Authenticities
I wrote the following short "introduction" essay for inclusion in a book proposal. Since the likelihood of it ever appearing in print seems small, I thought I'd put it here as well.
Recently Facebook, wary of facilitating more election-tampering scandals, took down 32 pages and fake accounts from its platforms that the company says were engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The joke practically wrote itself: What is Facebook in general if not “coordinated inauthentic behavior”? The posts and likes and algorithms harmonize everyone’s frantic efforts to get each other’s attention.
But that joke is actually too easy and buys into the company’s own rhetoric about how seriously it takes promoting “meaningful interaction” and among users who are expected to post under their “real names.” Part of Facebook’s pitch is that its sites facilitate “authentic expression” that lead to “genuine” experiences of connection and self-definition. Its pitch to advertisers revolves around a related notion of authenticity, that its users are nonrobots who provide trustable data about their connections, preferences, capabilities, and vulnerabilities. The platform accordingly polices what it deems to be “inauthenticity” — that is, not of value as targeting data — and purges users for this perceived offense.
Using social media allows us to contemplate ourselves and our relationships and try to reshape them in real time by sharing images and thoughts and links, and ritualistically exchanging tokens of approval. It’s a space where we can apparently take a hands-on approach to shaping our social being — as a process rather than a static, given thing — and receive a constantly updating scorecard on how well we are doing.
In practice, this process negates decades if not centuries of dogma about the unchanging inner essence of the individual self and the spontaneous, unreflective nature of authenticity. Authenticity has typically been defined in opposition to calculation, as the absence of strategic self-presentation; your “authentic” self was held to be who you are without really trying, with nothing distorting the outer expression of your true and unique inner being. From this point of view, deliberate efforts to impress, accommodate, or please others are fundamentally inauthentic, hiding the true self behind a polite mask of obsequiousness.
This ideology of the inner “true self” has had many avenues: Christian notions of the soul and personal salvation, aristocratic ideals of effortless grace and Renaissance-era sprezzatura, Freudian depth psychology, existentialism. But the driving force for the idea of authenticity since the late 20th century has been consumer culture, which touted shopping as a means of agency and self-expression. It stressed the sovereignty of the individual consumer and suppressed the social components and contexts for identity. Your choices are all that matter in who you are, the discourse of consumer culture insisted, and consumerism offers you choice after choice.
The main channel for this discourse is advertising, which works not only to sell particular products but the implicit logic behind ads themselves: that products were fundamental to expressing personal identity. The right goods could confirm or reveal what you wanted to believe was the inner truth about yourself. Shopping was less about satisfying concrete desires than a more open-ended project of self-discovery and self-expression. This idea posited “authenticity” as something discovered through consumerism, as its reward; it already existed within us but also needed to be pursued and confirmed. This meant shopping became a special region of practice where one was tacitly permitted to pursue what would otherwise be a contradiction: one could try to be authentic.
To that end, “authenticity” began to be understood as a quality that one could annex to oneself through particular goods — typically ones that evoke nostalgia for antiquated manufacturing or branding methods, that have a kind of life story that can mirror in miniature the buyer’s own, or that indicate some kind of subcultural belonging or a knowledge of trends at various moments in their life cycle. Authenticity became an ascendant marketing term, along with its close cousin, “aspirational.” Both of these trends coalesced in the rise of reality TV, whose contrived “realness” was frequently joined with open invitations to both envy and scorn the often decadent and indulgent subjects of such shows. Reality TV in turn became one of the templates for social media — a place in which lateral surveillance reigned and the constant performance of the self was demanded, rewarded, and monetized.
To use a social media platform is to be immersed in the apparent paradox of people strenuously trying to be themselves, to perform authenticity. Its regimented, moderated space elaborates ideals that the shopping mall once embodied: commercialism as a proxy for significance and a promise of safety. But social media is not a space we enter and exit, but an overlay on our lives, a constant presence that reshapes our sense of opportunity and vulnerability. It offers a continual series of chances for social recognition, at being legible to others and approved by them, included, affirmed as interesting or likeable. Though it was once characterized as a kind of “microcelebrity,” the capacity to represent oneself in such a way that secures attention and likes has become a prominent way of feeling not famous but normal. This has intensified the pressure to perform sociality in the monitored and measurable space of social media, but to seem as though one is not performing at all.
The change that began with lifestyle consumerism has been consolidated in social media: an orientation toward validation through the same protocols that validate advertisements and products. The way “authenticity” had been used in branding now characterizes the process of personal branding through various platforms. Their measurements derive from the advertising industry but are easily repurposed to the project of social evaluation. No definition of “authenticity” is authentic; they are all tactical.
Social media platforms have becomes laboratories for authenticity: how to signify it, how to produce it, how to measure it, how to commodify it. They draw from the logic of fashion and extend it, becoming a more powerful administrative mechanism for the orderly unfolding and distribution of trends. As new kinds of authenticity ossify into viral memes and recognizable trends, other forms begin to percolate to take their place. But rather than be limited to clothes or tastes in music, social media extend the effect of trends across more of everyday life, and make the stakes a matter of the one’s entire identity.
To my dismay, I have sometimes found myself using the metrics in social media as a proxy for recognition or relevance or inclusion. How well I can reshape myself to get attention sometimes feels like the only relevant reason for communicating at all, a measure of how flexible and conformist I am at the same time. Conversations outside of monitored spaces feels less private than provisional, a rehearsal for communication that actually matters, that will actually contribute to how I am seen and measured. At times, the responsibility of performing "my real self" begins to feel overwhelming, and counter fantasies begin to develop: not only nostalgia for earlier, less media-saturated times when performing the self didn’t seem as pressing, but also dreams of discarding identity, offloading responsibility for it, promulgating multiple selves, consuming my self as its reflected back to me algorithmically as a product.
The essays here address the transformations in consumerism and identity that social media have brought on, and how “authenticity” has been deployed to both mark and mask them. The earlier essays look at how social media have made producing and performing a self into alienable and alienating labor. A few essays consider the logic of fashion and how the notions of virality derived from it have organized social media business models while reshaping ideas about personal identity. And a few essays look more directly at the span of ideological work “authenticity” has recently been made to perform: instilling self-doubt, driving communicative capitalism, invalidating collective action, and justifying the way social media platforms are administered.
Too many discussions of authenticity obfuscate the deliberate slipperiness of the term and reinforce its hold over our imagination. But its centrality to consumerism and social media make it critical that we understand it as a façade, disguising a plurality of often conflicting ideas of how we should live and associate with one another. “Coordinated inauthentic behavior” now serves as a bureaucratic euphemism for politically motivated media manipulation, but it could be understood as shorthand for how everyone’s behavior is always already inauthentic, always conditioned and “coordinated” by social structures. And in that coordination is a hope for a kind of social recognition that is based on the ways we would like to be regarded, which would no longer serve as grounds for exclusion.