Post-Authentic Sincerity a Premium Generic Essay

normcore design treats its form as simply a product of social or material conditions. It embraces these conditions because they exist, not because they’re good. Goodness (virtue) comes from this honesty.

Virtue comes from what individuals and brands actually [appear to] do with their proximity to capital, not their effort to conceal it.

Understand the difference between changing default settings and changing defaults themselves, between simplification and synthesis, between reductivism and transparency.

This democratization of authenticity was the final nail in the Hipster’s coffin: solid, material proof that any pursuit of authenticity is foolish, because authenticity itself is fake, in the sense that any other marketing gimmick is perceivably “fake” — therefore rendering it useless as a tool to sell scarcity.

But who are we — am I — trying to be original for? Myself, a client, a boss, a professor, Instagram, my mom, nobody at all? I think that it’s time to really think about who we’re creating for, so that we can strategize who deserves our originality, who deserves our efficiency, who deserves both, and who deserves neither. If there’s one thing I

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But who are we — am I — trying to be original for? Myself, a client, a boss, a professor, Instagram, my mom, nobody at all? I think that it’s time to really think about who we’re creating for, so that we can strategize who deserves our originality, who deserves our efficiency, who deserves both, and who deserves neither. If there’s one thing I’m su... See more

Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to call it “authenticity” at all: a better suited word would be “transparency” or “sincerity.” Post-authentic sincerity derives virtue from an unironic complicity with total neoliberal colonization, or Fisher’s “capitalist realism”, acknowledging that there is no real “outside”, no real alternative to system default... See more

In Capitalist Realism , Mark Fisher, following along with Zizek, emphasizes that capitalism relies on this “overvaluation of belief”4 in order to keep populations complicit within its structure — it bets that even if we believe it is bad, we won’t take action to change it because belief itself goes far enough. Belief is a comfortable and safe way t... See more