Confronting Conspiracy Culture: Bridging Divides in the Digital Age
Reflections on Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's new book
A few days ago, I attended a fascinating event at Royal Festival Hall in London to hear Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein, discuss her new book, Doppelganger. Few writers manage to capture the zeitgeist better than Klein, and for the past twenty-five years, her work has documented seismic changes in our culture and politics. Her internationally best-selling books, No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything have been formative in my own activism and understanding of the world and many years ago, I had the pleasure spending some time with her in the West Bank where we both documenting human rights violations and connecting with the BDS campaign (here’s a great opinion piece that she wrote on the topic around that time).
In Doppelganger, Klein work takes a more personal turn and reading it I’ve been blown away at how she has captured the essence of our troubled times so perfectly. The book is part memoir and part deep dive into modern conspiracy culture and in it, she examines what she calls the "Mirror World" – this new alternate reality we seem to live in, filled with paranoia, half-truths, and misinformation. It's a weird and confusing time I’m sure you’ll agree, where traditional political allegiances seem to have fallen away. Far-right movements talk about solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and fake news, wellness influencers have turned into anti-vax warriors, and many of us also participate in a misrepresentation of ourselves through the rise of the personal brand.
This latter point about personal branding particularly struck a chord with me as I reflected on the online version of myself that I've curated over the last few years. A doppelganger of sorts, Klein would argue, presenting a digital version of myself for commercial purposes — as if I were a corporation.
Klein gave voice to a topic I've been grappling with for several years as our culture and technology have compelled us to project ourselves online in fervent competition with each other. What are our values? What's our mission? What is our elevator pitch about ourselves? Personal branding has permeated both work and social media, from TikTok accounts to LinkedIn pages, and your success now hinges on defining yourself within a very narrow set of parameters and sticking to those core messages without dilution. The only problem, of course, is that humans don't operate like that. We are multifaceted beings who evolve, change, and grow. How insufferable the world would be if we didn't!
Personally, I curated an online brand around food in my mid-30s because I wanted to write a cookbook and felt it was an important part of the marketing strategy. However, seven years on, I feel somewhat suffocated by it, as if I'm trapped in a one-dimensional online version of myself, unable to fully express the 'real me,' for fear of jeopardising my (already precarious) income. This has also pigeonholed me in the eyes of publishers. Book pitches about topics on which I have extensive experience—activism or social movements—are rejected, and it's kindly suggested that perhaps I could just write another cookbook since that's what my platform is built on. This further reinforces why Substack feels like a healthier space for writers these days, and I'm enjoying the liberating feeling of not being constrained by a particular brand voice.
Klein’s book landed with me just days after the Russell Brand story broke. Setting aside, for now, the disturbing allegations against him, I've found it hard to see his story turned into yet another culture war issue (sparked by Brand, with his outlandish video suggesting "other forces" were at play). But what was worse was seeing people I know – smart, engaging, conscious, kind individuals whom I am friends with – liking his videos, sharing memes about not believing the mainstream media, and going down the rabbit hole with him.
Of course, in light of the last few years, I shouldn't have been surprised. A recent poll by King's College London found that large numbers of the UK are now deeply immersed in conspiracy culture. One in four believes Covid was a hoax and a third of people believe that the cost of living crisis is a government plot to control the public. The UK is not unique in this. Conspiracy culture has swept the world, destabilising politics everywhere.
I've personally witnessed many people I know become engulfed by conspiracy theories. People who consider themselves liberals, progressives, or on the Left, and who share many of my own concerns about privacy, Big Tech, and the moral bankruptcy of Big Pharma. But then, from that seemingly understandable place of frustration, a form of paranoia has crept in, and the stories start to shift to how we're all going to end up with Bill Gates' microchips in our arms, how vaccines will make us infertile, and how the World Economic Forum's Great Reset initiative will impose a totalitarian world government.
For much of the last few years, I have dismissed conspiracy culture as a fringe issue but Klein’s book has made me reflect on this and realise that it is anything but. In fact unless we start taking it a lot more seriously, the consequences could be catastrophic.
Because here's the thing: humans are, by our very nature, creatures of narrative. Stories have always helped us understand ourselves, each other, and the world around us. And right now, we need new stories. We are living in a time of perma-crisis, where our economic system failing many, where the military-industrial complex is fuelling so much conflict, where unregulated Big Tech is turning us into personal data mining projects, where unequal access to healthcare means huge swathes of the world are at the mercy of Big Pharma's unfair patent laws and where too much media is controlled by corporate interests (in the UK, three companies - News UK, DMGT, and Reach - dominate 90% of the national newspaper market). Many people, feel that 'the system' is unfair and isn’t working for them. And they are right.
So far, so obvious. But the problem is that most mainstream politicians seem blind to this glaring problem, unwilling to address the deep structural political and economic problems we face. Those on the Left who traditionally have been advocates of many of these issues, have become locked into the inward narrative of identity politics and cancel culture, unwilling or unable to reach to those who are not already signed up to their exact ideological points of view with the aim of bringing them over. In this vacuum, it's easy for the likes of Steve Bannon, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Nigel Farage, and yes, even Russell Brand to step in and fill the gap. The fact that they are all white middle-aged men, a group whose control on power has diminished in recent decades, doesn’t seem to be a coincidence either.
My formative political education involved learning about the Marxist analysis of power and capital along with a deep examination of how the systemic structural issues of neo-liberalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy interact to create the modern world we live in. This means that conspiracy theories have never held much sway with me. To borrow from the title of the Dispatches documentary about Brand, for me, the forces at play are ‘hidden in plain sight’. Namely, an exploitative economic system that is deepening inequality, putting profit before people, and destroying the planet for corporate greed.
As the US and UK begin their moves into their respective election years, engaging with conspiracy culture could not be more critical. Progressive and leftist politicians and activists need to step up their game as, if anything, I believe it’s their failure to properly engage on these topics that has led people, who used to identify with our values, politics and political parties, turn to conspiracy theories and the alt-right.
This means instead of defending the status quo or deriding conspiracy culture and seeking to shut it down, we need to meet it head on and listen to people's fears. Modern life is difficult, isolating and precarious – and that is frightening for many. We need to get better at having difficult conversations with people we disagree with, instead of shutting them down for not immediately agreeing with exactly what we think. We need to become better listeners, hearing the real fears people have instead of mocking, muting, or ignoring them.
So next time, a friend, relative or colleague, brings up some conspiracy theory, perhaps instead of rolling your eyes, take a beat and try to meet them with compassion. Take the time to listen, engage in debate, send them some information that might add to their “research”. But perhaps more than individual actions, we need to think more about curating spaces where we can come together, in community and in person where we can try to rebuild the connections that have been lost over these last few years, bring back the trust that has been waylaid, bring in the communities that have been left behind. The powerful social movements of our times, from Black Lives Matter to the Climate Justice Strikes, have demonstrated the power of the collective in shifting narratives through coming together and taking action. We can’t abdicate our responsibilities on this, because the likes of Bannon et al are gearing up for a bigger fight and the stakes could not be higher.
What has your experience with conspiracy culture been like? Have you lost friends and family over it? And what’s your experience of the rise of the personal brand? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, let me know in the comments!
Yasmin x
As a biologist I honestly didn't feel like people fearing the covid vaccines were stupid at all. I never did. They were only afraid and maybe lacked the needed scientific knowledge. Spreading fake news about it is another whole discussion, but whenever people came to me saying they didn't feel comfortable with the vaccines, I always tried to listen and explain as nicely as I could why they are needed for our health and everyone else's. Most conspiracies come from big changes and tap into people's fears. We live in strange times and a simple narrative is always seductive.
Oh Yasmine as ever so much wisdom and great thoughts, great article that I will certainly share