The doppelganger confusion was initially understood as a digital avatar-swapping artifact

Evidence

There was another reason I didn’t bother much with correcting the record for the first few years of my doppelganger trouble: with the exception of the Manhattan bathroom incident, getting confused with Naomi Wolf appeared to be a social media thing. My friends and colleagues knew who I was, and when I interacted with people I didn’t know in the physical world, her name did not come up; neither were we entangled in articles or book reviews. I therefore filed away Naomi confusion in the category of “things that happen on the internet that are not quite real” (back when we were silly enough to do that about all kinds of things). I told myself that I was not being confused with Wolf, but that our digital avatars were getting mistakenly swapped—the thumbnail-sized photos of us, and the tiny boxes that prescribed the parameters of our speech on those platforms, just as they flattened and blurred so much else. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 85

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘digital avatars flattened and blurred’ framing connects to the broader literature on algorithmic identity and the way platforms collapse users into categories — same territory as the Milgrom/Richman work on information systems.