The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America

Under modernity, each person must be a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: completely unique but predictably so—a piece that is different from all those around it but still able to fit into a larger picture. We have more artifacts, both material and digital, than ever with which to enact our identities, yet we can never seem capable of staying unique for lon

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

Whereas authenticity peddling relies on the predictably unique, memes of place use very common symbols in unpredictable ways.

While the anthropological definition is certainly less overtly racist and elitist, it is clear today that this approach can and did open the door for a pernicious kind of cultural commodification—that is, a set of conditions wherein the collective heritage of a neighborhood, city, people, or nation is commodified via tourism or the selling of goods

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

The structural speculators at the helm of the growth machine are largely concerned with how well the city acts as a tradeable commodity (exchange value) and less interested in how it performs as a place to live (use value).

But just because the cosmopolitan liberal cultural trend generally comes before the reactionary political achievement does not mean the former causes the latter. In fact, there is much stronger evidence to suggest both are popular cultural reactions to the three contradictions of rent.

The theory is very elegant: Elites agree that growth is good, so all effort must be put into assuring each parcel of the city has reached its “highest and best use” and extracting the profit that comes with it. Because the most powerful people in any given city agree that growth is good, planning, zoning, and government in general aid in the arrang

Being regarded as authentic is a function of others’ evaluation of your performance. But if everything is in upheaval, then those others doing the evaluating have few points of reference. Because the network society is global in character, identity is constantly being contested and threatened from all sides. The freedom of the paranoid, just like t