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.

This is insane. That the early internet was the result of publicly funded research is a long way from the use of legislation to forcibly take ownership of land. Big Tech (if such a moniker really means very much) is part of a vast, global, decentralised development. Saying that these companies “appropriated commonly held tools for private gain” neglects to recognise that they invented the tools: the modern internet had to be created. Quoting Mark Zuckerberg is a weak form of argumentation for such a big point.

Klein has fallen so far into this rapacious, zero-sum view of the world that when she says we can take the internet back (yes, indeed, she wants to nationalise the internet) she actually uses the phrase “like decolonial movements of the last century… we could fight to claim back the common assets we have lost.” Excuse me? The development of Facebook may not have been everything the liberal left wanted, but comparing it to the colonial experience is audacious, to say the least. If a conservative had written like this, they would have been rightly excoriated.

And here is the problem with Doppelgänger. The difference between the two Naomis is not that big. Wolf compared vaccine passports to the Chinese social credit system, claiming that anyone with a vaccine passport would be submitting to extensive state surveillance. They would even be able to control your credit cards, she said. Klein is horrified to be mistaken for Wolf when she makes such outlandish statements. But what do we find a few pages later?

Vaccine passports aren’t a social credit system, but social media itself kind of is.

If you believe, as Naomi Klein does, that we are all “data mine sites”, then it is suddenly much easier to sympathise with Naomi Wolf’s pronouncements. But Klein knows she is relying on a few well chosen quotes, a vague narrative, and some non-sequiturs. She hardly bothers to prove or demonstrate what she says. She doesn’t need to. The audience for these ideas (that we are all being exploited for our attention and our data) is ready made. That’s why she can write like this:

Those QR codes [from vaccine passports] aren’t putting our lives under constant surveillance, but… our phones themselves, and many other smart devices are, or at least could.

Or at least could? Well, which is it? Is the CIA conducting daily stake outs in front of every house with long-range camera lenses or not? It is difficult to resist the idea that Klein is simply using this unfortunate situation (her constantly being confused with Wolf) to leverage the attention being given to the far-right movement to add her own speculative thoughts to the mix.

Klein should consider why competition has ended Meta and Alphabet’s domination of online advertising. Or why there is a large and rising consumer surplus from the internet. (Are you, by reading this, having your attention harvested and your data manipulated, or are you getting the benefit of technology?) Did you know that Amazon ratings are a much higher source of consumer surplus than traditional reviews? Aren’t there many ways in which the very conscious trade off we make of data for technology benefit us?

Klein is part of the more traditional media world having to compete with such things. It’s understandable that she dislikes it. As a journalist, she’s obsessed with Twitter and Facebook. What about Uber, which has delivered major savings for consumers. Or the technology no-one thinks of, like Sage or Adobe? Klein believes climate change and ecological problems mean we are living on a knife edge—how does she feel about the technology being used to prevent over-fishing? Or the astonishing development of battery technology and electronic vehicles? What about the innovators cleaning up plastic in the oceans?

Without more than the sort of op-ed language you expect to find in the Guardian, Klein is merely a more respectable version of Wolf. Doppelgänger isn’t a book of big serious ideas at all. It’s a pseudo-serious rant, full of warmed over platitudes.

What struck me most was just how sad Naomi Wolf’s story is. Her book Outrages contained a serious error—Wolf claimed dozens of gay men were executed in nineteenth century Britain when they were not. This error was exposed live on the radio. You could hear Wolf’s career falling apart in real time. The error was so basic the radio interviewer caught her out by reading the Old Bailey website. Wolf’s father had died shortly before she was exposed like this. Her subsequent career seems, at least in part, to be the result of a very difficult set of circumstances.

And yet, Klein, if anything, takes Wolf too seriously. Wolf was always something of a crank. In her review of Outrages Parul Saghal talked about Wolf’s “long, ludicrous career”, about her false claim that 150,000 people die annually from anorexia when the real number was closer to 50 or 60. There is even a study that found, “On average, a statistic on anorexia by Naomi Wolf should be divided by eight to get close to the real figure.” Similarly, her works on fascism and brain science are held in low regard. Naomi Wolf has always played loose with the facts.

Klein pays far too little heed to this. She takes Wolf much more seriously. Having decided they were doppelgängers—and that everyone online is trapped in an exploitative doppelgänger situation—she had little choice. But in doing this, Klein reveals herself to be much more like Wolf than she would like to admit. Once she got hold of the big metaphor that would explain everything—social media profiles, right wing conspiracies, the rise of Big Tech—Klein did what Wolf does. She wrote a book that fits her analogy, so full of large claims and strong ideology that her audience will go along for the ride.

Doppelgänger is a more accurate portrait of Naomi Klein than she knows.