In the age of AI, they say, that's the only way. Be more of your most real self.

But what does that even mean? In the context of a medium that, more often than not, rewards conformity over originality. That houses a mob with wifi acting as the Gestapo over who is deemed real and who is fake.

I have a love-hate relationship with social media. When I was in high school, Facebook was still a place where the feed was full of pictures shot at awkward angles during a house party the night before. You'd find yourself tagged in one and wish for nothing more than to sink into a hole in the ground because, by your estimates, you look horrible on there, and what if your crush sees this?

In hindsight, it was still preferable to the algorithmic feeds' fascist approach to what's considered beauty nowadays. At least most of the people back then, who'd see that picture, had already seen me in real life, from potentially even less flattering angles (and also from better ones).

Perhaps those images back then were more authentic, shot just to commemorate another booze-fuelled night in a home alone/ We weren't as much doing it for the gaze of strangers online, but largely for the crowd that was there. The scale was smaller, the image less concerned with generating lots of engagement.

There's a chance that nostalgia blurs my view, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who berates the lost promise these networks once held. Did they have to turn into a panopticon, where each of us is prisoner and guard simultaneously?

The advice to be more authentic is hardly new. It is a standard for building one's own brand -- when have we started to accept this is just the way it has to be? -- although the same advice is followed by the one to be consistent, pick one's niche etc.

Which makes it incoherent with what it'd mean to truly be oneself. As Emerson reminds us: "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."

Remember Be real? I do, but only because I found its premise dubious and the behavior it led to telling of our desire to portray ourselves well. It was a short-lived social media app that nudged users to take pictures with the front and back cameras in that exact moment, showing their most real moments, picked at random.

It caught some users on the toilet (real), but quickly led to them modifying their behavior. It didn't help that the app later allowed people to re-take, and therefore killed its own stated goal. It became just like any other social media app, where people modified their real-life behavior to show off their lives as more glamorous, more interesting than they might have been—a highly curated selection.

We have that already, be real gave us nothing new, therefore it faded into obsolescence.

What does it even mean to be real? To be authentic on these platforms? Are we not all playing a role on the big stage?

It's rather ironic that authenticity has been turned into something we judge others by on a platform that, let's face it, always has a performative aspect to it. We self-censor and edit our thoughts before posting.

We should all be aware and intuitively grasp that the way to gain the most attention is not to be our most true self, but to carefully cherry-pick the niche we fit in, and if necessary pivot to whatever is currently loved by the algo (labubus, dubai chocolate, other weird food trends).

The feeds don't care about us being real to our inner self, they care about what gets clicks. Add our human crowd mentality, and what you get is hugely successful influencers whose only personality is consumption and pretty privilege.

"The price for attention is assimilation."

Ashley Viola

Brands love it. There's nothing better than a creator who does not have a stance or stand for much besides looking good, as long as their audience gobbles up those referral links.

It's easy to blame the system — I'll never shut up about the downsides of commodification of the self when asked — but that's letting ourselves get off the hook a bit too easily. We're complicit whenever we lay eyes on it. Whenever we request that others be more as we want them to be.

"The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity."

Lydia Tar in the movie Tar

We live in a world where everything is marketing, and selling out is not frowned upon; it has become the norm. We shrug and get on with our lives.

"Marketing has taken the place of creation in the same way that conforming to the algorithmic feed has taken the place of creative self-expression"

Naomi Klein in Doppelganger

Occasionally, though, people wake up to the uncanny slumber induced by the filters, and it dawns on them that what's been rewarded is not to their liking.

Take the outrage at New York influencers, all going to Pilates in their expensive Lululemon uniform, carrying a Matcha Latte in one hand, and donning their effortless clean-girl no make-up make-up.

After one TikToker pointed out that these influencers were just plain boring, slowly but surely more jumped onto this, sharing the same discomfort with how what is supposed to be a medium to display one's uniqueness has done the complete opposite of giving us a bunch of clones of the same person.

Do these girls really love Pilates? Do they really look like that naturally, or is this one of those cases of thousands spent every month on their effortless beauty?

It's anyone's guess, and the whole filler and plastic surgery epidemic warrants a whole other essay, just so much, isn't it dystopian that we let a filter tell us how to fix our face to look like a better version of ourselves?

I wonder, what if you stripped these people of the attention? What's the self underneath? Hiding behind the aesthetics and products bought to hide what might be a lack of personality.

Many successful influencers are a good example of a well-commodified person, what Adorno and Horkheimer would describe as the liquidation of selfhood in the name of capitalist rationality.

Online, they're not a mere person, but a corporation of the self, a "corporace", as Grant, Dallmer, and Katherine establish in their Marxist influencer theory, laboring under precarious conditions.

I bet that the second clean girl aesthetics (problematic to begin with... but that's another story), and pilates fall out of favor, these influencers riding the trend waves will be the first to adjust their brand. They're the epitome of Fromm's marketing character. Who does not ask "Who am I?" but "Who do you want me to be?"

That's a danger we all face, not just online, in a world that loves to reduce us to data and indoctrinates us with a limited view of what success looks like. The danger of falling into performing for external validation instead of what the previous ethical dimension of authenticity called for.

"The performative fosters a detached form of self-awareness that potentially measures everything in terms of its strategic value for visibility, recognition and reward."

Psyche.co

It's what happens when we pursue goals because everyone says it's the thing to do. It's when we conform to the mainstream view on things, despite deep down thinking something else, just because we don't want to risk being ostracized. It happens when we base our entire identity on just one aspect —the one that brings external validation. When we can't but turn everything into content.

A common culprit is one's career. How many people do you know who'll mention it as one of the first things when you ask them to tell you about themselves?

It's great to love what you do, but it's not when it becomes the only thing you are.

A company does not care about the maintenance of a healthy self. A job can be lost in an instant. So can your standing as a thought leader, a person blessed by high view counts and engagement.

The question is: what's left then? What's the core of you, even when all that's stripped away?

More than 200 years ago, Kierkegaard warned of this tendency, of losing oneself in the finite, the easily definable, the concrete. He believed that the self held two poles in balance:

• the finite: your concrete circumstances, your past, your nationality, what is.

• the infinite: your imagination, capacity for freedom, the ability for a sense of transcendence, what could be

With personal brands and performative authenticity, we're treading the waters of collapse into the finite. Reducing ourselves to only what's easily validated.

We collapse into products, and that's somehow empowering (so neoliberalists tell us). Coining of our own pictures and thoughts on platforms like Zora is just another blatant example of it. You might reach all that fame and the achievements society will cheer, but you still feel empty.

You might feel compelled to go on one of those "finding yourself" trips, forgetting that, as Grizzly-kun teaches us in Polar Bear Cafe, that's not how it works.

The self is a constant construction, and if we don't fight against the collapse into the finite, we will end up paying the price: despair.

"You have lost yourself in the finite and the silence that follows is the sound of the infinite self, your true self, starving to death."

Kierkegaard

On a side note, what happened to the internet where we did not have to be ourselves? With the rise of verification requirements, we might be on the verge of losing that forever.

"All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can't survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel's mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It's impossible to have just one or the other. That's who we are. And that's Carneval. Schumann was able to see that many faces of humanity - the masks, and the real faces, because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap between the two."

Haruki Murakami - 1st Person Singular

Complement with Carneval played by Tiffany Poon.

Thanks for reading. 💚

Header: Empty conversations by abstractjity