After Authenticity

by 2012 it was finally possible to call just about everyone a hipster. The development of the authenticity aesthetic made it possible for the mainstream to participate in the most outwardly visible ritual of hipster behavior: authentic consumption.

For those without maker skills, consumer connoisseurship of “craft” commodity categories like previous hipster mainstays coffee and denim became a popular choice of hobby and profession. This in turn contributed to the hundreds of restaurants and brands that all claimed to be part of the movement towards “local,” small production scales, heritage, ... See more

People co-create their identities with brands just as they do with religions, communities, and other other systems of meaning.

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

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

“the concept of authenticity is increasingly deemed inauthentic.”

It is impossible to think about the Brooklyn authenticity aesthetic, authenticity commodities, the “maker movement,” and startup culture as independent phenomena. It is not a coincidence that they all developed into mainstream culture at the same time. It might have been inevitable but the Great Recession certainly catalyzed the process.

Nevertheless, now that authenticity is obsolete it’s become difficult to remember why we were suspicious of brands and commodities to begin with.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

Identitarianism is mirrored in—would not be possible without—the widespread preoccupation with authentic selves. In the future we may be able to look back at toxic wantrepreneurship, white entitlement, and identity politics both “left” and ethnonationalist as being underwritten by the same philosophical blunder.

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