we can never be truly authentic online

There is something freeing about removing your face from your online persona. It paradoxically makes you feel like you can be more authentic. This is a stretch of an analogy but just as psychedelics that facilitate ego death allow for a truer glimpse at your underlying psychology, untying your digital persona from your smiling LinkedIn photo allows... See more

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

Identity is contextual and, if we are to live, breathe, and grow, it has to remain contextual. The Internet of the “authentic self” — a loathsome, aberrant idea if there ever was one — is an exercise in slowly getting strangled by your past selves.

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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So: we have a desperate need for more authenticity these days. At the same time as performative measures are increasing in number.

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

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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.