Are you genuine? Do you speak with your own voice? Do your opinions when voiced cause others to question their own? Or do you tend to echo pre-processed groupthink? Think too about your behaviour; your economic behaviour, do you tend to be more of a conformist, or an outlier?
I'm not a good consumer. I look at the adverts for expensive wristwatches on the back of The Economist with a sneer. The luxury goods industry will never prise money out of my wallet. I can walk around a shopping mall and feel zero desire to buy anything. The last shirts and trousers I bought myself were secondhand from the Sue Ryder charity shop in Warsaw. The only brands to which I am fiercely loyal are Loake (shoes) and Nikon (cameras). Levis have tumbled out of this group; they are no longer made to last many years like they used to be. Levi jeans have turned into single-season fast-fashion item. Leica cameras (I still have three old ones) have also fallen out of my favour; once the picture-taking instrument of choice for photo-reporters, today – I file them alongside luxury wristwatches. Overpriced trinkets for show-offs. Another is RayBan; once the producer of sunglasses for US aviators, Bausch + Lomb sold the brand to Luxottica; the product now has the 'RayBan' actually written on the fucking lens.
Our economy is not a scam designed by rich people to fleece the poor – it has merely turned out that way, the process driven by human behaviour, which is driven by our mammalian biology. The mindless competition to be rise up the status hierarchy. Our desire for status drives us. And so, clever marketing people have created brands that connote association with a high position on the status ladder.
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own" said Patrick McGooghan's iconic character in The Prisoner. Authenticity is finding your own way through life, rather than yielding to the behavioral expectations of the market.
Generation Z are said to seek authenticity; but I see too many Vans rucksacks and Nike, Adidas or New Balance trainers about their persons. How can you project status within your peer group by showing off how wealthy your parents are? Surely, the most admired character trait is determination, rather than a fortunate accident of birth? Develop your own style, regardless of what the posters, the cinema ads and the promotions have to sell you. It has happened before...
The punk generation sought to shock through authenticity. 'Street cred' was what it was all about; but the flame went out quickly. The zeitgeist of '77 was co-opted within months into a diluted form by corporate music and corporate fashion, returning to the business of shifting product to the kids.
Did the blues cease to be authentic once played on electric guitars? Could white musicians, who had never faced oppression in the Deep South, play authentic blues? Made it any sense to try? Who is the arbiter of all this anyway? Who is to deem what is, and what isn't authentic?
The opposite of authentic is artificial. Artifice. Running it past a focus group to sand off any rough edges. Finding the lowest common denominator. A beer that offends as few palates as possible, while delighting none. What does the algorithm have to say?
Authenticity has become a tourist product. Are Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Prague authentic – or modern-day recreations of faded authenticity brought back into sharp focus with a lick of paint, trinket shop and an ice-cream stall? Sadly, New Orleans has become just that; indeed, the US no longer draws me to revisit; the America my soul yearns for is long gone; dead neons, ghost signs, ghost towns.
Authenticity today is more likely to be found in the countryside than in the city. Hold the flower of a wild plant between your fingers – that's authentic. My cottagecore aesthetic. Unwashed, uncut, unfiltered.
A final point: Can AI generate authenticity? After all, large-language models have scraped the entire internet, so if it hadn't been there before – can it be created? Only out of something that was there already. Every street scene is described as 'vibrant' and 'bustling', the AI is unable to pour out any meaningful emotion into its prose.
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, if you can fake authenticity, you have got it made.
This time two years ago:
A dog day's night walk
This time three years ago:
Old soul, new challenge
This time four year ago:
What happened at Monks Wood
This time six years ago:
Loss, faith and consolation
This time eight years ago:
Summer's wasting away
This time nine years ago:
Warsaw remembers the PASTa building capture
This time ten years ago:
Drought. It was a dry summer.
This time 12 years ago:
Warsaw's ski slope at Szczęśliwice
This time 13 years ago:
On the road from Dobra, again
This time 14 years ago:
August storm, ul. Targowa
This time 15 years ago:
Warsaw Central's secret underground kebab factory
This time 16 years ago:
Cheap holidays in other people's misery
This time 17 years ago:
Steam welcomes us to Dobra
This time 18 years ago:
New houses appear in the fields by Zgorzała