Naomi Klein has frequently been mistaken for Naomi Wolf, an author on the opposite end of the political spectrum. A hybrid of memoir and cultural analysis – Klein’s book takes the figure that she has been mistaken for as a jumping off point for probing the grotesque funhouse mirror world of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Much of what made this book so engaging is that it provides a tour through outlandish and evidence-less claims about the pandemic – how conspiracy theorists took basic facts and twisted them into mangled, upside versions of themselves. One example is the “vaccine shedding” theory, which claimed that vaccinated people were dangerous to their loved ones. Klein quotes an unvaccinated hippie youtube influencer called Glowing Mama, who breaks into tears in one of her videos, lamenting that her family is “selfish for getting vaccinated and still expecting to have a loving relationship with their granddaughter.”

Flinging allegations back at the other side has become a common tactic on the right – used by Trump and all his minions. If accused of sexual misconduct, then clearly it is the accuser who is guilty of the same thing. If one criticizes structural racism, the critic is the racist. And so on. The tactic is infuriating because it seems to be effective. Moral and political equivalence (“both sides”) somehow mutate into epistemological equivalence. It’s the rhetorical version of “I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” But instead of just bouncing insults back and forth in escalating, basic representations of reality have taken on a similar kind of plasticity.

But why? How has this cavalier attitude toward truth come about? Klein traces this kind of conspiracy-thinking to the mechanisms of capitalism. It’s the “core capitalist imperative to expand and grow by seeking out new frontiers to enclose” that “allowed a group of profoundly underwhelming tech bros to take over our entire information ecology and build a new economy off our attention and outrage.” This systematic tendency to consolidate and increase capital creates the feeling that “something is out there pulling the strings.” And so the conspiracy theories are fueled by the accurate sense that there’s something in control, but point to fallacious causes.

I’m not sure if my summary is completely faithful to Klein’s argument but if the answer to “why so much conspiracy thinking” is “capitalism,” why do we see such an intensification of conspiracy thinking right now? What is it about this specific historical moment that has people of a certain political persuasion willing to risk (and lose) their lives because they have been convinced that vaccines are more dangerous than viruses? While I find her argument that systematic economic injustice is grist for the mill of conspiracy-thinking compelling, I don’t see this particular historical moment as more inundated with capitalist ideology than the last two hundred years when workers died by the thousands in factories or traded slaves as means of enriching themselves.

Klein touches on a different factor when she points to a new “information ecology” that feeds on “attention and outrage.” The era of social media seems to have generated a form of communication that is not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from what has come before. Never before in history have people been so inundated with stories, images, words, feelings, calls to action, and theories. There’s just more information, a torrent of loosely connected opinions and ideas, sloshing around with little organization, each small thing exerting its gravity to pull us in a different direction – the cumulative effect being that our minds are constantly thrashing from idea to idea. Perhaps we crave conspiracies because we need unifying systems to organize the chaotic micro-narratives and unruly fragments that overload our feeds and make us feel so disoriented.

Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine fleshes out a more evidence-backed argument about the relationship between capitalism and conspiracy. Fisher shows how social media platforms chose to turn a blind eye to the impact of engagement-driven algorithms. We all know by now that outrage gets the most clicks, but it’s worth seeing how it’s not just outrage but also patently false conspiracies that keep people engaged.

I have a wild transhistorical reading of conspiracy thinking as well. What if Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was the first conspiracy theory? Remember how it goes? We’re all chained inside the cave, watching shadow-puppets dance on the walls. The real objects are out in the world but we confuse the shadow-puppets with reality itself. The philosopher is the one who “takes the red pill,” breaks the chains, and walks out into the world to see the real objects casting their shadows.

Plato’s allegory is the foundational imposition of a metaphysical split between appearance and reality that sets the stage for every future conspiracy. It’s doubtlessly true that sometimes the causal agent for an event is dislocated from the event and that it takes a broader investigation to understand even what is right before one’s eyes. Tides in the ocean are caused by the moon’s gravitational attraction. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just science. But how do you tell the difference between the two? Do I have to validate every piece of evidence myself? I’ve never tried to measure the gravitational pull of the moon for myself but maybe I should.

Or maybe there are just too many theories. Theories are cheapened, commoditized in their plenitude. They lose their value because we don’t have time or desire to read all the footnotes. Due diligence is unsexy drudgery. Trying to validate every theory, you get derided as a skeptic or a bean-counter.

In the end, I’m still on Klein’s side of the mirror. But I fear that the reason why I liked reading Doppelganger so much was that I enjoyed feeling superior to the wingnuts and crackpots. I found myself chuckling at the elaborate and unfalsifiable theories that they put forth, seeming to ignore their own subjugation to a system that holds them in contempt. And if I look carefully enough, I can see them laughing back at me.