Favorite Quotes from Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World by Naomi Klein

My students may not have real live doubles making chaos for them, as I appear to have with Other Naomi. But they have nonetheless grown up with an acute consciousness of having and externalized double—a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their “real” selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed. (p. 56)

This points to what may well prove to be the deepest danger of our era of branded humans. Brands are not built to contain multitudes; they demand fixedness, stasis, one singular self per person. Human statues. The form of doubling that branding demands of us is antithetical to the healthy form of doubling (or tripling, or quadrupling) that is thinking and adapting to changing circumstances. (p. 66)

The more we accept the premise that we must be online for everything—liking, loathing, sharing—and he more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies are able to hoover up about us. And with that data, they create our real doppelgängers—not the aspirational avatars many of us consciously create with those carefully curated and filtered photos and those posts with the perfectly calibrated tone, but the doubles that countless machines create with the data trails we leave behind every time we click, or view, or fail to disable location tracking, or ask a “smart” device for anything at all. (p. 88)

There is something uniquely humiliating about confronting a bad replica or one’s self—and something utterly harrowing about confronting a good one. Both carry the unmistakeable shudder of the doppelgänger. A shudder that turns into a quake when we realize that it is not just individuals who are being artificially copied, however poorly, but the entirety of human existence. (p. 89)

‘We did change this discourse…,’ a friend remarked to me the other day, and then the thought trailed off. We did. But we appear to have done it at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming on those screens. A torrent that assiduously amplifies the most operatic forms of virtue performance and the most cynical forms pipiking. (p. 153)

But it would seem that Greta no longer believes in that theory of change. She has come to the place at which so many of us have arrived: the realization that no one is coming to save us but us, and whatever action we can leverage through our cooperation, organization, and solidarities. (p. 154)

In the end, what mattered most about those campaigns was the boldness with which they were broadcasting that, from here on out, nothing means anything anymore: if MLK and Gandhi and Bob Dylan can all be conscripted as neoliberal shills, the absolutely anything and anyone can be severed from their contexts and made to mean their precise opposite. The story beneath the story was the normalization of the disassociation between words from reality, which could only usher in the era of irony and flat detachment, because those seemed like the only self-respecting postures to adopt in a world in which everyone was lying all the time. And from there we were all primed to dive headlong into the sea of social media non sequiturs, the scroll that scrambles the narrative structures of argument and story in favor of a never-ending thought confetti of “this” and “this” and “this” and “look over there,” (p. 156)

The pressures were greater for women at the start, but soon enough even heterosexual cis men would face their own unattainable fitness and beauty standards and myths. For Ehrenreich, this was all “part of a larger withdrawal into individual concerns after the briefly thrilling communal uplift some had experienced in the 1960s…If you could not change the world or even chart your own career, you could still control your own body—what goes into it and how muscular energy is expended.” (p. 172)

As Ehrenreich taught us, we turn toward the body when life feels out of control. It was in this period that so many of those fit and beautiful influencers stopped merely cooing soothingly and offering encouraging words to motivate our home workouts and green juicing and starting whispering alarmingly, about dark forces coming to poison us, and eventually to gag, jab, and dominate us. It was then that the diagonal lines started to race toward each other. (p. 179)

In many ways, the most successful influencers in the wellness and fitness world—the people who make fortunes from selling idealized versions of themselves and the idea to you, too, can attain nirvana through a project of perpetual self-improvement—are a perfect fit with far-right economic libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, who also fetishize the individual as the only relevant social actor, In neither worldview is there any mention of collective solutions or structural changes that would make a healthy life possible for all. (p. 180)

The very idea that humans can and should be “optimized” lends itself to a fascist worldview—because if your food is extra-clean, it can easily mean that other people’s food is extra-dirty. If you are safe because your immune system is strong, it can flip to mean others are unsafe because they are weak. If you are optimized, others are, be definition, suboptimal. Defective. Next door to disposable. (p. 187)

So sad are they about the child-double who wasn’t that they can’t really see the singular child who is. It’s not unlike what some parents of trans kids go through: they often need a little time to grieve the daughter or son they thought they had before they can fully accept their child’s gender identity. (p. 198)

Instead of figuring out how to have a world where everyone can thrive, they want their kids to thrive in a world that is falling apart. (p. 219)

But calm is the precondition for focus, for capacity to prioritize. If shock induced loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves. (p. 227)

The information is almost always distressing and, to many, shocking—but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it. (p. 227)

The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic. (p. 227)

For me the reason to study and read and write about economic and social systems, and to attempt to identify their underlying patterns, is precisely because it is stabilizing. (p. 228)

Decades of wringing out every possible efficiency means that each link the chain—the mines and industrial farms where raw materials are extracted; the factories and slaughterhouses that turn those inputs into parts and finished products; the trains and ships that carry them across continents and oceans; the warehouses that sort and store them to be ready at the click of a cursor; the trucks and cars that deliver them when the click arrives; the mountains of waste and poisoned waterways where the detritus from each stage ends up; the glimmering playground where the ultrarich enjoy their spoils—carries a distinct yet numbingly familiar story of depredation. (p. 237)

Where does it go? Where is the outrage and shame and sadness diverted? (p. 239)

As I have said, I was conflicted on the vaccine apps; increased digitalization of daily life deepens preexisting inequalities, but does letting a virus run rampant as the bodies pile up. (p. 249)

In the Mirror World, conspiracy theories detract attention from the billionaires who fund the networks of misinformation and away from the economic policies—deregulation, privatization, austerity—that have stratified wealth so cataclysmically in the neoliberal era. They rile up anger about the Davos elites, at Big Tech and Big Pharma—but the range never seems to reach those targets. Instead it get diverted into culture wars about anti-racist education, all-gender bathrooms, and Great Replacement panic directed at Black people, nonwhite immigrants and Jews. (p. 285)

But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame and guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms. I am struck that we never actually grieved, not were we invited to seize our anger and turn it into a instrument of solidarity. (p. 297)

The self as perfected brand, the self a 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. (p. 322)

How could we? It is all so unbearable. No wonder we work so hard to look away. No wonder we erect these walls, literal and psychological. No wonder we would rather gaze at our reflections, or get lost in our avatars, than confront our shadows. (p. 323)

No one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another. (p. 326)

Everything worthwhile is done with other people. (p. 328)

We are going to need each other. This means staying attuned to the possibility of a collective power, instead of attached to a proprietary plan. (p. 330)

As Marx said of religion, doubles are our opiates; we have less need for them when there is less pain and dissonance to escape. (p. 333)

Yet we all know (or should know) that the choices available to us are hardly random. (p.335)

If there is anything this journey has taught me, it’s that identity is not fixed. Not mine. Not Wolf’s. Not even the barrier between our two identities. It’s all fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating that doubling—between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves—is a part of what it means to be human. A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self. It’s about what we make together. (p. 348)