Doppelganger begins by chronologically retracing the steps of how Naomi Wolf turned from inhabiting a leftist feminist perspective to becoming a regular pundit on Steve Bannon's alt right programme. Espousing and inflaming every conspiracy theory she could get offensive traction with.
At the same time an even stranger phenomenon happened. Naomi Klein started to be regularly confused online with Naomi Wolf. So much so that the algorithm picked up on it and began to fuel the confusion still further. At which point Naomi Klein, unable to effectively counter any of this, felt control over her own identity was pretty much lost.
This personal experience made her start to take a more active, inquisitorial role into the whole issue of conspiracies. Investigating why the alt right has gained so much traction with the 'left out' working class. Picking up on issues that traditional parties had either abandoned or were afraid to engage with. So what might traditionally have been a concern of the left, gets co opted and adapted into a populist right wing one. But as Klein herself admits, it's not that conspiracies don't exist, just not the ones Bannon and Co espouse. But for the left to start talking about them risked getting lost in the murky morass of those with less contact with factual truth, or integrity.
There were times when reading this book that you cheer for how well she puts the finger on what is so wrong. But at the same time the book is a really hard read. The situation we are in is so depressing, and so difficult to see how we, as a civilisation, can extricate ourselves from. Its not completely without hope, but goodness it is hard to keep a clear hold on that.
One very cogent idea she lays out here, is that we are all in danger of being 'othered' by people on the Internet and in society. We all do it so easily ourselves. We stop seeing the person, and create this doppelganger version of them, onto which we can project all sorts of reprehensible qualities. If you happen to be Jewish, a woman, black, gay, trans, socialist or belong to any sort of religion, then you can end up being seen as this archetypal nefarious representative figure.
She takes the example of the Nazi's and the Holocaust. Since the end of the war the techniques and methods employed to commit genocide by the Nazi's have been presented as an evil act particular to them. This ignores the fact that Hitler openly stated he got a lot of his ideas about concentration camps from the British in South Africa. The idea for mass extermination, from how the Indigonenous American Indians were rounded up, robbed of their lands, and then of their lives, in the US. Genocide was all part of the European colonial ethos, and the Nazi's were the inheritors of that, not the sole progenitors of it.
From the perspective of history, we are all implicated in this, and we'd rather not know. And this not wanting to know, fuels the distractions of frankly barmy conspiracy theories, climate change denial, the vehement obsession with vaguely indefinable concepts like culture war or wokeness. Anything to not look our complicity in the face, of modern slavery, poverty wages in far off places and a looming apocalypse.
And what about hope? Well she thinks there is one way things could change. If we were to rediscover a way to rebuild connections and work together as a community. To find meaning and purpose in real relationships again. To see our self absorption with social media as the escapism it is, getting lost in the pursuit of gratifying our unique brand of individualism. Fiddling whilst the world literally burns, floods, and collapses all around us.
CARROT REVIEW - 5/8
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