Boring but not necessarily meaningless
Earlier this week, the social media platform BeReal — reportedly in decline, in terms of downloads and daily users, according to this New York Times piece by Callie Holtermann — issued a press release about a new feature, which it calls RealPeople. Ironically enough, it basically inverts the premise of the 1970s proto-reality-TV show Real People, which sought to make a commercial spectacle of noncelebrities, defining which sorts of odd behavior could safely make unfamous people briefly interesting to a collectivized curiosity. By contrast, BeReal’s RealPeople will supposedly offer “a curated timeline of the world’s most interesting people — from top athletes, artists, activists and everything in between,” photographing themselves doing “ordinary” things. This would reinforce the power of their celebrity to elevate any image to noteworthiness while establishing what mundane, “normal” practices are supposed to be.
“With RealPeople we want to try and eliminate society’s notion that public figures live in an alternate, filtered universe,” the press release explains, which makes the feature sound like a phone-app version of “Stars — They’re Just Like Us,” and other similar gossip-magazine staples. It’s also completely preposterous: It is not some foolish “notion” of “society” that the lives of celebrities are different from those of noncelebrities; celebrities do live in a highly guarded and “filtered” world of access and privilege that is fundamentally beyond anything “the masses” experience. The fact that BeReal can decide to “curate” them into a special timeline of their own speaks to the universal recognition of that kind of filtering and demonstrates that it is not “society’s notion” but BeReal’s own as well. You can’t declare that “We believe we’re all just people. We’re all equal — all equally interesting and boring!” and then make a special separate category for the “most interesting people” without generating a massive self-evident contradiction.
Of course, it is a kind of category error to expect logical coherence from a press release. Nonetheless, the contradiction is so blatant that it underscores the instability of BeReal’s authenticity-based sales pitch. (“RealPeople isn’t about influencing, amassing likes or comments, or promoting brands. You won’t see perfect photoshopped pictures, product recommendations, or ads disguised as posts.”) Authenticity itself is always a contradictory concept: The word typically shows up to mask such impossible ideals as “studied indifference” or “planned spontaneity” or “realism” that in turn derive from larger irresolvable socioeconomic tensions between social classes, between the forces and relations of production, between collective and individualistic conceptions of subjectivity, consumerism and nonconformity, use and exchange value, and so on. When all discourse is understood as a form of marketing, when everything is perceived as a spectacle of self-simulation, efforts to draw the line between “real” and “fake” cancel themselves out.
In the New York Times piece, Holtermann characterizes BeReal’s struggles as a “dilemma” between “doubling down on so-called authenticity” and breaking its own rules “to generate more interesting pictures.” I definitely appreciate Holtermann adding “so-called” here and not taking the problematic use of authenticity at face value. But that phrasing also seems to posits an authentic “authenticity” that the app isn’t concerned with but should have been, one that can’t be set in opposition to “interesting” (or “famous”).
The problem with BeReal isn’t that it is commodifying our authentic selves into “so-called authenticity,” but rather that it is participating in a broader overvaluation of an “authentic self” that is presumed to be detachable from its surrounding conditions and capable of transcending the compromises and complicities that the fallen world of capitalism imposes on us. The app stages a shared moment where everyone expects everyone else to perform their authenticity, reveal their essence, as if to guarantee these things indefatigably exist, even if they prove to be boring. Of course, you have to sneak up on your authenticity because it is conceived as a remainder, as what is left of you when you strip away your conscious intentions and ambitions, and all the efforts made to accommodate other people. BeReal asks you to make a spectacle of your own thoughtlessness in conformity with everyone else’s, under the auspices that this species of “honesty” is something to be mutually celebrated.
Almost every contemporary appeal to “authenticity” can be construed as an expression of what Herbert Marcuse disparaged in a 1937 essay (included in this collection) as “the affirmative character of culture,” a mode of excusing the status quo by separating our “essential nature” from its effects.
By culture in this context, Marcuse means “the realm of authentic values and self-contained ends” that is set up “in opposition to the world of social utility and means.” With the development of the “bourgeois epoch,” this realm becomes a
universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world that must be unconditionally affirmed: a world essentially different from the factual world of the daily struggle for existence, yet realizable by every individual for himself “from within,” without any transformation of the state of fact. It is only in this culture that cultural activities and objects gain that value which elevates them above the everyday sphere.
Marcuse follows Marx’s general account of the rise of the bourgeoisie dissolving “the social, ecclesiastical, and political mediations of feudalism” and positing a new social freedom for individuals who can theoretically pursue their living in their own way. “But the universality of this happiness is immediately canceled,” Marcuse argues, “since the abstract equality of men realizes itself in capitalist production as concrete inequality.” The basis of capitalism is not that everyone is provided for and given the means to flourish but that the vast majority of people must compete to sell their labor power.
In a society that reproduces itself through economic competition, the mere demand for a happier social existence constitutes rebellion. For if men value the enjoyment of worldly happiness, then they certainly cannot value acquisitive activity, profit, and the authority of the economic powers that preserve the existence of this society.
Affirmative culture, and its consecration of the individual’s ineffable “soul,” is capitalist society’s effort to address this tension. The soul is not associated with reason or with what a person can consciously accomplish — aspects of the individual that are tainted by association with the “social labor process” and its grotesquely unjust outcomes — but with inner life conceived as an “indivisible unity” that can’t be comprehended or deliberately exercised but only expressed. Marcuse quotes the reactionary historian Oswald Spengler, who declared that the soul “is forever inaccessible to the lucid mind, to the understanding, or to empirical, factual research … One could sooner dissect with a knife a theme by Beethoven or dissolve it with an acid than analyze the soul with the means of abstract thought.”
Thinking of the “soul” as ineffable would seem to preserve it from the commodification that afflicts everything else, even if it is an empty consolation for those socioeconomic conditions. But in practice it also means that our “real self” is not directly knowable to ourselves but is a mystery that must be approached indirectly through commodities. Hence the barrage of “authentic” products and “authentic” procedures (like BeReal); these purport to reveal our authenticity to us without our having to operationalize it and thereby nullify it. The effectiveness of these tactics is always ephemeral, however, as authenticity remains only that which escapes.
BeReal epitomizes the inevitable sadness of this recognition, that authenticity as an ideal depends on institutionalized economic competition and thus cannot be a principle of solidarity — having friends and “being authentic” are ultimately at odds. The deliberate pursuit of authenticity is “doomed,” as Brooke Erin Duffy and Ysabel Gerrard argue here with respect to social media platforms, which ultimately serve to facilitate that competition.
Marcuse offers the following as a description of aesthetic experience in affirmative culture, but it could also serve to describe the loftiest aspirations for BeReal and their inherent limitations:
In a world without happiness, however, happiness cannot but be a consolation: the consolation of a beautiful moment in an interminable chain of misfortune. The enjoyment of happiness is compressed into a momentary episode. But the moment embodies the bitterness of its disappearance. Given the isolation of lone individuals, there is no one in whom one’s own happiness can be preserved after the moment passes, no one who is not subject to the same isolation.
Momentary episodes of authenticity dissolve into an enduring sense of isolation, a sense that one is a “beautiful soul” compelled to always appear as something one is not in a life lived wrong, in what Marcuse bluntly calls “bad reality.”
There is at least critical potential in that moment of recognition, when the mask of affirmative culture slips. As Gerrard notes in this Guardian piece, “Maybe it’s OK that BeReal was evanescent; that it was simply that fun thing we all did last summer. After all, there are worse ways to be remembered than the app that taught us it’s too exhausting to be real on command.”
Yet here tech columnist Casey Newton wants to characterize this as the company “missing its moment” — failing to convert users’ desire for a reprieve from bad reality into a more robust manifestation of that bad reality. “The team failed to ship more than a couple of user-facing features over the past nine months,” thus failing to further exploit the user base it had captured with an expiring promise.
Newton laments that for all the new social media apps being developed, none have “identified a truly novel new feature.” But rather than understand that as the resilience of the social and its capacity to resist full subsumption to an extractive media platform, Newton wishes platforms would be more ingenious in developing systems that could dictate the meaning of sociality to us and make it more binding. “It feels like an indictment of the collective creativity of the tech industry that my median group chat feels livelier and more relevant than any so-called social product on the market,” he writes. Apparently we should prefer that “social products” become more interesting than the people we know, and that we could use a product like BeReal or a algorithmically personalized app like TikTok without ever questioning their stale structuring of our “authentic” selves independent of our social relationships. We should look to the “market” to find life and relevance, not to our friends.
“It’s not enough to invite users in and expect them to create magic,” as Newton would have it, chastising platforms for their “laziness.” “You have to make it seem like you’re trying, too.” The users need to “make magic” on the platform’s terms, or else how is anybody going to make any money? Make your culture more affirmative!