Attention-and-shame culture magnifies people’s baser impulses into harm.

Evidence

When I try to understand Other Naomi, I see something similar. She, too, is both that and this. As a young writer, she helped inspire countless women to become feminists. In middle age, she took stands that required real moral courage—as when she walked out of that synagogue or shared her platform with people being pounded by missiles. She has also, especially lately, done a great many things that are extremely harmful, and I think many of the reasons behind them are pretty uninteresting: a desire for attention, for ego gratification, for cash; perhaps a drive to prove that she was right and that every person who ever attacked her was wrong. But all of those baser impulses have been greatly exacerbated by a culture that places limitless value on attention and money, while creating information tools that seem designed to turn every person’s screwup into an opportunity for public shaming, mockery, abandonment, and humiliation on a scale previously unimaginable. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1101

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the Doppelganger book’s core thesis about the media/information ecosystem producing doppelgangers out of ordinary people. — connects to: Activist culture can generate despair by demanding attention to every issue — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 113; Shaming traditions like rote memorization contain valuable attention-forming practices — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 438; An attention-extraction industry converts human care into money and harms everyone. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 480