Gen Z and gen Alpha brought a raw, messy aesthetic to social media. Why does it feel as inauthentic as ever? | Eugene Healey

The curated feed of flatlays gave way to the sloppy photo dump; the finstas; the bedrotting. Finally, our real lives represented on screen. Finally, something real.

Except that this quickly became another role to be performed, a generation-defining content genre that has itself become subject to more and more extreme performances – filming oneself b... See more

The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been c... See more

Authenticity simply can’t survive this environment of constant performance – we become alienated from our own actions when every moment is filtered through the question of how it will be received.