Olivia: Alright Jackson, pop quiz. Five-word review challenge. The author is Naomi Klein. The title is Doppelganger. Go. Jackson: Hmm, Naomi Klein. Okay. "Capitalism's evil twin buys world." Olivia: I love that. And you're not entirely wrong, but the real story is so much stranger and more personal. Today we are diving into Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Jackson: Wait, so it's not about corporations? I thought Klein was the ultimate critic of big-picture systems. Olivia: Exactly. She's the author of the anti-branding bible No Logo and the paradigm-shifting The Shock Doctrine. But this book, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Women's Prize for Nonfiction, starts with the ultimate branding nightmare. For years, she has been living with a doppelganger, constantly being mistaken for another public figure named Naomi. Jackson: Oh, that's rough. So this is her trying to untangle that mess? Olivia: It starts there. But she uses that bizarre, personal vertigo as a lens to understand the much weirder vertigo we're all feeling in our politics, our culture, and our digital lives. It begins with a case of mistaken identity and ends with a map of our entire, confusing modern world.

Jackson: Okay, you have my full attention. Who is this other Naomi? And how bad did the confusion get? Olivia: The other Naomi is Naomi Wolf. Back in the nineties, Wolf was a celebrated feminist author, famous for her book The Beauty Myth. But over the past decade or so, her public persona has shifted dramatically. She's become a prominent voice in conspiracy circles, especially around anti-vaccine misinformation. Jackson: Whoa. So you have Naomi Klein, the leftist academic and critic of corporate power, being confused with Naomi Wolf, a darling of the anti-vax right. That is a potent cocktail for online chaos. Olivia: Potent is the word. Klein tells this incredible story about being at an Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011. She's in a public bathroom and overhears two women talking about something "Naomi" said about the movement. Klein realizes they're talking about her, but she never said it. So she walks over to the sink and has to say the line that becomes a refrain in her life: "I think you are talking about Naomi Wolf." Jackson: That is fantastically awkward. It’s like having to correct people about a relative you're not on speaking terms with, but it's your own name. Olivia: And it just gets more intense. As Wolf's theories get more outlandish—questioning 5G, ISIS beheadings, and then becoming a major figure in COVID misinformation—the blowback online increasingly lands on Klein. She's getting tagged in furious tweets, her name is algorithmically linked to Wolf's. It's a total identity hijack. Jackson: For the woman who wrote No Logo, a book all about the dangers of branding, this must have felt like a special kind of karmic hell. Her own personal brand, which she says she tried to "poorly manage" on purpose to avoid being pigeonholed, was being completely corrupted. Olivia: It's the ultimate irony. She wanted to be an author with ideas, not a brand. But in the digital world, your name is your brand, whether you like it or not. And hers was being diluted, distorted, and associated with things she fundamentally opposes. She even uses this great metaphor of her dog, Smoke, who barks ferociously at his own reflection in the glass door every single night. She calls him her "dogpelganger." Jackson: I love that. The dog sees an intruder, a rival trying to steal his home and his food, but he's just barking at himself. Olivia: Exactly. And Klein realizes she's doing the same thing. She's spending hours, days, weeks falling down the rabbit hole of her doppelganger's world, watching her videos, reading her posts, trying to understand this other version of herself. She describes neglecting her family, her work, even her aging parents, all because she was obsessed with her double. It created this profound sense of the uncanny, that Freudian feeling of something being both familiar and deeply alien at the same time. Jackson: That's actually heartbreaking. The story about her son watching a violent nature show called 'Animal Fight Club' while she was lost in this research really hit me. It shows the real-world cost of this digital obsession. It's not just about tweets; it's about the life you're not living while you're consumed by your reflection. Olivia: And that's the first major insight of the book. This doppelganger phenomenon isn't just a quirky problem for famous people. In an age of social media, we all have doubles. We all perform a version of ourselves online—a curated, branded, partitioned self. And we can get so lost in managing that double that we lose touch with our real, embodied lives.

Jackson: Okay, so the personal doppelganger is a powerful metaphor. But you said it gets bigger. How does she connect her personal identity crisis to the chaos in our politics? Olivia: This is the big leap she makes. She argues that her personal doppelganger problem is just a small-scale version of a much larger phenomenon she calls "doppelganger culture" or the "Mirror World." It's a political and social space where everything is inverted, projected, and doubled. Jackson: It sounds like the political version of that Spider-Man pointing meme, where everyone is just accusing everyone else of being the bad guy. Olivia: That's a perfect analogy! And Klein points to figures like Steve Bannon as the master architects of this Mirror World. Bannon's core strategy, which he honed with Trump, is projection. Whatever you are guilty of, you accuse your enemy of doing it first and louder. He accuses the left of being the real fascists, the real censors, the ones creating chaos. It's a constant inversion of reality. Jackson: It creates a kind of political vertigo. If everyone is calling everyone else a Nazi, the word loses its meaning. You can't tell who is who. Olivia: And that's the point. It's meant to disorient and paralyze. But Klein identifies something even stranger happening in this Mirror World: the rise of what she calls "diagonalism." Jackson: Hold on, 'diagonalism'? What exactly does that mean? It sounds like a geometry term. Olivia: It's a term from political scientists, and it describes the bizarre new political alliances that cut diagonally across the old left-right spectrum. Think of the anti-vax movement during the pandemic. You had traditional right-wing libertarians marching alongside wellness influencers, yoga instructors, and crunchy New Age types. Jackson: Right! How on earth do yoga enthusiasts and MAGA supporters end up on the same team? Their values seem completely opposed. Olivia: Klein argues they find common ground in a few key areas. First, a shared language of "bodily autonomy" and "sovereignty." Second, a deep distrust of institutions, whether it's Big Pharma, the government, or mainstream media. And third, a vulnerability to misinformation that exploits legitimate fears. People are right to be skeptical of pharmaceutical companies' profit motives or concerned about digital surveillance. Jackson: So the Mirror World takes a real concern and twists it into a distorted conspiracy. Olivia: Precisely. Bannon and his allies are brilliant at this. They see a void where the left has failed to offer a compelling narrative or solution, and they rush in to fill it with their own. Klein tells this incredible story from her husband's political campaign in Canada. They meet a lifelong voter for the progressive NDP party, a woman with solar panels and an electric car, who tells them she's now voting for the far-right, anti-immigrant People's Party. Jackson: Wow. She didn't even stop in the political center. She went straight from the far-left to the far-right. Olivia: That's diagonalism in a nutshell. The woman felt the left had become too compromised, too "globalist." The far-right offered her a sense of purity and rebellion that she wasn't finding anywhere else. It's this strange convergence of the far-right and the far-out, creating a political landscape that is deeply confusing and increasingly dangerous.

Jackson: Okay, this is all pretty bleak. The digital world is a nightmare, politics is a funhouse mirror. Does Klein offer any way out of this maze? Olivia: She does, and it's a really beautiful and challenging idea. After spending the whole book diagnosing the problems of doubling, branding, and projection—all things related to the self—she argues the way out is something she calls "unselfing." Jackson: Unselfing. That sounds a bit abstract. Does it just mean being less selfish? Or deleting your social media? Olivia: It's deeper than that. It's the radical opposite of personal branding and self-optimization. For decades, we've been told the answer to our problems is to work on ourselves: build a better brand, get a better body, optimize our lives. Klein argues this hyper-focus on the self is the core of the problem. Unselfing is about deliberately de-centering that individual self and turning our attention outward, towards solidarity and collective care. Jackson: That's a powerful idea. It's not about becoming a better 'me,' it's about strengthening the 'we.' Olivia: Exactly. And she gives these two stunning, contrasting examples from Canada. First, you have the "Freedom Convoy," the trucker protest against vaccine mandates. On the surface, it looked like a collective movement, but Klein argues it was a performance of hyper-individualism. It was all about "my freedom," "my choice," a rejection of the idea that we are interdependent and have responsibilities to one another. Jackson: A collection of individuals all focused on themselves, just in the same place. Olivia: Right. And she contrasts that with another, less famous convoy that happened a year earlier. After the horrifying discovery of hundreds of unmarked children's graves at a former residential school, a white trucker named Mike Otto, moved by the grief of his Indigenous neighbors, organized a "We Stand in Solidarity Convoy." Hundreds of trucks drove to the site, not to protest, but to bear witness, to share in the grief, and to offer support. Jackson: That's a powerful contrast. One is all about 'me' and my freedom, the other is about 'us' and our shared responsibility and history. Olivia: That's the essence of unselfing. It’s the move from the isolated, branded self to the interconnected, social self. It’s about recognizing that the most important work isn't perfecting our own lives, but facing the uncomfortable, often painful truths of our shared world together. It’s inspired by thinkers like bell hooks, who famously used a lowercase name to de-emphasize her persona and put the focus on her ideas. Jackson: So the answer to having your identity stolen by a doppelganger isn't to build a stronger, better identity. It's to let go of the idea of a fixed, perfectible self altogether. Olivia: That's the radical conclusion. The way out of the Mirror World isn't to polish our own reflection, but to smash the mirror and look at what's real, what's shared, and what needs our collective care.

Olivia: When you step back, the journey of this book is incredible. It starts with a seemingly niche, almost comical problem—a famous author being confused with her namesake—but it unfolds into this sweeping diagnosis of our time. Jackson: It really does. The doppelganger becomes this key that unlocks everything. It's not just about Naomi Wolf. The doppelganger is the idealized, branded version of ourselves we perform on Instagram. It's the political enemy we project all our own flaws onto. It's the shadow that our society tries to hide. Olivia: And the ultimate insight is that our culture's obsession with the "self"—our personal brand, our individual optimization, our curated identity—is a trap. It isolates us and makes us vulnerable to the very forces of division and disinformation that are tearing things apart. Jackson: So the ultimate message is to stop staring at our own reflections—or our doubles—and start looking at each other. To find our identity not in what makes us unique individuals, but in what connects us as a collective. Olivia: I think that's it exactly. Which leads to a really interesting question for all of us. What's one small way you could practice 'unselfing' this week? Maybe it's putting your phone down and being fully present with someone. Maybe it's volunteering for a local cause. Maybe it's just listening to a perspective you normally wouldn't. Jackson: That's a great challenge. We'd love to hear what our listeners think. Head over to our community page and share your thoughts on what 'unselfing' could look like in your life. Olivia: We can't wait to read them. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.