how she parsed everything inspired me to be more…thinking. To slow my roll and not be so harsh, or to rush to judgement. Indeed, another review I read (that I can’t remember where, argh!) said that the real joy of this book isn’t that it has any answers—it doesn’t. It’s that it is a living, breathing document creating the sort of collaborative engagement with ideas that should be the goal of the progressive movement. Not policing ideas, but engaging with ideas and thinking through problems and trying to make people’s lives better.

It’s simply gorgeous, and I hope you read it. You’ll be better for it. xo