Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

In this convergence of worlds, we can see more than a shared infrastructure of misinformation: there is also a shared worldview, a shared mindset, a shared way of seeing people as either normal or deviant, pure or tainted, successes or failures. And even, as in all doppelganger stories, real or impostors.

The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.

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