[HN Gopher] After Authenticity (2018)
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After Authenticity (2018)
Author : antoviaque
Score : 29 points
Date : 2025-01-20 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
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| glutamate wrote:
| 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.
| antoviaque wrote:
| Thanks, looking at the channel it wasn't immediately clear
| which video would explain that idea, so in case this is useful
| to someone else, that one goes further into it, and was
| interesting: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Cu1lnTQM0Gw
| boesboes wrote:
| That graphic towards the end is scary...
| siavosh wrote:
| 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.
| qrsjutsu wrote:
| > 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.
| ryandv wrote:
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| That third-order simulacra is really interesting. Fits social
| media like a glove: the metrics become the thing that drives
| engagement and content, so they become seen as legitimate to a
| public that once laughed at the concept of talking to other
| people on the Internet.
| keybored wrote:
| > 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.
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