Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

Asperger created the controversial distinction between “high-functioning autism” and “low-functioning autism.” This is Asperger’s legacy: lifting up a small group of neuroatypical children as supposedly superior to all the others, while being part of an apparatus that sent children without that competitive edge to their deaths.

If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment, it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a web of life-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes.

“Pattern recognition” is often how I describe the work of my life. I remember the moment, a true click, when I realized there was a connection between the increasing precarity of work, the consolidation of ownership in key industries, and the exponential increases in marketing budgets that characterized the hollow corporate structures of the first

Philip Roth explored this push and pull in his doppelganger novel Operation Shylock: “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” he wrote of a duplicate Roth. That sentence has become my mantra during this uncanny period.

A commodified self may be rich, but commodification still requires a partitioning, an internal doubling that is inherently alienating. There is you, and then there is Brand You. As much as we might like to believe that these selves can be kept separate, brands are hungry, demanding things, and one self necessarily impacts the other. If countless nu

To be the only clean one in a dirty business. And isn’t that what so many of us want as we try to win the game of personal branding—or at least not to get slain by it? We carefully cultivate online personas—doubles of our “real” selves—that have just the right balance of sincerity and world-weariness.

Some of it will help—a bit. But the truth is that nothing of much consequence in the face of our rigged systems can be accomplished on our own—whether by our own small selves or even by our own identity groups. Change requires collaboration and coalition, even (especially) uncomfortable coalition.

Do we have a plan for a world without sacrificial people? And does that plan feel credible, rooted in action—or does it seem like more blah, blah, blah?

I also worry that members of this same class of liberal parents will convince themselves, in a few years’ time, that doing just a little bit of embryonic gene editing to enhance their future child’s IQ or athletic prowess or height is not just their prerogative, but their duty. The world is spiraling out of control, they will tell themselves.

There was a disingenuousness to this theater; I see that clearly now. I wanted it both ways: to be the No Logo girl (the face of an emerging anti-capitalist movement) and to deny that I cared a bit about building a brand.