The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Both the intellectual history of authenticity and the recent scholarship on how authenticity behaves in media and tourism settings are indicative of an irredeemable system of striving and false hope.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Authenticity is a poison pill at the end of a long rat race. Nothing short of dispensing with the inherently capitalist notion of authenticity will give us relief.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
The safe, vapid art of this era did more to signal that a place was ready to be gentrified than to express any specific idea. Art-as-politics has been devastating for both politics and art.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
It is overstating things to call retro bars inherently fascist—they’re not—but there is a clear, material linkage between the rent-seeking behavior of authenticity peddlers and fomenting turf battles over definitions of place and time.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Dilution of authenticity through the commodification of a place’s culture is just one of the many problems with making money through authenticity peddling.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
But generally, the move from government provision of housing, food, and jobs programs to this network of semiprivate organizations introduced perverse incentives into life-sustaining institutions. The result has been a wealth transfer of public money to boards of directors staffed largely by local elites that are more likely to be responsive to rea
... See moreDavid A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
We seek out authentic experiences because we want a break from modern drudgery and to experience something untouched by marketing and the profit motive. But because fulfillment of this desire is so valuable, our search for authenticity is “precorporated,” a word coined by the cultural theorist Mark Fisher to describe the “pre-emptive formatting and
... See moreDavid A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Because “everything is for sale” on social media, writes media scholar Zoe Hurley, it is assumed that “everything and everyone participating in the social media landscape is doing so for commercial gain. Projecting a fantasy or giving a performance of ‘authentic’ life is the important thing as authenticity itself becomes commodified.”70
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
constructive authenticity