Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You … The good news—and it is largely good news—is that everyone has

As Richard Seymour writes in his blistering 2019 dissection of social media, The Twittering Machine, we think we are interacting—writing and singing and dancing and talking—with one another, “our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors—anyone we like. We are not interacting with them, however, but

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.

In his novel The Double, José Saramago includes an epigraph: “Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.”

And all the while, tech companies use these data troves to train machines to create artificial simulations of human intelligence and human functions, lifelike doubles that carry their own agendas, their own logics, and their own threats. What, I have kept asking myself, is all of this duplication doing to us? How is it steering what we pay attentio

And this is the catch-22 of confronting your doppelganger: bark all you want, but you inevitably end up confronting yourself.

When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded. That applies to the individual but also to entire societies that are divided, doubled, polarized, or partitioned

I began publishing about the dangers of geoengineering as a response to the climate crisis, with a particular focus on how high-altitude simulations of volcanoes that were intended to partially dim the sun risked interfering with rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere.

I interviewed several of the key scientists involved in lab-based research on sending particles into the upper atmosphere to control the sun’s radiation.

A Spanish word for existential anxiety and deep gloom, zozobra also evokes generalized wobbliness: “a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on”—absurdity and gravity, danger and safety, death and life. Uranga writes, “In this to and fro the soul suffers