Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

I came to feel as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well. The ambient and all-pervasive hunger for ever-more-fleeting relevance; the disposability with which we treat people who mess up; the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility, and m

But doppelgangers, by messing with our heads and our illusions of sovereignty, can help teach us this lesson: that we are not as separate from one another as we might think. Not as individuals, and perhaps not even as groups of individuals who have been born into various kinds of seemingly eternal fratricidal duels.

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

Frictionlessness is the great promise of our age. But friction doesn’t disappear just because we don’t see it—it is simply displaced onto these lives of pure friction, in the Shadow Lands.

Unjust ownership structures have been changed before and they can be changed again.

This is the perennial appeal of doppelgangers in novels and films: the idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity—the painful truth that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to f

The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality—we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.

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

“Inclusive nationalism” just means that they have found some new blocs of voters who are also looking for scapegoats, and not all of them are white, or male.

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