1. Even though authenticity is frequently posited as the reward for producing content, it is not what motivates people to speak. When people post content to social media, they are not trying to “be authentic” or “discover themselves” or even “express themselves.” We are simply communicating in order to see if people are listening, to see if we are included. (Bethlehem Shoals writes about that idea here.) There is nothing about a self (in and of itself) to express; the self, as it it is constituted in social media, consists of reactions.
2. Being “authentic” in social media usually serves as code for “work harder” and “post more.” “Authenticity” is offered as wages for the work of circulating signifiers, charging them with stakes, with potential value. It is the false premise for getting users to generate and circulate social media content, as well as register superfluous reactions to the endless flow of content. What is our “real” reaction? Was it a WOW or did we merely like it?
3. All this creates more data points to attenuate the demographic profiles assembled by marketers. If we have an “authentic identity,” it consists of these profiles, but we have no direct access to them. They are not in our consciousness or in our intentionality but in some remote server. At best we can try to trace the contours of our alienated identity — who we are believed to be by the only entities capable of housing and processing all the data — through gauging the reactions to what we post.
4. People (brands) trying to be “authentic” must continuously and vigorously reassert their identity with strategically chosen signifiers. It requires constant effort to attract the attention that substantiates a particular posited identity and redirect divergent interpretations of the previous posts. Social media presupposes we will develop brand-management strategy for ourselves. The illusion of a stable, consistent identity is achieved through constant recalibration. The content meant to create an “authentic” personal/brand identity is consistent only in its continual flow.
5. In social media, we build out the networks that impose identity on us; the platforms (as they are currently configured) profit from structuring the social attention we give and seek from one another in the form of veiled authenticity competitions, in metrics that purport to assess how much favorable attention we are receiving and thus how “real” we are. An identity is “authentic” only in so far as other people notice and approve of it. One can’t be real or true to oneself in a social vacuum. It is reactions all the way down.
6. The old ruse of “authenticity” was that it expressed an individual’s uniqueness. Authentic behavior manifested a unique self. But being unique is trivial in a climate of ubiquitous surveillance and nonconsensual archiving. Authenticity is explicitly a form of brand equity in competitive markets for opportunities, projects, connections, etc. Authenticity is measured in relation to the other competitors in the field; as always, it is not a matter of measuring one’s behavior against an essential interior truth.
7. It may seem as though rejecting authenticity could move us beyond this forced labor, can be a way of trying to opt out of the competition. Postauthenticity can seem like work refusal. Strategic inconsistency and conformity as disguise become measures of resistance. We can present ourselves as an unabashed collage of incoherent appropriations, with no pretense to molding a curatorial sensibility that lifts “a real self” out of the melange of our influences. If only we were genuinely, authentically indifferent to how authentic we were, we would resist, if not transcend entirely, the de-authenticating, alienating ruses of social media. But there is no unilateral way for an individual to opt out of authenticity, any more than one can opt out of having a reputation. The curatorial sensibility attributed to us is imposed from without even if it is not directed coherently from within.
8. The expectation that people’s social media behavior must be authentic is imposed; it is a judgment passed on people, not an aspiration that motivates people. It is a punishment, an external demand for self-consistency that overrides the self’s innate desire to be multifarious, to be unlimited, to be always in the process of becoming something else, something more.
9. You don’t get to choose who you are; worse, you can’t choose to be no one.
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