How to be authentic in the 2020s?
In this decade of AI-repeated content, how can I be original and authentic? Is it even possible anymore? Is it even worthwhile?
We really need to have this conversation. Or at least I really need to have it with myself.
Before I give you my $0.02 on how to be authentic, let’s deal with this question:
What does it mean to be authentic?
Isn’t everything always already a copy of everything else?
Didn’t the greatest artists of all time s̶t̶e̶a̶l̶ …borrow from other great artists (and from unsung artists too)?
Besides, isn’t it a creative act — perhaps even an authentic act — to plagiarize someone’s work to such a high level that it goes undetected?
That was the central idea in Orson Welles’ final film, F for Fake. A masterclass in mixed-media storytelling and an exposé of the magic of copying and recopying. Watch it. Watch it. Watch it.
Steve Reich, the celebrated American “minimalist” music composer, started out working with tape splicing in the early 1960s.
What’s tape splicing? Cutting a piece from an audio tape reel and sticking it to another piece.
Reich experimented with sound loops. Recording sounds. Re-ordering the sequences. Bending their time signatures. Creating new rhythms from drab compositions.
Which brings me to André Breton and automatic writing. Not really. I just like some of his poetry!
The human brain functions through a system of feedback loops, processing inputs to produce desired outputs.
We are living, breathing data ecosystems, constantly receiving, processing, and sending out information. We are quantum photocopiers, never content in our machine-like shells, but always worrying about the original ground. The ground before the ground. The bang before the big bang.
I digress…or do I? Isn’t digression precisely the point I’m making here? If we zoom in too closely on authenticity and originality, we find pixelation and incompleteness. Authenticity is in many ways the expression of incompleteness.
If you make something new. Truly new. It’s often the case that you don’t know how new it is, or that it’s even new at all. It takes the eye of another, to see in your creation the potential for expansion, and slippage, and digression, and so the cycle of forms appearing and disappearing goes on.
Death and rebirth.
There is something cyclical in the nature of authenticity. What it means to be authentic is a byproduct of the technology of the day.
What was deemed authentic yesterday is not necessarily authentic today.
Walter Benjamin, in his essay of 1935, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” pinpointed the fading “aura” of authenticity in classical art, a shift in value and meaning from art for the few and by the few, to art for the many and by the many. The old order, the old “aura”, was being extinguished by the mechanical whirlwind of photography and film — arts of repetition, arts of the people.
Authenticity is like water. Flowing, ebbying, shapeshifting, but from mountain top to river mouth, it is still substance, still matter. How we view that substance, depends on the time and place, and the means through which we view it. It is never guaranteed to be eternal. The source could one day dry up.
But in so far as there is still is a source and a ground for our human projects, then how can I be authentic in the 2020s?
Should I write the world’s best AI prompt?
Should I live in a van down by the river?
Should I read Plato in ancient Greek?
Should I pretend to speak many different languages and post clips of my “skills” on YouTube?
Should I play the game, behind the game, behind the game…
The authentic answer is that I don’t know.
The inauthentic answer is that you should do any or all of the following:
- Immerse yourself in art, reading, science, philosophy etc.
- Express yourself honestly. Like Bruce Lee said. Be true to yourself. Brutally honest. That takes courage.
- Tell other people to f**k off with their expectations. Or more politely, tell yourself not to think too much about other people’s expectations.
- Exhaust yourself at something. Write until your wrist gives in. Walk until you drop. Dance until you cower.
- Speak to yourself. A lot. In front of the mirror. Prince wrote the song “Cream” in front of the mirror. Particularly the line that goes:
Everything you do is success (Oooh-ooh-ooh)
Make the rules (Rules)
Then break them all ’cause you are the best
- Express yourself in one way or another.
- Don’t be afraid of the long haul. S**t takes time to ferment.
- Be deliberately inauthentic for a day.
- Tell people like me to stick authenticity up your tailpipe.
- Don’t be authentic, and be proud of it.
- You are amazing, but you probably don’t deserve it. 💯
