Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Content Warning: This section discusses fascist ideology, genocide, abuse of children with autism, eugenics, antisemitism, racism, and enslavement.

“What, I have kept asking myself, is all of this duplication doing to us? How is it steering what we pay attention to and—more critically—what we neglect?”

Throughout Doppelganger, Naomi Klein confronts the many different kinds of doubling that take place in society. She sees doppelgangers as messages that reveal things that are hidden, things that have been neglected or ignored, and things that are yet to come.

“This is the perennial appeal of doppelgangers in novels and films: the idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity—the painful truth that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control.”

Klein looks at doppelganger media and suggests that its appeal speaks to the precarity of individual identity. Doppelgangers reveal how humans grapple with the definition of the self and the fear they may feel at the idea that their selves are not as fixed or in their control as they think.

“This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate tech platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us but were always about extracting from us.”

Under Surveillance Capitalism and Nationalism, online identities and activities are constantly monitored and mined for data. Klein argues for a publicly controlled internet so that privacy in online spaces is not exploited for the profit of private tech companies.