That’s because, amid the extreme isolation and anxiety of early pandemic life, Naomi confusion became one of Left Twitter’s favorite jokes. The internet hive mind not only enjoyed laughing about what outrageous thing Other Naomi had said now but equally delighted in the prospect that I would get at least some of the credit/blame (“Thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein”). We were a pastime for profoundly bored people addicted to dopamine hits from our machines. It was giving people not pleasure exactly, but something synthetically adjacent to it—a fake communal experience in those lonely and anxious times.

QUESTION: Does manufactured viral outrage actually satisfy loneliness, or only superficially mimic belonging? Worth examining the psychology of digital mobs. SEED: Potential essay angle: how mistaken-identity pile-ons function as improvised social rituals in socially thin times.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 107