Naomi Wolf’s been melting down. She’s been using her clout on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter to complain about her Naomi problem. Wolf’s problem is that the other Naomi—Naomi Klein, famed author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine—has written a new book about her own Naomi problem—which is that she’s constantly confused and, worse, conflated with the aforementioned Naomi Wolf.

That book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, uses the frequent mixups as a launching point to explore the world of conspiracy culture, misinformation, and disinformation that Wolf has leveraged to online infamy (alongside the likes of Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and a whole cast of right wingers and anti-vaxxers). Part memoir, part sociological dissertation, the book aims to detangle the mirror world and offer some perspective on how we solve the problem.

So of course, the other Naomi’s taking issue with it. So is Alex Berenson, a prominent anti-vaxxer with a half a million Twitter followers, who tweeted (if that’s what we’re still calling it) how Doppelganger hasn’t sold any copies—despite it topping the New York Times bestseller list.

“They’re about as good at analyzing the book market as they are at epidemiology,” Klein muses. “Obviously, it’s going to piss some people off, and that’s fine. My books always do.”

Klein spoke to me from Toronto, on the final leg of her book tour, before heading home to BC’s Sunshine Coast, where she now resides.

At the beginning of the book, you write about how it was almost this feeling of isolation that led you down the path to write it. It was heartening, in a way, that you, a famous person, could feel like you were disappearing during lockdown, which is how I felt and how I think a lot of people felt. It was clearly a universal feeling. But obviously, not everyone has been caught up in the mirror world. How much of this, in your opinion, is integral to the mirroring effect? Is isolation a mandatory part of it?

I think the isolation accelerated digitization. I think it’s pretty integral to us representing ourselves to the world through our digital avatars because we’re swimming in this sea of faces. I don’t think our brains are wired to differentiate this many faces and names, and we don’t have a lot of information to go on when you’re deciding who is who online. There are at least four people named Alex who I’m always getting confused, and I haven’t met any of them in the real world.

You’re asking about people changing. I think just being online and looking to these online communities for community, for a sense of mission and self, all of that accelerated the conspiracy culture—and just also there being something that was so disruptive to so many of our lives and the fact that we didn’t really understand it. It’s the nature of a novel virus. It’s novel, and you’re looking for answers.

So yeah, I think it was a confluence of forces. But the main thing that is accelerating conspiracy culture is that people are scared and they’re mad. If everything were going great, I don’t think people would be prone to believe there is some plot of elites that are trying to poison them. I think that we are in a kind of system-failing moment, and that’s the most important factor. I think we tend to overemphasize the algorithms as the determining factor, which is why conspiracy culture is spreading as rapidly as it is. It’s the same reason why Poilievre is running on a platform of “Canada is broken.” People have a sense that the promises of the system are broken. They can’t afford rent. They can’t afford groceries. They played by the rules and suddenly more is being asked of them. So I think that that’s the most important factor.

That’s why, in the latter half of the book, I get into why I think only an analysis of these systems offers a competitive narrative. Only, in my opinion, an anti-capitalist analysis or socialist analysis can explain what is really going on without resorting to these conspiracy theories.

It reminds me of when you write how liberals and leftists didn’t question the origins of pandemic enough, or the vaccination, because the people that were questioning it were kind of considered these freaks on the right. That hit way too close to home. I think you nailed it because it leaves room for complacency. The complacency leaves a void for that mirror world to take hold.

Yeah, exactly.

I was having this argument with some random right-wingers on Reddit—which is in no way a good use of my time—but it was about the news that streaming services and social media companies will need to register with the CRTC. This policy makes sense to me. To them, it’s authoritarianism run amok, which then furthered my position that it does make sense. But then I read this bit in your book and I think, “Oh, shit, are the CRTC’s motivations legitimate? Is Trudeau actually an authoritarian?” And then I’m like, “Oh God, is the Great Reset actually happening?” 

All these words, like authoritarianism, freedom, tyranny, are all being distorted, and there’s this idea that to not live in an authoritarian state is to have this absolute unfettered and unaccountable freedom. You don’t have to answer to anyone. That’s never been what freedom in an open society is. There is a social contract. We do have agreements that do constrain our freedoms, in a way, so that we are not able to hurt one another or are less able to hurt one another.

What was the intention or your hopeful outcome for the book? I have this idea that maybe the book could blow some minds of those that have been caught up in conspiracy culture, but that’s because I’m getting mine blown. But I also happen to already share your worldview.  

I have really been gratified to hear from a lot of people who talk about reading the book and then deciding to reach out to a sister or an uncle who they’ve severed relationships with and having some new ideas about how they could possibly find some common ground and bring them back. 

I mean what I say at all my events, which is: “Don’t give them my book.” They’re already protected against me. In their world, I’ve sold out to the globalists. I’m part of the conspiracy. But all the social science research shows that if somebody is going to be reached, it’s going to be by somebody who they have a preexisting relationship with, like a friend from high school. So I think it’s less that people are going to read my book and realize the error of their ways, and more that maybe somebody who loves them is going to read the book and get some ideas about how to reopen some lines of communication. I’ve already heard lots of stories about that.

But then the other thing that’s been really exciting for me is that I feel like I’ve heard from a lot of people on the left for whom the book has been clarifying around the need to stop ceding so much political territory to the right, and like what you were saying around that activity.

I mean, a book is not going to change everything, but it can give people some frames and some ideas to be part of something broader. 

It’s funny you say that about selling out to the globalists. It struck me that you spend the first 60 pages or so essentially establishing your credentials, as if you needed to in order to make the arguments necessary for later in the book. The Naomi Klein of today is not the same Naomi of 2007, when having just written No Logo was credibility enough to make the arguments in Shock Doctrine. These days, we have to prove ourselves to make certain arguments. 

We’re all swimming in just this sea of words and claims. BuI had to look at myself with anthropological curiosity and distance because I’m a character in the book. 

If there’s anything that having a doppelganger will teach you, it’s that you’re not actually in control of how people perceive you. So you may as well just loosen the grip a little bit. I don’t actually think we’re going to get anywhere with all of us just thinking that we’re going to perfect ourselves and purify ourselves. I think it’s going to be a process of loosening the grip on our individual selves so that we can maybe be working with each other a little bit better, because we’re up against massive forces. Which is the same thing I’ve been saying for my entire adult life—not an original insight, but bears remembering.

It definitely feels like you’re having a lot more fun with this book, at least in the writing of it. But I also wonder, in doing the research here, was there ever a point where you felt like you were breaking free of reality? That maybe you were questioning whether you were actually on the right side of it or not?

All the time. I question myself all the time.

Bannon is right!

Not Bannon. But I think one of the lessons I’ve learned is to interrogate one’s own positions more. The thing about listening to Bannon is: somebody asked me if I was afraid I would red pill myself by listening to him so much. The point is they’re always contradicting themselves. It’s not convincing because they’re moving around so much, which is why I don’t call them conspiracy theories—I call it conspiracy culture. I don’t call them conspiracy theorists—I call them conspiracy influencers, because there isn’t really a theory there. They’re really just going where there are cliques, where there’s heat, and you can see that now as they pivot to transphobia and climate denial. They’re just looking for where the next liftoff is going to be.

It kind of goes back to my original question about isolation being necessary for going into the mirror world. What does it take to become actually red pilled? Is it a choice? If so, is it always a choice?

This is why the latter parts of the book talk a lot about the role of the left in fighting fascism. This is why conspiracy culture, and specifically the oldest conspiracy theory of them all—that there’s a cabal of Jews running the world—has been referred to since the 1800s as the socialism of fools, in the sense that if you don’t understand how capitalism works, if you don’t understand structures of power, if things start going horribly wrong in the economy and it doesn’t live up to what you've been told it is going to be, then you’re going to be very, very vulnerable to somebody who takes you aside and says, “It’s these five guys,” or, “It’s the Chinese and it’s the Jews,” or it's some combination therein.

So I think the only way to fight it, really, is a lot of popular education that does that kind of analysis. But we need popular education that actually has a plan about what to do about it. Which is why I think the trucker convoy was so harrowing for me as a lifelong leftist, because it wasn’t only what they were doing, it was also what we weren’t doing. They were sort of occupying a place that the left used to occupy.

This is something I’ve heard as I’ve been touring with the book a lot of places: that there’s really a feeling that the far right has ascended and the left is a little bit in disarray. So it’s been good to be in rooms full of lefties thinking and strategizing about how to respond to this political moment, because I think the stakes are very, very high.

You write about the cynicism of the university students you teach, and about the authenticity of social media influencers specifically. Do you see that as a positive or a negative for them? Is that cynicism a useful protective layer for fighting or processing misinformation and the algorithm as this is all continues?

I don’t know. I mean, I always find my students are more ambivalent about these platforms than people assume young people to be. I think Gen Z is unjustly portrayed as being these complete social media addicts when that’s mainly because the people you see on these platforms are. But there are all kinds of young people who are choosing to spend a lot less time on them because they know the effect it has on their mental health.

But I think, in general, there’s a great deal of confusion about whether one another is human online. That’s really why I wanted to return to the subject of branding after so many years since No Logo, because I think there’s been a lot written about the culture of online casual cruelty that is focused on the technology and the algorithm biases toward a certain kind of angry engagement.

I think all that’s true, but I think missing from that analysis is the fact that we are trained to perform a version of ourselves that is not really human. To be a brand is not to be human. To be a brand is to be the same version of yourself. I think that is part of the reason why people are so unkind to one another: they don’t believe each other are fully human. 

There’s that isolation piece again.

Yeah. That’s the most troubling cost, I think, of the logic of turning oneself into a brand.

Naomi Klein is at The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts as part of the Vancouver Writers Fest on October 21.