Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

A successful Covid response would have set a precedent for a modern, activist government—a precedent many on the right consider dangerous. So it’s worth considering the possibility that Covid public health measures may have been in the crosshairs for people like Bannon and Carlson for a deceptively simple reason: because they were public.

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.

abusing such terms is dangerous: it drains them of their intended meaning, their legibility, and their power.

If you successfully thing-ify yourself, then other people will begin to believe you are a thing and will throw all kinds of hard objects at you, sure that you will not bleed.

Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be? And if enough others start seeing someone else as me, who am I, then?

This triad—of partitioning, performing, and projecting—is fast becoming a universal form of doppelganging, generating a figure who is not exactly us, but whom others nonetheless perceive as us. At best, a digital doppelganger can deliver everything our culture trains us to want: fame,

A poorly managed brand is distinctly less consequential than a poorly managed soul—but, on the other hand, the consequences occur in this realm, not the next.

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

Here is where things get more complicated, as they invariably do in the realm of doppelgangers. When radical and anti-establishment writers and scholars attempt to analyze the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world, including the proven existence of covert operations to eliminate threats to those systems, it is common for them