Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf and fame in the social media age

Naomi Klein, an unimpeachably radical writer whose first book No Logo I enjoyed back in the year 2000 or thereabouts, has a problem. A writer called Naomi Wolf, who used to tackle similar political subjects from a similar standpoint, has become a darling of the MAGA crowd. You name an absurd Trumpian theory, she believes in it wholeheartedly.

In the the introduction to her latest book, Doppelganger, Klein explains how she has been mistaken for the "other Naomi" and chronically confused with her for over a decade. "I have been confused with Other Naomi for so long and so frequently that I have often felt that she was following me."

She also has a lot of illuminating things to say about fame in the social media age:

People ask me variations on this question often: What drove her over the edge? What made her lose it so thoroughly? They want a diagnosis but I, unlike her, am uncomfortable playing doctor. 

I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like: Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown. And there would be some truth to that bit of math.

The more I learn about her recent activities, however, the less I am able to accept the premise of these questions. They imply that when she went over the edge, she crashed to the ground. 

A more accurate description is that Wolf marched over the edge and was promptly caught in the arms of millions of people who accept every one of her extraordinary theories without question and who appear to adore her. So, while she clearly has lost what I may define as "it," she has found a great deal more – she has found a whole new world. 

Feminists of my mother's generation find Wolf's willingness to align herself with the people waging war on women's freedom mystifying. And on one level it is. As recently as 2019 Wolfe described her ill-fated book Outrageous as a cautionary tale about what happens when the secular state gets the power to enter your bedroom. Now she is in league with the people who stacked the US supreme Court with wannabe theocrats whose actions are forcing preteens to carry babies against their will. 

Yet on another level her actions are a perfect distillation of the values of the attention economy which have trained so many of us to measure our worth using crude volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Viewers? Did it trend? 

These do not measure whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply how much volume, how much traffic, it generates in the ether. And if volume is the name of the game, these crossover stars who find new levels of celebratory on the right aren't lost – they are found.

The talk of "public humiliation" and her "ill-fated book Outrageous" is a reference to an appearance on BBC Radio's Free Thinking programme, where this blog's hero Matthew Sweet pointed out that a major theme of it was based on a misunderstanding of 19th-century British legal records.