Too serious to be ridiculous

Naomi Klein's 2023 book is an excellent primer to understand the psychology and politics that fuels conspiracy theorists

- Somak Ghoshal

If you want a one-liner to put on a T-shirt that sums up the spirit of the times we are living in, I bet you can't find a better one than this droll sentence from the late Philip Roth's 1993 novel, Operation Shylock: "It's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous."

I stumbled upon it in writer and activist Naomi Klein's 2023 book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, where this quote runs like a refrain, much like an anthem you may hum under your breath every time you are scrolling through the internet, especially if you are looking for news or information that is reliably true.

The "mirror world" that Klein refers to in the subtitle is, in part, a reference to the world wide web, a domain where it is becoming harder each day to tell fact from fiction. Thanks to the flagrant manipulation of tech and AI, it is easier than ever to peddle any number of lies—from cures for chronic diseases to conspiracy theories that can pull entire democracies down.

In all this mayhem, the worst nightmare perhaps is the dread of identity theft—a central theme of Klein's book. The difference in her case is there is no actual stealing involved. Rather, it starts as seemingly trivial confusion—people on the internet mixing up Klein with her namesake, Naomi Wolf, best known, once upon a time, as a liberal feminist and author of The Beauty Myth, her critically acclaimed first book published in 1990, which triggered new conversations around patriarchy's manipulation of women's bodies and psyches. But that was in another lifetime.

Although Wolf was never known for the soundness of her research, as Klein shows through close reading of passages from her books (including her much-lauded debut), her career underwent a watershed moment in 2019. On a BBC programme, while promoting