No Logo’s publication coincided with early signs of today’s platform economy

Evidence

What I couldn’t see at the time was that No Logo came out on the cusp of a new world. I wrote it on a chunky, rectangular Macintosh Plus computer that accessed the internet via a dial-up modem connected to my landline. By the time the book came out, in January 2000, I had a high-speed connection and could watch my book sales click up live on Amazon, which we were all sure would destroy the publishing industry but which I nonetheless checked obsessively, an early taste of the addictive power of social media’s credit systems of likes, views, and follows. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 174

Categorization

• XREF: Klein’s dating of the cusp sets up the diagonalism thesis: the same technologies that spread anti-brand critique also powered the influencer economy that would later feed the far right.