Attention-economy metrics explain ideological crossover as volume seeking rather than contradiction

Evidence

As recently as 2019, Wolf described her ill-fated book Outrages 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 U.S. 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? Views? 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 celebrity on the right aren’t lost—they are found. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 334

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the attention economy’s volume-based value matrix and how it dissolves the left/right contradiction
• XREF: On the reader’s page about Wolf and the doubling device — this is the causal mechanism explaining why the mirror-image lands right. Also connects to the book’s central ‘diagonal’ thesis.