After Authenticity (2018)

As a tangent but I think related, I remember years ago with the first appearance of influencers in our culture, I thought to myself if multi million dollar corporations with some mission statement can be predictably corrupted by every opportunity to make more money by compromising their stated ethics, what chance does an individual have who makes their living off of promoting some corporate goods? Not much was my conclusion, and I think culture has just embraced or better said, reinterpreted that corruption into something normal and desirable.

There's a great YouTube channel that has a lot to say about this: carefree wanderings (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnEuIogVV2Mv6Q1a3nHIRsQ).

The idea is that after first sincerity, and then authenticity, we are moving into a new identity generating technology (in the philosophical sense of the word technology) called "profilicity" which is focussed on curating a profile across a variety of media channels. This profile is more multifaceted than an authenticity and is created or evolved with deliberate intent.

That graphic towards the end is scary...

> Has it occurred to you that nobody talks about sellouts anymore?

It hasn’t occurred to me. Because it never stopped being a thing. Activist turned upstart politician turned career politician? Very likely to be a sellout. There are recent examples. Band which had a distinct, underground style but then went big with a mainstream sound? Well now you get into mind-reading since some bands just change their sound. But “sellout” is a charge that people could levy at them.

One can easily see parallels between the commoditization and commercialization of hipster culture & music, and the software industry. Being a software geek went from, as the article states, "being reprehensible to being the thing that everyone is doing." While I maybe wouldn't use the word reprehensible, it's certainly been my observation over the past few years that what was once seen as a hopelessly obsessive, almost autistic hobby or pasttime, has now been elevated to a signal of social status - even to the point where the first image in the article is of the cover of a pop magazine with the encouraging words, "You can learn to code at any age!"

More to the point, the practice of software craftsmanship, of hacking, has been commoditized and reduced to a means to extracting value out of the market, instead of the once subversive, countercultural, and even anticommercial hobby that it once was, practiced simply for the joy of programming. There is a palpable difference between the authenticity of a grizzled programmer who spent his early days implementing toy programs or cellular automata in obscure, completely impractical programming languages with almost no industry application; and the new "careerist" sort of software developer transplanted from a completely unrelated discipline, with no prior connection to geek culture, who puts on the airs of a computer geek so they too can get a slice of the tech industry pie, but comes across as a Big Bang Theory-esque facsimilie of what popular culture thinks geek culture is like. "Posers," as they might have been called in that bygone hipster era.

"Cultural Conformism" is the term introduced by the article to refer to the aesthetic of authenticity, beneath which no genuine article is to be found. We have labels, or symbols, like '"artisanship", "craft," "small-batch," "single-lot," and so on' which signal authenticity despite its absence: "hand-crafted Popeye's tenders."

More broadly this is just a continuation of the accelerating trend of postmodernism noted by thinkers such as Baudrillard in his description of what he called "third-order simulacra": symbols that "mask the absence of a profound reality" and are exchanged, not because those symbols actually represent or refer to anything genuine underneath, but because the symbols have come to take on value themselves as things or realities (Baudrillard would say, "hyperrealities") in their own right. Money and currency itself is a prime example of this phenomenon.

Once you understand this concept it becomes hard to unsee these marketing slogans, symbols like "small-batch chicken tenders" as anything but linguistic games, magickal incantations meant to evoke a reality that does not actually exist.

Elsewhere in this thread the concept of "profilicity" was introduced, and it is interesting to investigate the parallels between the third-order simulacra of "small-batch chicken tenders" and the aesthetic of authenticity; and the third-order simulacra of social media profiles which lend to the aesthetic of an actual person, but which actually "mask the absence of a profound reality," beneath which there is no actual "self" or "person" to be found - just pixels on a screen.

> Maintaining criticality is a fundamental challenge in this new era of trust. Unfortunately, much of what we know about being critical is based on authenticity ethics. Carles blamed the Contemporary Conformist phenomenon on a culture industry hard-set on mining “youth culture dollars.” This very common yet extraordinarily reductive argument, which makes out commodity capitalism to be an all-powerful, intrinsically evil force, is typical of authenticity believers.

Abusing and exploiting teen minds, fallacies, bias, primed emotions and interests and as a result anchoring preferences is "youth culture dollars" and it is an intrinsically ugly force that will bring many more children of bad, ugly and or overly unhealthy stressed parents in shitty school districts to the brink of selling out their bodies and minds before they turn 21. There will be brutal and disgusting debates about whether pedophilia should be/is getting normalized, and I'm not talking the Nabokov kind of think. And it's all linked to authenticity being replaced by "culture dollars". It didn't happen "by force". It happened by brute-forcing one and half generations' minds. Now it's being hard-coded via twitchy TikkTock.