Thoughts on Doppelganger
Part one of a multi-part book review on digital identity dysfunction & more
I’ve been anticipating Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger since it was announced. Like many lefties of my generation, I came of political age alongside No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, so when I heard that her new book would cover issues of digital selfhood and conspiracy culture (absolute catnip topics for me), I knew that when I got a copy, I’d shove aside the rest of my big reading pile. A lot of people in my life do not devour book-length nonfiction—particularly about “bummer” topics—with the level of enthusiasm I do, so I’ve come offering a review and some of my own personal takeaways.
But guess what? It was so dense, fascinating and timely that it’s going to be stretched out into a multi-part read. This first chunk corresponds with the opening sections of the book, but in the coming weeks I’ll offer up more partial reviews—one on the covid, anti-vax, and conspiracy culture sections of the book, and another on its crucial chapters concerning Israel and Palestine. In short, Klein revealed so much by pulling at the one pesky thread of her own problematic doppelganger, that I’ll be left talking about this book for a while.
I started reading Doppelganger shortly after I wrote my first dispatch here and re-semi-obliterated my Instagram presence (again). Within the first fifty pages, I was personally attacked.
Klein writes, “…to be the only clean one in a dirty business…isn’t that what so many of us want as we try to win the game of personal branding—or at least not to get slain by it? We carefully cultivate online personas—doubles of our ‘real’ selves—that have just the right balance of sincerity and world-weariness. We hone ironic, detached voices that aren’t too promotional but do the work of promoting nonetheless. We go on social media to juice our numbers, while complaining about how much we hate the ‘hell sites.’”
Ouch.
The balm in brutally honest passages like this is that Klein (in a book that’s by far her most personal, intimate and self-reflective) cites her own life experiences to explore the problems of being both a person and an online persona, rather than simply calling out others for our technologically-empowered expressive dysfunctions. I previously cited a statement she made in an interview about Doppelganger discussing the origins of our bizarre need to hone our public-facing images into personal brands. We do it, basically, because we’re disempowered by so many of our other collapsed systems—economic, political, social, civic—and one of our best remaining survival tools is the promotion of our own selfhood. In some ways, it’s a perfectly logical outcome of neoliberalism’s focus on the individual. If each person takes responsibility for creating their own viable brand, who needs “society,” anyway?
When this logic is accepted, we end up—as I wrote in that first Substack post bemoaning my own history of self-branding—believing that the privately owned platforms who kindly host these parties at which our digital avatars can connect and co-mingle might be society, after all.
And here I am, slyly sending you back in time to further engage with my digital self in her new enclosure. Cute, right?
One of Klein’s greatest strengths in this work is her ability to name some of the nameless phenomena we’ve generated in our digital mirror world and to incorporate the surprisingly potent logic of the doppelganger narrative into so many facets of our confusing modern lives. This is not just a book about Naomi’s annoyance with being confused for Other Naomi—feminist-icon-turned-conspiracy-darling Naomi Wolf—it’s about all of the ways that our technologies and fractured ideologies generate schisms and deep confusion. She’s given us some new vocabulary to understand the vague, buzzing dread so many of us experience.
Her notion of a digital golem is one of the better metaphors I’ve encountered for the personal experience of being mined for data by tech platforms. The golem, a being animated from non-living matter like mud or clay, is an ancient presence in the Jewish tradition. Golems are obedient to their creators, but generally remain mute, unable to communicate their own realities. The digital golem is the version of ourselves that’s created in “the shadowy back end of personal branding and identity performance culture,” Klein writes.
While our digital doppelgangers might be the avatars we curate for ourselves to present to our online audience of friends and followers, these golems silently follow close behind, growing more embodied each time we feed our information to the machines. Klein warns her students and readers that “every data point scraped from our online life makes our double more vivid, more complex, more able to nudge our behavior in the real world.”
As someone who does their best to elude the machinations of the corporate actors who would build up my digital golem, who never leaves location services on, who tries to never click an ad or shop in an identity-linked browser, who will always choose the “stupid” version of an appliance, car, or any other “smart device,” I understand that caring about digital surveillance and privacy in our day and age seems quaint and old-fashioned to many of my fellow Americans.
No one wants to think about the dirty work behind the scenes that contributes to the lives of incredible convenience so many of us have gained access to over the course of a single generation. Predictive, perfectly timed grocery delivery, digital assistants for anyone who can pay an increasingly cheap cell phone bill, and so on. In the digital sphere, the labor behind these conveniences is made invisible (or at least abstract), but the broader pattern of hiding the parts of systems we’d rather not look at is much older.
Klein refers to the places where the undesirable, unsightly elements of the market live as the Shadow Lands. These places have been previously named (certain uses of the term “Third World,” for example, or Chris Hedges’ “sacrifice zones”)—she hasn’t invented a new way to examine the inequality of global capitalism and its extractive processes, but her choice of language helped renew my own ability to care, to not look away. She describes the “surface layers” of our consumer world—our user experience, in the technological realm—as being powered by an extractive world below.
She writes, “…[the consumer-facing economy] sits on top of more hidden parts of the supply chain, zones of hyper-exploitation, human containment, and ecosystem poisoning that are not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run.”
The horrific cobalt mines that will power the all-electric car infrastructure of the world’s richest future commuters, the faraway cubicles filled with content monitors who screen the ugliest content on the internet to prevent it from reaching the rest of our eyes, the prison labor firefighters risking their lives to combat the disastrous impacts of climate change—all moving parts in this space “below.” And for what? For the comfort and convenience of those of us living in the light.
“Frictionless is the great promise of our age. But friction doesn’t disappear just because we don’t see it—it is simply displaced onto these lives of pure friction, in the Shadow Lands.”
I appreciated that Klein didn’t seem to write about these upsetting dynamics just to make us all feel guilty. As a recovering self-righteous leftist, I’ve come to understand that there’s perhaps no less productive emotion than guilt. It doesn’t do to mope around about how your awful privilege and your unfortunately consumptive lifestyle are killing the planet and producing human suffering. What’s needed is action.
When I think critically about my own inactions and about those of others in my life who “get it,” but feel trapped within these horrific systems, I realize that it’s the very divisions created by our notions of self-hood that get in our way of transforming the current order. If you consider yourself an individual on a quest for betterment, salvation, beauty, fame, wealth, or goodness, there’s little you’ll be able to accomplish on your own. We are not discrete entities. We are not curated avatars. We are deeply, intrinsically enmeshed with every other living being. Until we learn to remember and really feel this truth, it’s unlikely we’ll build the sorts of networks we need for survival and beyond.
Our phones and other technology may be portals to connect with one another and glimpse the other side of the two-way mirror of our mediated relationship with our selves, shadows, golems, and possible futures, but I don’t believe they can offer us the deep solutions we require. They’re too easy to turn off, to walk away from, to use for dissociation and self-soothing. They’re too out of our control, driven by the whims of a handful of billionaires and the people they employ. They’re too far from the physical nature of our sensual world. This seems like something we all feel as a vague dread or a sense of un-reality in the world, but it’s also incredibly difficult to parse and discuss. That’s why giving language and conceptual shape to these problems is so important.
I’ll close this first fan-girl review with an extended passage from the end of Doppelganger.
“The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision). I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history—with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see—in our past, in our present, and in the future racing toward us.”
Sending solstice warmth, ’til next time.
Deep thoughts on doppleganger. That's one I want to read soon. The personal angle she took with it makes me want to see what insights are there. What I've already picked up, from other reviews, suggests that the doppleganger thing is much more than a gimmick, as I might have thought. And giving up privacy and personal data to make the platforms run smoother... "Give me convenience or give me death", The Dead Kennedys said. Even truer today. I think perhaps the capitalists and tech-lords are going to be panicking soon. Because everyone can see they've past Peak Information, and there's no new innovation coming that can sustain the business models. So people are becoming skeptical, on mass, that it's worth it, these platforms and web 3 and whatever other bullshit. After a certain point, they can't be bought off with perceived convenience. Matt Christman also talked about the "frictionless" ideal. Another part of your review reminded me of the late great Michael Brooks [it was E's idea to name our car after him]: "Be kind to people and ruthless with institutions". It's nice to get a more developed sense of how you think, through your writing, because I can see more clearly how we share a large ellipse in our world views. I feel a vital need becoming more and moreso, as more decades happen in these years: the need to talk with people who think about these things, and the near-future, and bounce ideas of of them. My interactions on social media with strangers have not worked for me, for whatever reason, it tends to feel too shallow. Come visit!
just came back for a closer read of this post. i started the audiobook of doppelganger this morning, and remembered that it was a post of yours that caused me to make note to check it out in the first place. excited to keep listening to it, wanted to say thanks for that!