At first, Naomi Klein thought it was pretty funny. More and more people confused the prolific critic of capitalism with Naomi Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth and first feminist star who has become a source of conspiracy theories about everything from Ebola (the US wanted to spread the virus and launch a military takeover! ) to COVID-19 (The vaccines may die! The government is eavesdropping on your vaccine passports!).

It was a periodic annoyance, not a big deal, Klein said in a recent video interview. It didn’t happen that much. I came across someone online who was really mad at me somewhere, and it took me a minute to realize it wasn’t me they were mad at.

Then the social media echo chamber gradually became deafening. The quarantine due to the pandemic meant more hours online for just about everyone, including Naomi. Wolf and her easily agitated cadre, which now included right-wing agitators Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, took a hard line on the COVID conspiracies, describing a dark fantasy version of real-world crises. Millions seemed to buy it. Klein realized this was serious. On both a personal and political level, the Naomi merge turned from intermittent annoyance to an existential dilemma.

So Klein, the author of liberal calls to action including No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, did what she does: she wrote a book about it. Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World isn’t necessarily about Klein’s Naomi Wolf problem; as Klein says: She’s like the white rabbit that I follow down the rabbit hole, and the book is actually about the rabbit hole.

More specifically, it’s about the mirror world, a place inhabited not only by conspiracy makers, who deliberately take advantage of public confusion and fear, but possibly by all of us. After all, we all live in a social media world; we are in constant danger of distorting ourselves, changing our personalities as circumstances change, and infecting our children with fears and dreams that are not their own.

The doppelgänger provides a lens through which you can look at a lot of different things that I find really interesting, says Klein, including the way we create doppelgängers of ourselves to show ourselves online, whether in a video game as an avatar or as a an idealized beautiful person on Instagram or a mother influencer. We divide ourselves and we create this double, we polish it and we burn it.

Basically, to use the title of a doppelgänger film that Klein explores in the book: Doppelganger is about us.

As Klein writes, we live in a culture filled with various forms of duplication, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own virtual doppelgänger versions of ourselves that represent us to others as a doppelgänger that we relentlessly perform in the digital ether . as the price of admission in a predatory attention economy. In this economy, the one with the most clicks wins, and the one with the craziest take gets the most clicks.

That helps explain the supply side of the world we live in, where talk of Maui space lasers, 5G vaccine surveillance, and blood-sucking pedophile rings is banging on the gates of mainstream thinking. But the demand side is trickier and perhaps more worrying. What makes consumers who have nothing tangible to gain subscribe to woo-woo theories? As Klein sees it, many flee to fantasy when reality is too much to bear. The illusion of control, or at least understanding, is often more bearable than the chaos that increasingly surrounds us.

We are in a moment of multiple and difficult reckoning, and COVID has brought much of that into focus, Klein says. There is the way we treat our elderly, the way the working class is mistreated, and the mirror held up to the lockdown class, the people like me who were able to stay at home. The only reason we could stay home and stay safe was because other people delivered food with very little protection, worked in slaughterhouses, Amazon warehouses and nursing homes. And suddenly the veil was lifted on how our world actually works.

Like Klein’s other books, Doppelganger is a profound critique of what late-stage capitalism has accomplished. But it is also much more. Klein wields her polymath expertise like a sword, cutting through the mirror world via political theory; fear of technology (she shudders at the potential of AI); literary criticism (she warms to former nemesis Philip Roth through his double novel Operation Shylock); and films that are famous (Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator) and obscure (Henrik Galeen’s silent oddity The Student of Prague).

The results may leave the reader at risk of splitting in two. You can’t help but be invigorated by Klein’s intellectual synthesis and agility, even if her drill eye makes you want to run screaming into the night.

Much of it comes back to the woman Klein calls the other Naomi and the strange bedfellows she has embraced. It pains Klein to see Bannon, Wolf and company co-opt legitimate concerns such as internet privacy and government-mandated COVID school closures and turn them into sci-fi theories. She puts some of the blame on the left-wing instinct to reject outright anything that comes out of the right-wing echo chamber, instead of working harder to find common ground in reality.

The conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong, but often they have the right feelings, she says. The feeling of living in a world of shadow worlds. The feeling that important truths are being hidden from you. And the other thing they offer is a sense of community and belonging. Sometimes they seem to enjoy it a lot. And that can be critical in a time of growing social isolation and deaths of desperation.

There’s a lot going on in Doppelganger, but somehow Klein ties it all together into what we seem to lack as individuals: a cohesive whole. Doppelganger is both current and timeless, a work in a great tradition. Things fall apart, wrote WB Yeats in his 1920 poem The Second Coming, “The center cannot hold it. Almost 50

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Years later, Joan Didion referenced his verse in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a tour through the existential crisis of the 1960s. Now we have another inspired guide, a source of fact-based understanding, but not always comfort.

Vognar is a freelance writer based in Houston.