The notion of individual authenticity was once aligned with the idea of a motivating inner truth. Today, “authenticity” is enmeshed with social media and external signaling: to be who you project to be.
We are constantly working on “our self” to align with the “data self”: The projected media self is not internally generated but externally manufactured, integrated, and then re-transmitted as an increasingly curated, co-evolved, drift into a commodity version of the “wisdom of crowds.”
The new authenticity is complete subsumption; to be owned is non-contradictory, and to have no internal truth is never to betray yourself but always to be a victim when the crowd turns.