Real results
A recent, widely circulated blog post made the claim that "Google search is dying" and that for many queries, appending "Reddit" to a search will lead to better results because "most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." Google's search results are top-heavy with ads, and then below the ads are usually clickbait articles that effectively squat on common queries looking for traffic.
This is the inevitable result of search engine optimization strategies and Google's own advertising-based business model. That model dictates that all "information" is essentially promotional, and that to be informed is to be sold on something. That is, Google doesn't organize information to make it more accessible; it brokers audiences and sells them to the highest bidder, providing the minimum amount of signal (desired information) to make the noise (sales pitches and propaganda) more effectual. It follows that one must take an adversarial approach to querying Google: You have to be skeptical of the information provided, even though this defeats the purpose of searching in the first place. It’s like asking to be lied to.
As the blogger notes, this has been the case for a long time, and they cite a series of previous articles making these same kinds of points. But what caught my attention about the post was how it uses the word authentic in passages like this, responding to the "Dead Internet theory" (the idea that most web content is by and for bots):
It reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone. The SEO marketers gaming their way to the top of every Google search result might as well be robots. Everything is commercialized. Someone’s always trying to sell you something. Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.
Here "authentic" is used to conflate "noncommercial" with "human," and "commercial" with "bot." Perhaps this portends a lowering of the bar such that anything not produced by a machine will eventually be called “authentic.” (I turned off the autotext and wrote an authentic email, I authentically drove to work and steered the car myself. etc.) But it is also in tension with the longstanding relation of authenticity with disinterestedness. Nothing can be more disinterested than a bot; it has no agency to invest in anything it does. But yet bots are fake, and scheming humans (the ones who make and deploy the bots) are real.
The "authentic web," in the poster’s view, was the uncommercialized, nonoptimized one, here associated somewhat implausibly with Reddit, conceived as a “community” of commentators with pure motives, having real discussions of their real opinions. Sure, they are incentivized to some degree by the upvoting system, but the rewards are reputational rather than financial, so they remain mostly “authentic.” (If only they could tokenize their posts, then they could be profitably inauthentic too. Web3 will fix that soon enough.)
The nostalgic tone of “the authentic web is gone” posits a lost golden age that was probably always a fantasy — wasn’t the internet better when no one used it? It’s premised on the idea that technological development was once driven by something other than its commercial exploitation potential. The centralized platforms have ruined the dream, turned people into “users.”
But the platforms themselves use the same “authenticity” language to describe their struggles with content moderation, which they frame as a battle against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” It’s hard to fathom how they can fight “inauthentic” behavior when the discursive spaces they produce are predicated on manipulation. Communication is typically incentivized with metrics and algorithmic rewards and interspersed with ads that compete for the audience’s attention while establishing that everything being said is all essentially sponsored content. If “authentic” means doing what the platforms afford, selling out and deceiving people would be as authentic as it gets.
This suggests that platforms are mainly concerned with the “coordinated” part of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” They want to reserve the right to manipulate people at scale to themselves and their advertisers. In that sense, what they regard as “authentic” is when users don’t actively coordinate their behavior with anyone else’s at all, but merely spontaneously following their own instincts and impulses as isolated individuals. From a platform’s perspective, “inauthentic” behavior is the unintended consequences from the conditions and incentives that they have imposed. At the same time, the term “coordinated inauthentic behavior” uses the egregious activities of brigaders and scammers to make the more mundane forms of hustling by ordinary users seem “authentic” by comparison.
But there is another sense in which the term seems as wistful as the blogger’s lament, “The authentic web is gone.” Every evocation of authenticity plays on how it is both aspirational and always already lost. It can’t really exist in the present tense, but is something one remembers or hopes for, a time when you can just be. The problem is that in the present, you are always doing something, which speaks not to who you “really are” but who you are trying to be.
Platforms want to offer the “real you” to advertisers, and they understand this the same way the blogger does, as a kind of demotivated objectivity: “Real” is when you are not being intentional, when you are not selling something but are being sold to, when you are not active but passive, reacting rather than acting. Reddit posts are a resource only insofar as the posters aren’t trying to capitalize on them themselves but instead dutifully offer them up with a kind of ignorance or indifference about their commercial value. Only certain people can afford to be indifferent or ignorant like that, which biases the information in a subtler way.