we can never be truly authentic online

I don’t believe in authenticity on the internet.

There’s this obsession with realness online. When I was working on Trust Exercise, and watching all these Beauty Secrets videos, I would see all these comments like, “she’s so real”. Which was funny to me, because it’s a Vogue video. It’s the most edited thing in the world. But we’re obsessed with

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Another corollary of blocking users’ feeds is that posting can start to feel like mere housekeeping – an obstacle to be cleared rather than a valuable form of self-expression in itself. This results in non-committal content – half-captured faces, blank computer screens, random window frames, empty dinner plates – which quickly gets boring. The... See more

Influencers who dedicate every waking moment to documenting their identity have no idea who they actually are. Women who post pictures of their faces from every angle and in every possible lighting hate how they look. Families who capture every moment of their perfect lives get caught in scandal after scandal. And still we keep falling for it: the... See more

Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It’s a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone’s clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic—this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor’s telling, everyone becomes a kind of

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I will never understand the amount of comments saying couple goals and how do I find this! to the most staged, rehearsed, insincere moments I’ve ever seen. I can’t get my head around applauding people who set up a camera in the corner to record themselves being romantic.

Sometimes it's harder, sometimes there are moments where you're like, man, I really wish I could escape this moment and go check Instagram or something, but instead I'm just going to sit here and my kid's crying and dinner's terrible because the kids are just being total jerks and I'm tired and not feeling great and my wife is upset because she's... See more

Authenticity brings us to avatars. This might seem a strange connection: aren’t avatars, by nature, inauthentic? After all, avatars entail being someone other than yourself. But for many people, avatars are a vessel for more authentic self-expression.

So put the camera down. Don’t document everything. Stop selling your life off so cheaply to strangers. Keep some things sacred. Let some memories fade and look back at them through fuzzy nostalgia instead of the cheap glare of an iPhone camera roll. Enjoy the fireworks.