Suzanne Harrington: Deep fakes are deeply worrying, but Kate Moss's one is real
Kate Moss in Milan last month. Does Kate Moss herself give a hoot about her doppelganger? Unlikely. She’s too busy being Kate Moss. Picture: AP Photo/Luca Bruno
News reaches us from Paris Fashion Week that Kate Moss has a double. A doppelgänger. A model from Ormskirk — which sounds like a Siberian outpost, but is in Lancashire — who looks so like Kate Moss that her Instagram username is @iamnotkatemoss. She’s known as Fake Moss.
On the Daily Mail website — and yes, I washed my hands afterwards — there are adjacent photos of the two models, one named Denise Ohnona, the other Kate Moss; to the untrained eye, they’re indistinguishable. It’s deepfake, except real. But does anyone care? Does Kate Moss herself give a hoot? Unlikely. She’s too busy being Kate Moss.
But what if yourdoppelgänger is not someone you’d ever want to be confused with? What if people are mixing you up with someone you’d have no wish to be identified, no matter how briefly?
This is what happened to Naomi Klein, public intellectual and author of serious books — globalisation, war, climate crisis, anti-capitalism — like and . In recent years, in what Klein calls “the crowded filthy global toilet known as social media”, people began confusing Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf, author of 1991’s turned right wing conspiracy theorist.
Both Naomis are similarly-aged Jewish feminists — Klein from Canada, Wolf from the US. The problem for Klein is that the Oxford-educated Wolf has morphed into a full blown Q Anon-adjacent anti-vaxxer, departed to the outer realms of crackpottery. She has stated — loudly — that you can ‘catch’ menstrual cramps by sharing a hotel room with a vaccinated person, and has demanded separate sewage treatment facilities for those who have been vaccinated for reasons so unhinged it would hurt my brain to research it. She thinks Edward Snowden is a “police state plant".
You can see why Naomi Klein — thinker, speaker, writer, campaigner — might be a bit freaked out. She’s used these fleeting, unwitting comparisons with whom she terms Other Naomi as a jumping off point for her most recent book , in which she explores conspiracy rabbit holes, the Yoga-Nazi alliance, and how in the digital age, we are all doppelgangers of our authentic selves. How the moment we go online, we become a branded version of ourselves. The irony of Klein the anti-capitalist wanting to protect her brand — albeit from association with someone who has unhinged views — is not lost on her.
“There is you, and there is Brand You,” Klein writes. “If countless numbers of ourselves are doubled, all partitioning and performing ourselves, it becomes harder for anyone to know what is real and what and who can be trusted.”
You don’t have to be an influencer, a tech bro, TikTok or Instagram famous — the very act of uploading an image of yourself is brand-creation. New phones have such enhanced editing tools that you can create your very own deepfakes while sitting on the bus — altering an image to entirely change what it presents. The original image — the real one — is erased, replaced with fakery. Where are we headed with this?
