Readers attributed Wolf’s ideas and books to Klein with complete indifference to authorship

Evidence

This is the most destabilizing part of the Naomi-Naomi conversations I stumbled across online. More than once, someone typed: “OMG. I just now realized they are not the same person.” Or: “TIR [today I realized] that Naomi Wolf is not Naomi Klein and honestly things make a bit more sense now.” Someone else claimed The Shock Doctrine was “One of the most informative books written” and that, in it, I lay out “the 10 steps that lead to a fascist government”—which I have never done but Wolf has. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 120

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Shock Doctrine/10 steps attribution mix-up could warrant checking what Wolf’s actual argument was and whether it genuinely masquerades as Klein’s thesis.
• SEED: The ‘realized they are not the same person’ online confessions are a rich artifact of how misinformation makes authorship fungible — an essay angle on ‘the author as vanishing category.’