Doppelgänger, by Naomi Klein

A story of two cranks

I wrote about my wife and Virgina Woolf for the

Inner Life

Substack.

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What a bizarre book this is. Feeling somewhat horrified at being constantly confused for Naomi Wolf, the notorious conspiracy theorist, Naomi Klein has written a book about her experiences with a doppelgänger. As Naomi Wolf has recently been spreading Covid misinformation, Klein is understandably upset about the confusion. At first, Klein was reluctant to engage with this situation; then she “mainlined” hundreds of hours of Wolf’s podcasts and videos. Hence the title: Doppelgänger. A Trip into the Mirror World.

Each chapter starts with a personal anecdote, then quickly becomes a recounting of the wondrously strange way that Naomi Wolf’s career unfolded (from liberal darling to Steve Bannon co-host), or a dissection of a left-wing idea (such that the tech firms were engaged, during Covid, in “ecofascism”). There is plenty of discussion of the topic at hand, doppelgängers, but it is so embedded in all of this other rambling I was put in mind of what Samuel Johnson said, “It is the great excellence of a writer to put into his book as much as his book will hold... Robertson is like a man who has packed gold in wool: the wool takes up more room than the gold.” Klein’s larger thesis, that the internet has made doppelgängers of us all, is baggy and hand-wavy and involves vague metaphors. Is it really like having a doppelgänger when you have a social media profile? Are we all Jekyll and Hyde now?

Naomi Klein is difficult to assess, because so much is ideologically earnest and has been treated seriously. Or, as she puts it in the introduction, she writes “books of Big Ideas About Serious Subjects.” The modesty of those slightly self-mocking capitals soon fades away, though, as Klein cannot quite see that saying “I am right” doesn’t really distinguish her from Wolf in any serious way. If anything, it enhances the similarity.

For all of her immersion in the study of doppelgängers (Freud, Dostoyevsky, Stevenson, Chaplin, Roth) Klein remains a speculative thinker, some of whose obsessions border on conspiracy theories. This book makes its arguments with vague metaphors, weakly argued repetitions of the last ten years of anti-tech op-eds, and emotional appeals. Little data is presented for her largest claims.

And this so often leads Klein down paths that, while not the same as Wolf’s, are equally hard to see as anything other than wild tracks to strange places.

Klein documents Wolf’s obsession with comparing Covid masks to Nazism, and her assertion that we have endured a “biofascist coup”. Outlandish, but who isn’t misusing the word fascist these days? It’s everywhere. Including just a few pages earlier in Doppelgänger, when Klein calls the spread of smallpox in the colonies of the New World in the sixteenth century “ecofascism”, a term she applies to those people who thought (think?) it a good thing for Covid to kill the vulnerable. Fascism no longer means the specific set of political policies popular in Germany and Italy in the 1940s, instead it is a Large Word Denoting Bad Things for use in books of Big Ideas About Serious Subjects.

For both Wolf and Klein it is a sign of how much they prefer to appeal to an audience already enraged.

Klein documents the way Wolf has pivoted to the far-right, talking nonsense on the Steve Bannon show. Klein then compares Bannon to The Great Dictator, when Charlie Chaplin urges the American people to resist the slavery of fascism. But she devotes a significant portion of the book to arguing that we are all being captured for data, because the tech companies made a land grab for the internet which used to be public space. She compares the development of Big Tech to the enclosures, a system of laws in eighteenth century Britain that passed land formerly held in common ownership into the ownership of landowners and aristocrats.