Naomi Klein investigates ‘conspiracy theory culture’ that has shaken her life

Award-winning author and Guardian columnist Naomi Klein is to publish a book about conspiracy theories, which she has described as a departure and “more personal, more experimental” than her previous books.

Doppelganger, out in September, uses the fact that Klein has often been mistaken for author Naomi Wolf as a jumping-off point to explore conspiracy theories and what Klein calls the “Mirror World”, our destabilised present rife with doubles and confusion.

Combining “tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage and piercing cultural analysis”, UK publisher Penguin Press said Klein will look at how “far-right movements feign solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious and new age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances”.

Klein’s book discusses the author’s “doppelganger”, Wolf, whose name and public persona, “are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years” even though her views are “antithetical to Klein’s own”, according to her UK publisher. The US and Canadian publisher is Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Wolf, who came to fame with her book The Beauty Myth in 1990, has been involved in a series of controversies in recent years. Her most recent book Outrages was pulled and pulped in the US, and corrected in the UK by Wolf’s publisher Virago, after she misread a historical term.

Outrages examined the effect of 19th-century legal changes on the lives of Victorian poets such as John Addington Symonds and argued that the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 marked a turning point in the treatment of gay people. Wolf argued that it led to a number of executions of gay men after the last recorded execution for sodomy in 1835.

However, in an interview with Wolf, writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet pointed out that she had misunderstood “the very precise historical legal term, ‘death recorded’, as evidence of execution, when in fact it indicates the opposite”.

Wolf was suspended from Twitter in 2021 after using it to spread myths about the pandemic, vaccines and lockdown. She has also made unsubstantiated claims that the US military was importing Ebola from Africa with the intention of spreading it at home and that US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden might be a government plant. Last week GB News was found to have breached the broadcasting code when it allowed Wolf to repeatedly compare Covid-19 vaccinations to mass murder without being challenged.

Klein, whose previous books include No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, said Doppelganger would “explore what it feels like to watch one’s identity slip away in the digital ether, an experience many more of us will have in the age of AI.

“Mostly, it’s an attempt to grapple with the wildness of right now – with conspiracy cultures surging and strange left-right alliances emerging and nobody seeming to be quite what they seem,” she continued. “Doppelganger is my attempt at a usable map of our moment in history but to make it, I had to get lost a few times.”

Tom Penn, publishing director at Penguin Press, said Doppelganger was a “white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of our hyper-individualised culture”.

Klein’s first book No Logo was published in the UK in 2000, and detailed the practices and far-reaching effects of corporate marketing. Its publication coincided with globalisation protests, particularly in the global north.

Reflecting in the Guardian on the 20th anniversary of the book’s release, Klein said it “hit at this moment when a global movement was exploding and taking mainstream commentators entirely by surprise”. Yet she recalled that she had trouble finding a US publisher for the book, saying that “the perception among media and cultural gatekeepers in the late 90s was that young people were completely apolitical”.

Klein is an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. She also writes a regular column for the Guardian. Doppelganger will be published on 12 September in the UK, US and Canada.