Naomi Klein: Things get tricky in the attention economy.
Naomi Wolf: I’m learning. I have questions.
Klein: Touché. You probably don’t.
Wolf: I don’t have a conclusion about it.
Klein: I have a line in the book: it’s not that we don’t know, it’s that we don’t know how to know what we know.
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Wolf: Everyone is talking about geopolitical borders as if they are the only things that matter in relation to peace but to me building civil society relationships and everyone obeying the law are as urgent and in some ways more urgent than focusing only on borders and diplomacy—or on war, incarceration and bombardment—in getting to peace.
Klein: I think we’re talking about a different kind of calm, that can coexist with fury, that can coexist with a lot of passion.
Wolf: No. I very much reject the analogy.
Klein: And so now I get to be weird.
•••
Wolf: Every time someone posts something ridiculous, like did the Holocaust happen… this is a Facebook discussion. I encourage people to double-source things.
Klein: It’s not just Grandma on Facebook anymore. Sometimes you need to cut people off.
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Wolf: I won’t keep sending you academic conference links but this one was at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Klein: It was people just taking straight-up joy and pleasure in somebody else’s pain.
Wolf: These are people who almost never get a chance to be in dialogue.
Klein: They feel a lot of vertigo and confusion, especially around people whom they used to trust and respect, who are now in what I’m calling the mirror world.