Keepers #6: Authenticity
I’m increasingly grateful for the genuine. The most visible aspects of the modern world have something to sell you, be it a product, an ideology, or a painstakingly curated version of themselves.
The cameras are always rolling, so politicians and celebrities rarely take off their masks for fear that they may end up trending on Twitter. In pre- and post-game interviews, athletes’ utterances are a word soup of platitudes. Corporations want to be seen as forces for good, so they latch onto the latest trends with a tweet or an ad campaign… but only after holding countless focus groups on to determine who they’re liable to offend. Authenticity is little more than a buzzword.
But there are signs that we’re growing tired of the performance. Instagrammers are increasingly lifting the veil (even if the act is, itself, a mere performance). The # metoo movement is, at its core, a refusal to bury the indignities and traumas that we regularly inflict on women. The stigma around mental health issues is losing its stigma, as a new generation rightly questions why it was ever stigmatized in the first place.
Even the most terrifying trend of all, the rise of right-wing populism, is a response to a world that had grown too comfortable with artifice. Trump was elected because he has no filter. Nevermind that every other word out of his mouth is a lie. Forget the narcissism, the thinly veiled fear masquerading as hatred, the disdain for everything compassionate human beings hold dear. Surveys and interviews with Trump supporters have revealed that these things take a back seat to his supposed authenticity. They’re aware of the lies. They just don’t care.
This is what happens when we put everything up for sale. Elections, data, your very attention are merely a product suite to be monetized. And as long as the opportunity to monetize exists, there will always be a company happy to monetize it, To do so, they must pretend to value the same things that you value. If a company is to be profitable, they know they must align themselves as closely as possible to the collective conscience of their market.
It works the other way, too. Human beings are mere capital, and every public action—which is to say, all actions—can produce a positive or negative ROI. Comedians and reporters and writers craft a public persona that positively impacts the bottom line. Their livelihood literally depends on it.
But us average folk are not immune. Everything we say and do may may or may not hold up under the scrutiny of potential employers as they scroll through our social media presence to determine whether or not we’re a good “cultural fit.”
The result of all this filtering and showmanship is the commodification of authenticity. It’s hard to define, but we know it when we see it. And it is becoming an exceedingly rare thing.
My Keepers
I cancelled my Amazon Prime account recently, because frankly Bezos is just an asshole with too much money. This list of alternatives to shopping on Amazon helped numb the pain of giving up free two-day shipping.
The old model requires massive audiences before a given platform becomes useful. The new model does not.
Marketers sometimes go after short, generic keywords to reach as large an audience as possible. Other times, they go for longtail keywords that serve a nice audience, knowing that their product or service aligns extremely well with that longer search term.
There’s a cases to be made that social media is entering a longtail phase, where going after the biggest audience takes a back seat to serving a smaller audience very well.
Apple released the newest version of its Mac operating system and signaled that it will soon no longer allow software that Apple hasn’t approved to be installed. In short, an ideal of computing in which users can make their devices do whatever they want seems to be dying — and we’ll all be worse off for it.
I spent about a decade using Linux instead of Windows or macOS because I loved the amount of control it gave me over my computer’s behavior. I’m now firmly embedded in the Apple ecosystem, and I appreciate how much everything just works out of the box. It works because Apple controls the entire ecosystem, so they don’t have to plan for many edge cases. That walled garden approach tends to make for a more seamless experience, but it comes at a cost.
This dehumanization was enabled by the criminalization of the “other,” an other increasingly associated with terrorism and all sorts of crime. But dehumanization has also been enabled by the victimization of migrants—the idea that they are a shapeless mass, numbers, bodies that need to be fed, aided, helped. That’s how we like to represent them, instead of as people with their own desires and will.
Borders are arbitrary and inhumane.
It will be hard for the party to present itself as anything other than the party of angry white men looking out for the interests of billionaires and corporations with some misogynist white supremacy and God-is-Hate sprinkles on top (which is pretty much what they were before, only now what was hitherto genteelly clothed is naked and drunk and loudly puking on your doorstep).
Read everything Rebecca Solnit writes. (Incidentally, I wrote a few thoughts about Solnit’s latest books.)
(via NITCH)