The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America

Instead of making things, Klein argued, corporations shifted resources to managing their brands. Your Nike shoes might have slightly better build quality than some discount brand, but the difference in price is dictated by the status of the brand itself, not the actual product.

But then the City Authentic came to town and everything—from the buildings to the city government’s website—was reoriented to grab outsiders’ attention through the conspicuous deployment of authenticity peddling.

The result is an ironic twist of fate: the very thing that made the area popular to begin with is diluted by corporatization.

Another is to make them actually look and behave predictively unique. We see this forming online as entrepreneurs like Caroline Corrigan use hashtags not just to promote the store but to decide how it should look so it will be recognizable as something Brooklynites might want to go to.

Despite the best efforts of committed housing activists, much of the energy in this arena was absorbed into bourgeois consumer activism. A fetish for the gritty and the obscure was transmuted into delectable luxury goods.

Byrne is pointing to a change in the American landscape where postindustrial work can be done anywhere, and so places like Virgil must invent completely new reasons for people to stay. As you may have already guessed, small towns will turn to services, mass consumption, and cultural amenities as a new source of both tax revenue and a reason for exi

The second turn inward is to the self: changing not only what is hip but how capital finds (or makes) the next big thing. This double turn suggests that the City Authentic is much more than a gentrification scheme. It is also the setting for a psychological journey of self-actualization.

In To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov implores the reader to “inquire into how Facebook mediates the very conditions of authenticity, sometimes by erecting new barriers and constraints but, more often, by destroying them.”

We seek out authentic experiences because we want a break from modern drudgery and to experience something untouched by marketing and the profit motive. But because fulfillment of this desire is so valuable, our search for authenticity is “precorporated,” a word coined by the cultural theorist Mark Fisher to describe the “pre-emptive formatting and