A Crisis of Authenticity

mada(71)
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The above image was made by amberjyang@amberjyang using Midjourney with the prompt 'artisanal closeup of a sewing machine stitching leather, authenticity.'

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2023 is 'authentic.' According to the announcement:

A high-volume lookup most years, authentic saw a substantial increase in 2023, driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media. ... The quest for authenticity partly results from technologies like the deepfake: "an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said." In late April and early May, we saw a surge of interest in deepfake when lawyers for Elon Musk argued that he shouldn’t have to give legal testimony about public statements he made, since, as a famous person, some of his statements might be deepfakes. (This argument was rejected by the judge.)

Other commonly searched words this year include 'dystopian,' 'coronation,' and 'implode.' The inclusion of 'coronation' in this list is notable because I've only ever recently heard it in reference to the pandemic by those who theorize that the pandemic was deliberately orchestrated for reasons having to do with occult initiation. But I don't pay any attention to pop culture, so maybe the term was also widely in use somewhere else and I just didn't notice it.

Crisis of Authenticity

In a society drowning in fake everything, authenticity can be hard to come by. Our environments are artificial. Synthetic chemicals adulterate our food supply. Public discourse is dominated by the disingenuous and outright liars. Many people have jobs that prevent them from displaying even a hint of who they really are.

Online, the information we find is increasingly suspect. Propaganda and censorship have infected popular news and social media. AI promises to make doctored images and videos convincing enough to fool anyone. In these and other ways, modern life is shaping up to be brutally inauthentic.

On a primal level, the environments we evolved to live in are long gone. Our personalities and behaviors are all fitted to artificial habitats. Politically and economically, we're reduced to soulless categories. Voter. Worker. Consumer.

All of this has contributed to a crisis of authenticity in society. It's getting harder and harder to know who is genuinely being themselves versus merely repeating prescribed speech to conform. And the legal, professional, and social consequences of non-conformity can be devastating. So our society incentivizes the inauthentic.

Despite these challenges, many of us still crave authenticity in our lives and interactions. I know I do. And I find it often enough in an interpersonal context, while the larger world is fake fake fake.

At the same time, emerging technologies are pushing the boundaries of our identities in a variety of ways. The authentic expression of these identities could take many forms. Personally, I try to be my authentic self in any circumstance. Plenty of other people do the same. We're being our authentic selves in a dystopian human ecology.

Read my novels:

See my NFTs:

  • Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
  • History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
  • Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
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A Crisis of Authenticity | Ecency