Opinion | ‘The Doppelganger Is at the Wheel’

Liberals and the left became very powerful in institutions over the past 20 years. And, this is before the Mirror World basically took over our world. But powerful in the media, powerful in academia, powerful in government. And so this idea that you could just shun people out, that would be an effective way of creating social change in politics took hold. And it wasn’t a crazy idea. And there are ways it has worked in the past and ways that it worked even then. But it missed how much is happening outside the institutions and how they had become their own institutions and networks and media structures. And that kicking somebody out of your institutions meant you couldn’t see them anymore, but it didn’t mean they were gone. I feel like so much of this is just about social media, and I know that’s slightly hackneyed. But all of this is playing out on platforms. And I even think that something like the mute button or the block button has a huge amount to answer for, just in terms of it being almost habit- forming. Like, we get used to this idea. Like, this person’s annoying me. I’m going to just press a button and make them disappear. And I think that idea that this is how we relate to people spills offline as well. It created a tremendous space in which power could be built in private with different rules. And then I feel like it exploded into dominance after the election. And you see how much this became a legible network that is now arguably the default network in American life. I mean, this is the thing about doppelgangers and doppelganger literature and film. The storyline usually what happens is like you’ve got a protagonist and then somebody comes along who’s a double of them, and they’re so good at performing. You like so much better at performing you that they eventually overtake you at the end of Dostoyevsky’s the double, as protagonist is getting carted away and sent to an asylum while the double just takes over. So I think that’s kind of happened in our culture is that the doppelgangers — doppelgangers at the wheel.