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The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

coryzue.com

281–290 of 347 posts

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#281
post #157

Saw this video yesterday about how the reality show Love Island got professionalized in the same way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8VqPxYM2tY

Early vs recent 90 Day Fiancé(e) seasons are night and day for this reason. The latest season of Love is Blind features a lot of contestants pointing the "you're here for clout" finger at one another, as though violating the academic integrity of their (self-styled) experiment was beyond the pale.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#282
post #269
post #267

Maybe this is my own neurospice speaking but...What even is authenticity? Do we even see authenticity in public? Any awareness that we are being observed introduces some amount of Hawthorne effect. Probably the most genuine folks are the introverts and socially averse. Regional burns are espoused to celebrate "radical self-expression" , and unlike the Big Burn, their smaller size seems to promote authenticity to a gr…

> Do we even see authenticity in public? If you have the ability to sense another human's emotions you can often tell when someone is being authentic or not. Set and setting are also important. Authenticity is closer to honesty about yourself rather than some kind of self-expression. I am still authentic if I don't mention my hobby of collecting records while I am at the gym. I am not authentic if I start making up w…

Great points. I think fundamentally you and I have different operating definitions of authenticity.

Though I do want to clarify

> The systemization of everything (through what you call "radical self-expression") is creating a bunch of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing

That's not my term, it's a burner term, and has nothing to do with systematization. The Ten Principles are a set of descriptive (not proscriptive) observations about what makes a Burn different from other festival-like gatherings [0].

> fundamentally a simple topic. Authentic people are honest people. You can often tell right away who is lying and who is not. The computer in your head has hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to help you with that.

This is probably the neurospicy rearing it's head. I understand what you mean about "fundamentally a simple topic". But in a lot of ways, it's not simple. To a first order approximation, yes "honesty about who you are" is tantamount to authenticity. Because for most folks, "who you are" is a fairly fixed concept, so being honest (or dishonest) about it is straightforward. But I don't think having a fixed concept of self is a universal experience. For me, (when I'm at my full potential) I'm able to select and deselect attributes of myself to express.

Tl;dr - "masking" making defining "authenticity" challenging for neurodivergent folks.

https://burningman.org/about/10-principles/

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#284
post #68

One thing I’ve noticed is that the culture on Twitter now is quite different than it was a decade ago, and the platform has calcified. A decade ago the common adivce for how to connect with people - Tweet often, comment often, follow accounts - connected you with a lot of people, and you would often end up following each other. I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got m…

It's the difference between optimizing for the sum of followers squared and optimizing for the sum of squared followers.

You want lots of people having a few followers rather than one person having millions.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#285
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You call them naive like if it was a bad thing. I for one welcome the naive ones, they don't feel like they are transparently trying to take advantage.

It is a bad thing if you can be fired if someone digs up your 10 year old tweets.

The Naive don't have to worry about that. They just have to deal with it if it happens.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#286

Some thoughts: > Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts... Honestly, the long form tweets became a signal to just ignore that tweet. I unfollow or block users that tweet long form often. > The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following, by the way— Yea, just use the chrono-tab ("following"). Only usable version of Twitter. > love posting for engagement. Some of the…

> Honestly, the long form tweets became a signal to just ignore that tweet. I unfollow or block users that tweet long form often. Even though I don't use Twitter much any more, I fully agree here. Whenever I see the "[thread emoji] 1/?" I'm already done. I can't even fathom why anyone would put the energy in these "thread" style tweets. Twitter content will forever remain fundamentally ephemeral: it's hard to find my…

> Twitter content will forever remain fundamentally ephemeral:

I've bookmarked a "thread of threads" from a user or two. Even that was a half-baked solution though. Since they've started limiting public (not logged in) access again i haven't bothered.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#287
post #123

People aren't authentic when they are talking to everyone on the planet at once, unless they are incredibly naive. They are authentic talking to their friends, or family, in private conversations. A lot of people were naive in the early days and it made for amusing conversation, not any longer and these platforms are just about brand management / advertising now.

People are not authentic talking to friends or family in private either. The entire authenticity cult is a creation of modern media and is as much manufactured as "fitting in" is. In fact, I'd say that it's GOOD that people craft their image, no one genuinely wants to hear your unfiltered thoughts. Usually people who do that are considered socially maladjusted.

I partially agree, but think it's a matter of degrees.

Most of us probably have to do some image-crafting, but the closer the match between the image we craft and our unfiltered-self (if there is such a thing), the better.

I've certainly felt frustrated by people who seemed preoccupied with image-crafting, and by people who seem to have no social awareness or filter.

Edited to add: I think pseudonamous forums like this can be a valuable opportunity to develop the self you want to be with different social constraints from day-to-day life.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#288
To me, the problems with Twitter were never complicated. The thing Twitter wants you to do with it is not good: it wants you to pay constant attention to a stream of short messages. Occasionally the messages are funny, sometimes they are even insightful, but they are always short and there is never and end to them. I could never imagine how that would make me smarter, wiser, or better informed. I could see how it would help me waste a lot of time, sure. But even if Twitter succeeds beyond their wildest expectations and nothing ever happens that was not exactly according to plan, it still leaves the world a worse place. If you think something makes the world a worse place, my advice is don't do it.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#289

One thing I've realized about social media, especially X/Twitter, is that it's not a singular place, that is you can have 4 feeds on twitter from different users that might as well be different social media platforms. I've noticed if you follow the "Indie Hackers" on X then you will get lots of self promotion (ie. "My startup just hit $X/MRR!!, here's how I did it: substack.com...."). On the other hand there are othe…

I'm not sure the "global square" model of Twitter scales well for so many people. Just reading the comments here it seems like a lot of people use Twitter/X defensively. They're constantly scanning for what they think is grift, politics, etc. They have an attitude of "do not disturb me" on X by default. This sort of gruff fatigue is what seems to set in on very large, cacophonous social networks.

I also find Youtube to be a lot healthier, probably because not everyone is incentivized to have an opinion, and it's quite easy to ignore the Comments section. I find the Youtube -> Discord pipeline to be great. I'd love to have an open version of this, something like Peertube/Bitchute -> Matrix, but due to the usual reasons FOSS continues to only appeal to small niches.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What communities and subcultures are you following for example?

Pirate bay, software downloads, that sort of thing I reckon. Given the username.

Pirate Bay? The kids straight up be #stealing merchandise from stores and posting videos of them doing it.
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