"Your worst sin is that you've destroyed and betrayed yourself for the Algorithm." - Dostoevsky, 2024
This is the great, unspoken truth of our age. If you do not post, you do not exist. If you are not constantly reinforcing your presence, your relevance, your desirability, then you are slipping, shrinking, becoming unimportant. It is not enough to simply be anymore, you must be perceived, and preferably, admired.
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.
Gen Z and gen Alpha brought a raw, messy aesthetic to social media. Why does it feel as inauthentic as ever? | Eugene Healey
We are currently in the uncanny valley of online expression. “Be yourself” has gone from a well-meaning kindergarten encouragement to a genuine threat. If you look closely, behind every front-facing-camera-short-form-video is a person making extreme calculations about their own authenticity. After all, we want “CREATORS” who are “REAL” ! We want th
... See moreWe’re in a constant battle to find our own sense of identity within the overarching internal values of the scene we want to belong to, and on that journey we’re incentivized to continuously prove our allegiance (“fanship”) and how we’re ‘in the know’.