‘Steve Bannon is watching us closely’: Naomi Klein on populists, conspiracists and real-world activism

Author speaks candidly about a mirror world' that feeds our anxieties, distorts reality and fuels the polarisation of society

Naomi Klein is aware that her new book, Doppelganger, looks strange. A distorted picture of her face stares at you from the front cover. Everyone who holds it looks like they're holding my severed head, including me. It feels like Macbeth," she says. Her laugh punctures the quiet communal space we're sitting in on the first floor of a London hotel in late September.

But the weirdness is intentional. It's supposed to capture what she's writing about - a mirror world where her sense of self becomes distorted. Her starting point is her very own doppelganger, the writer Naomi Wolf. For more than a decade Klein has repeatedly been confused with Wolf. What at first irked her became more frustrating - destabilising, even - as it moved to social media and Wolf dived full on into conspiracy culture, allying with the far right in the process. The two are so frequently mixed up that social media algorithms began to autocomplete Klein's name when people were writing about the latest thing Wolf had said or done.