After Authenticity

With information effortlessly transferable at zero marginal cost and social platforms that blast content to the top of everyone’s feed, it’s difficult to for an ethics based on scarcity to sustain itself.

Mainstream culture and commodity goods present a problem for people who believe in authenticity.

“reactionary distancing—aestheticizing, ironizing.” Viewing the junk products of pop culture “ironically or anthropologically….from internally afar” allowed hipsters to see them as something not part of themselves

Ironic consumption of commodities is one ... See more

Nevertheless, now that authenticity is obsolete it’s become difficult to remember why we were suspicious of brands and commodities to begin with. 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.

to the horribly corporate Brandless. Even the names of boring basics companies like “Common Threads” and “Universal Standard” reflect the the popularity of genericness

It goes further than that. What we are witnessing is the disappearance of authenticity as a cultural need altogether.

Under authenticity, the value of a thing decreases as the number of people to whom it is meaningful increases. This is clearly no longer the case. Take memes for example. “Meme” circa 2005 meant lolcats, the Y U NO guy and grimy neck... See more

K-HOLE and Box1824 captured the new landscape in their breakthrough 2014 report “Youth Mode.” They described an era of “mass indie” where the search for meaning is premised on differentiation and uniqueness, and proposed a solution in “Normcore.” Humorously, nearly everyone mistook Normcore for being about bland fashion choices rather than the grea... See more

With information effortlessly transferable at zero marginal cost and social platforms that blast content to the top of everyone’s feed, it’s difficult to for an ethics based on scarcity to sustain itself.

One thing is certain: the authenticity aesthetic served as a cohesive for all of these developments. It tied the spectrum of consumable items, spaces, and identities into a single unified visual experience.

This is a good time to discuss the demand for authenticity and where it comes from. As I hinted at previously, there’s a personal dimension to a... See more

Clearly the cultural pressure to achieve a unique self is old, strong, and not unique to hipsters, so why did the authenticity drive spin out of control after CE 2000? One possible reason is that the hundreds of studies on authenticity in tourism and subcultures have also been read and in many cases sponsored by business thinkers who directly influ... See more