Thread by @drvolts

As a Gen-Xer, it is wild to contemplate how much the notion of "selling out" dominated our minds & youth culture ... and then how quickly that all went away. The very notion sounds like a charming anachronism now. aarongilbreath.substack.com/p/selling-out

The idea of being authentic, of resisting the distorting influence of commerce ... do Kids These Days even think about things that way any more? I feel like media & youth culture have become so utterly ubiquitous that it's senseless to imagine anything outside them.

Seems like the best you can do these days to resist all that stuff is just to bury yourself in layer upon layer of irony -- to be ironically distanced from *everything*, as self-defense.

Hm, I didn't get this across well. Gonna try again & then go for a walk.

It was still possible for a young Gen-Xer to imagine "the system" -- commerce driven by media, image & packaged identity -- as something ... distinct. Something one could theoretically operate outside of.

The idea was, when you're outside of The System, you're making "real" art that's true to yourself, but when you get sucked into it, you inevitably end up worried about how you look, who's watching, what's selling. You end up oriented toward that rather than yer authentic self.

What's changed, seems to me, is that The System metastasized & ate everything. EVERYTHING is on camera now, everything is broadcast, everything is crafted for an audience. Everything is image & representation & identity now.

If you grow up in a world where, from your first consciousness, you are a series of avatars, a series of constructed identities in various online spaces, the whole notion of some "true, authentic" self outside of all that just starts to sound kind of weird & anachronistic.

You can be part of various obscure online subcultures, but even within those, you're a constructed identity, an avatar talking to avatars. It's representation all the way down -- there's no "real" core. (This is sounding negative, but I don't necessarily mean it to be.)

So in that milieu, wherein one is simply the uneasy sum of one's avatars, wherein everything one does is performance for some audience or other ... what do "authenticity" & "selling out" mean? Anything?

This is a real question, BTW. How do Kids These Days think about retaining some personal identity & integrity when basically their entirely world is a market & clicks/views are the currency? What does it mean to be "real" in that milieu?

This is definitely the root of it.

https://twitter.com/WestIsWestIs/status/1398394466390605825

Last attempt:

To GenX, "authenticity" basically connoted "how you act when people aren't watching."

But for Kids These Days, there is no such thing as "people not watching." Everything is broadcast; all of life is performed. So how do they think about authenticity now?

Related to the above 👆 aeon.co/essays/social-…