Book Review: Doppelganger - A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

 

I have been an admirer of the work of Canadian thinker and social critic, Naomi Klein, since her 2007 ground-breaking book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. That book changed permanently how I read news, interpret events (and political responses to them), and think about the world. In that sense, it would be fair to describe Klein as a key influence in the development of my own political, social and even historical thinking. (On that note, I have not yet read the book that first brought her into prominence, 1999's No Logo, but one thing I intend to do this year is to rectify that).

Doppelganger is clearly cut from the same intellectual and philosophical cloth as Klein's earlier works (especially The Shock Doctrine and her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate), but takes a different, and more personal, approach to the big questions and big problems that beset the present moment. Klein's entry point, shaping theme, and key hook is the idea of a mirror world and mirror self - the Doppelganger - which, for her, is represented by the woman with whom she is often confused in public discourse, the American writer and social critic Naomi Wolf.

Wolf, as Klein explains in great detail, is a figure with a strange public trajectory. Her breakthrough days were as a public feminist (she is the author of The Beauty Myth, the 1990 text that dominated young feminist conversation in the early 90s, something I can attest to as a young woman who was at university and swimming in that discourse from 1991-1994). For most of the 90s, Wolf was a fairly standard left-wing feminist figure - perhaps always a little more concerned with surfaces than some other thinkers, but nothing out of the ordinary.

However, things started to take a turn for Wolf at some point in the latter noughts and certainly was bedded in by 2019, as the pandemic was starting off. It can best be summarised by her Wikipedia entry, which describes her as "an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist." Wolf has, by a process that Klein describes with care, fallen down a right-wing conspiracy rabbit hole so deep that it seems unlikely she will ever climb out of it. I won't redo all of Klein's exposition (read the book for that!), but as a shorthand, she is now a leading light in the high conspiracy anti-vax movement, is a buddy of such folks as Steve Bannon, and regularly appears on right wing talk shows to spout her ideas.

Klein uses the idea of mirrors - the distorted versions of self, society, truth, reality - to good effect as an organising principle throughout this wide-ranging dissection of (in no particular order) late-stage capitalism, the risks and costs of the digital age, conspiracy theorising, the failures of the left, the failures of the right, the destruction of the earth, the way damaged people damage people, the dangers and drivers behind Zionism, the desperate and parlous state of the environment, and the intersection of race, gender and class (or more particularly, money) in determining the shape of people's lives. Telescoping up and back from her personal story of being mixed up with Wolf in the public imagination, and the broader, deeper story of what is up with the world, Klein treads some complex ground. She writes powerfully of seeing in Wolf a distorted mirror image of her own ideas and activism, and it serves as a really engaging way to think about and dissect the bigger issues.

The book is riddled with insights that punch hard - this pithy summation of all that is wrong with the digital age is a case in point:

"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. And it represents an enormous and radical shift in not only how we live but also, far more importantly, 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."

Or this one, which encapsulates neatly the phenomenon I refer to as "the left eating its own young": 

"When we have differences, we tend to focus on them obsessively, finding as many opportunities as possible to break apart ... 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 offputting - or straight up absurd".

 Klein is, politically and philosophically, what I would consider to be an old-school leftist in most ways (if you mix traditional left thinking with environmentalism). She has a clear-eyed and well-argued position on the essentiality of class as a way of understanding the world, and the role of capital (money) in making and maintaining oligarchies and power structures. 

It is exactly because she understands this so well, and has herself often pointed to the ways in which shadow-structures exist and undermine the project of, well, life on earth, that she is able to make a strong case for what drives people into the "mirror world", where facts are flipped or ignored, where realities are reshaped into conspiracies. She says, and she's right in my opinion, that people who fall to the mirror world are not stupid (necessarily) or evil (necessarily) or even completely wrong; what they are is frightened, aggrieved, and lacking the tools or the self-reflection required to (to coin a Langston Hughes quote) "take a knife and cut the world in two - and see what worms are eating at the rind." It is easier, it is safer, in many ways, to not face the reality of the ways in which things are kind of fucked, because those ways are complex and intertwined and would require work and sacrifices to fix. Easier, then, to believe that the problems are simple and caused in some way by cabals of people we don't like, or things that we don't properly understand, or ideas that make us uncomfortable because they demand something of us.

All of that said, and reiterating the incredible power of the book, I did have one quibble, and that was the ending. Having made such hard-hitting points, and built a convincing picture of how we got here (insights that seems more, not less, applicable now, as we enter the second Trump administration, than they did when the book was released in 2023), Klein's offering of a solution, of a way forward, feels undercooked and quite diffuse. She observes that collectivity and community is the key, with such lyrical phrases as:

"We are not, and never were, self-made. We are made, and unmade, by each other".

And she highlights the need for, in effect, a less selfish approach to life if all planetary life is to survive: 

"Our role here on earth is not simply to maximise the advantage in our lives (or to try to extend our selves beyond our life with 'grief tech' avatars). It's to maximise (protect, regenerate) all of life. We are here not just to make sure that we as individuals survive, but to make sure that life survives; not to chase clout, but to chase life".  

Those are lovely sentiments, and I agree with them (Klein and I are very closely sociopolitically aligned overall), but what they aren't are specific, actionable or imbued with the kind of energy that would stand any chance of moving the needle. I commented on social media recently (yes, given the content of this book, I appreciate the irony) that I hope to live long enough to see the pendulum start to swing again, but I'm not sure I will. Given that I will likely see the year 2060 arrive (good genes, so far good luck), this indicates that I believe us to be near the start, not the end, of this particular timeline - and that's an urgent and possibly epoch-killing problem for the earth, given the climate change we are already seeing.

Overall, I'm still giving this book 9/10. It's an important, powerful book that has already clarified some things for me and is likely to be a significant factor in my decision-making as I start to disengage from social media. I only wish the final section had been a little more built out and concrete, because that would have been just a little more hopeful a place to end the story.