You're Fake: the Century of Fake
Sorry to tell you: you're fake.
But you have an excuse: if the 20th Century was the Century of the Self as Adam Curtis termed it; the 21st is the Century of Fake.
Curtis' thesis was based on concepts established by two thinkers: Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew.
Freud famously, if ambiguously defined human Self as an expression of Ego, Super Ego and Id. Ego is what we think we are and Super Ego, culturally received values; the Id, instinctive desires. Obviously Freud's theories were more complicated than that--but, for the time being, let's accept my simplification.
Bernays took Freud's notion of Conscious and Unconscious and commercialized it as the latest, trendiest "psychoanalytic science", suggesting that these notions could be exploited to control the "masses"; ie ordinary people. He wanted loads of cash from rich people to implement such manipulation--and he got it.
Whether or not, Bernays was really successful in his efforts; the notion of "self" caught on--not that it really had nothing to do with either Freud or Bernays, whose ideas were the expression of social evolution, driven by new technologies. They just articulated what people already thought.
The industrial revolution, which started long before Freud and Bernays were in nappies needed "individuals". In order to organize large groups of people in factories and armies and bureaucracies, tribal and familial bonds had to be weakened and human relationships atomized, with an emphasize on the singular "self". But human beings are social beings and, all by their lonesome, they hunger for affiliation.
On the one hand, the industrial revolution gave us the "individual"; on the other, new de-personalized and non-familial social groupings, that were really organized mobs which de-individuated their members, defining people in terms of roles.
General literacy offered access to information, which was important to the "progress" of technology and also indoctrination. This information was easily controlled: the "media" were the voice of the Few, not the Many.
So, the 20th Century "Self" was defined by technologies and in terms of the roles necessary to support those technologies.
Fast forward to the 21st Century and you have another technological revolution. New roles. New concepts of "Self".
The Internet is inherently anarchistic and democratic. Suddenly every kind of information, every idea, every opinion, every contradiction is almost instantly available.
That means the end of informational control as it was understood previously.. It also means the end of the 20th Century Self -- or rather its evolution into something different, which is...?
Fake.
Now, don't get me wrong. People are still people. The "Self" is not a natural construct, it is largely a confection of nurture--something learned. Underneath we are the same animal, driven by lust and hunger,
Complicated?
The philosopher Baudrillard thought so and devoted his life to writing about it.
]Although, good ol' Jean was a man of the 20th Century, he anticipated the development of "fake", not that he ever used the word.
In Baudrillard's theory, the Classical Period - by which he meant the Renaissance--was the Age of Counterfeit, in which kinds and princes and clerics were counterfeit gods. People aspired to be fictional beings.. Then came the Industrial Period-- the age of Simulacra -- where factories turned out endless copies of things -- and people became copies too, thanks to social and psychological atomization.
Counterfeit, Copy, Fake. Progress?
I have just insulted you by calling you fake....What is "fake"?
It something that is not authentic -- not genuine.
Do I mean a knockoff? I have a fake Rolex. It looks like a "real" Rolex. It tells the time just fine. It does everything a Rolex can. But it is not a Rolex -- and it won't last as long. It is cheap--but temporary.
Yet, these days, people don't want knockoffs. They want a genuine I phone -- or whatever. They don't really want something perceived as "cheap" but something "affordable" that looks expensive. And "temporary"? That's a hard one. We say we want things that are "reliable". We say we want "quality" but we accept the fact that things don't last, or the trends change. The average life of a "quality" consumer products is just about three years (if you're lucky). That just happens to be the about the time for a new generation of device to appear.
So today's "fake" is different from any simple notion of "counterfeit" or "copy". It's a subtle difference but important.
We see also that if "fake" is yin, yang is "genuine". But that is usually fake too.
As I said, "fake" is also you.
You emphasize your genuineness in terms of "identity". Your individuality. Your uniqueness. White, black, gay, straight, trans, old, young. But all these things are aspects of being. You are not just any of these things. And identity through this kind of social attribution is therefore inauthentic. That is: fake. Social attributions change. So...you are still cheap and temporary. OK, OK..."affordable" and soon obsolete.
In the 20th Century, we didn't use this word "fake" much, except for counterfeit art and money.
"Genuine" identity of any kind, personal, public, national was easier to project because information was much more controllable. Since, information was less accessible, it was hard to identify contradictions. While it was easier to lie, people believed there was a clear distinction between true and untrue, not to mention good and bad.
By the 21st century, "new" media had changed everything.
Suddenly, there was so much information and contradictions appeared quickly. Of course, governments, corporations and others still tried to control "narratives", a concept that replaced "facts" or the "truth". Lies and false information were soon revealed so everything was a story.
Previously, it took years to learn the truth of, say, the Korean War, one of America's earliest postwar wars of aggression or the Gulf of Tonkin lie, and so on. Today, things are revealed quickly despite the best efforts of the mainstream media.
As a result you have the Great Firewall of China, which of course doesn't really work. The "Western" approach is more complex and subtle-- and therefore effective. First, you have media monopolies controlled by a handful of people beholden to unequal and exploitative oligarchies.
While promoting the illusion of "freedom" they conduct a War on Truth, which is backed up by state persecution of whistle-blowers, disinformation programs and the like. Naturally, it is the mainstream media that insist their propaganda is genuine, and the truth is "fake".
Wikileaks' Assange languishes in detention in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But the truth still leaks.
As I have just said, people don't really want "fake" even though most of what they get really is "fake". They seek "genuine" depending on their belief systems (which, of course, are also "fake").
Donald Trump proved you could be successful by running against the mainstream narrative. It did not matter that his ideas were as silly as those of the Democrats -- he projected -- wait for it -- genuineness, not matter what the facts. He just said what he thought -- at the time he thought it. Yup, cheap and temporary = genuine.
Now Hillary was as big a liar as Trump, probably worse. But she was 20th Century in the sense that Obama was so she tried for facile consistency, which translates as "fake" against the background of evidence. Obama, although half "white" had black skin and he pushed his blackness, as a sign of authenticity, Fake again, but playing the race card is harder to argue with. He naturally did nothing for black people or their cause, just helped cover up Americans' endemic racism.
Fake, fake, fake.
Trump's triumph was Whitman's: "I am large, I contain multitudes". He had style without substance. Hillary had neither. Where Trump was just a buffoon; Hillary, a proven war criminal, was just despicable. Where Obama pushed "black identity" and Trump pushed "white male" identity. Hillary pushed "female identity" which didn't work that well since she was also trying to be ballsier than any male.
Fake news, fake politicians. And ...fake YOU! Especially if you self-identify as a "liberal" democrat.
In the Age of Fake, whither the True Believers? I have a former "friend", who recently wrote me that he would not read any article I posted on Facebook (Fakebook) unless he agreed with the headline.
Now, he thinks that he "thinks". He thinks he is educated and intelligent. He thinks he is "liberal". But he takes his
beliefs from other peoples. So is he any of these things. He calls me "his old friend" but we are not friends at all.
My "old friends" reality is what Baudrillard calls "hyper-reality" --meaning that his 'beliefs" refer to a reality that does not exist, a convenient form of denial in these troubled times. Such people fashion an identity, what used to be called and still is called a "Self". It is not a simple copy, however--it is customized, with off the shelf addons. But still fake. Cheap and temporary. So my "friend" does not think for himself. He takes on faith whatever the greatest purveyors of "fake news" -- WaPo and the NYT and CNN say. Fake, fake, fake. The real person died long ago. RIP.
As I said, it is all about technology.
With so much information, you get to choose your "truth". The assumption of relativity means that you don't have to analyze or fact check or parse or search or engage in dialetic. What you believe is right.
"Fake" is a word that you use for opinions that you disagree with. Are they really "fake"? You don't know because you don't bother to find out. You just that that Someone Else is pretending.
How many times have you heard someone dismiss your ideas with: "I bet you read that on the Internet". This is usually said with the unspoken thought "the Internet where you have to analyze and compare and figure out facts, rather than the mainstream media which give you a simple -- cheap and temporary-- answer.
Technology is about convenience. Ancient man could dig up tubers with a stick. But a shovel made it a lot easier.
Reality, however, is not always convenient, and not always consistent, which is why we have hyper-reality --basically anything we want. Electronic LSD. Virtuality? You don't need real world things.
We can see some of the results in low rates of sex worldwide -- and (fortunately) declining populations. Smartphones and "social" media and porn mean fewer face to face, touchy feely relationships, which are ever so inconvenient and don't yield the immediate satisfaction of an emoji or a good wank. The best relationships must be online. Just swipe right or left.
Fake people. Fake relationships. BUT.... with Facebook, Whatsapp, Line...you get to tailor your image -- safe from getting caught out until those sexted photos get published. Never, ever publish sexy photos of the REAL YOU! Learn to fake it.
When the world comes to an end, it won't matter. Cheap and temporary. And anyway, it never was.
But you have an excuse: if the 20th Century was the Century of the Self as Adam Curtis termed it; the 21st is the Century of Fake.
Curtis' thesis was based on concepts established by two thinkers: Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew.
Freud famously, if ambiguously defined human Self as an expression of Ego, Super Ego and Id. Ego is what we think we are and Super Ego, culturally received values; the Id, instinctive desires. Obviously Freud's theories were more complicated than that--but, for the time being, let's accept my simplification.
Bernays took Freud's notion of Conscious and Unconscious and commercialized it as the latest, trendiest "psychoanalytic science", suggesting that these notions could be exploited to control the "masses"; ie ordinary people. He wanted loads of cash from rich people to implement such manipulation--and he got it.
Whether or not, Bernays was really successful in his efforts; the notion of "self" caught on--not that it really had nothing to do with either Freud or Bernays, whose ideas were the expression of social evolution, driven by new technologies. They just articulated what people already thought.
The industrial revolution, which started long before Freud and Bernays were in nappies needed "individuals". In order to organize large groups of people in factories and armies and bureaucracies, tribal and familial bonds had to be weakened and human relationships atomized, with an emphasize on the singular "self". But human beings are social beings and, all by their lonesome, they hunger for affiliation.
On the one hand, the industrial revolution gave us the "individual"; on the other, new de-personalized and non-familial social groupings, that were really organized mobs which de-individuated their members, defining people in terms of roles.
General literacy offered access to information, which was important to the "progress" of technology and also indoctrination. This information was easily controlled: the "media" were the voice of the Few, not the Many.
So, the 20th Century "Self" was defined by technologies and in terms of the roles necessary to support those technologies.
Fast forward to the 21st Century and you have another technological revolution. New roles. New concepts of "Self".
The Internet is inherently anarchistic and democratic. Suddenly every kind of information, every idea, every opinion, every contradiction is almost instantly available.
That means the end of informational control as it was understood previously.. It also means the end of the 20th Century Self -- or rather its evolution into something different, which is...?
Fake.
Now, don't get me wrong. People are still people. The "Self" is not a natural construct, it is largely a confection of nurture--something learned. Underneath we are the same animal, driven by lust and hunger,
Complicated?
The philosopher Baudrillard thought so and devoted his life to writing about it.
]Although, good ol' Jean was a man of the 20th Century, he anticipated the development of "fake", not that he ever used the word.
In Baudrillard's theory, the Classical Period - by which he meant the Renaissance--was the Age of Counterfeit, in which kinds and princes and clerics were counterfeit gods. People aspired to be fictional beings.. Then came the Industrial Period-- the age of Simulacra -- where factories turned out endless copies of things -- and people became copies too, thanks to social and psychological atomization.
Counterfeit, Copy, Fake. Progress?
I have just insulted you by calling you fake....What is "fake"?
It something that is not authentic -- not genuine.
Do I mean a knockoff? I have a fake Rolex. It looks like a "real" Rolex. It tells the time just fine. It does everything a Rolex can. But it is not a Rolex -- and it won't last as long. It is cheap--but temporary.
Yet, these days, people don't want knockoffs. They want a genuine I phone -- or whatever. They don't really want something perceived as "cheap" but something "affordable" that looks expensive. And "temporary"? That's a hard one. We say we want things that are "reliable". We say we want "quality" but we accept the fact that things don't last, or the trends change. The average life of a "quality" consumer products is just about three years (if you're lucky). That just happens to be the about the time for a new generation of device to appear.
So today's "fake" is different from any simple notion of "counterfeit" or "copy". It's a subtle difference but important.
We see also that if "fake" is yin, yang is "genuine". But that is usually fake too.
As I said, "fake" is also you.
You emphasize your genuineness in terms of "identity". Your individuality. Your uniqueness. White, black, gay, straight, trans, old, young. But all these things are aspects of being. You are not just any of these things. And identity through this kind of social attribution is therefore inauthentic. That is: fake. Social attributions change. So...you are still cheap and temporary. OK, OK..."affordable" and soon obsolete.
In the 20th Century, we didn't use this word "fake" much, except for counterfeit art and money.
"Genuine" identity of any kind, personal, public, national was easier to project because information was much more controllable. Since, information was less accessible, it was hard to identify contradictions. While it was easier to lie, people believed there was a clear distinction between true and untrue, not to mention good and bad.
By the 21st century, "new" media had changed everything.
Suddenly, there was so much information and contradictions appeared quickly. Of course, governments, corporations and others still tried to control "narratives", a concept that replaced "facts" or the "truth". Lies and false information were soon revealed so everything was a story.
Previously, it took years to learn the truth of, say, the Korean War, one of America's earliest postwar wars of aggression or the Gulf of Tonkin lie, and so on. Today, things are revealed quickly despite the best efforts of the mainstream media.
As a result you have the Great Firewall of China, which of course doesn't really work. The "Western" approach is more complex and subtle-- and therefore effective. First, you have media monopolies controlled by a handful of people beholden to unequal and exploitative oligarchies.
While promoting the illusion of "freedom" they conduct a War on Truth, which is backed up by state persecution of whistle-blowers, disinformation programs and the like. Naturally, it is the mainstream media that insist their propaganda is genuine, and the truth is "fake".
Wikileaks' Assange languishes in detention in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But the truth still leaks.
As I have just said, people don't really want "fake" even though most of what they get really is "fake". They seek "genuine" depending on their belief systems (which, of course, are also "fake").
Donald Trump proved you could be successful by running against the mainstream narrative. It did not matter that his ideas were as silly as those of the Democrats -- he projected -- wait for it -- genuineness, not matter what the facts. He just said what he thought -- at the time he thought it. Yup, cheap and temporary = genuine.
Now Hillary was as big a liar as Trump, probably worse. But she was 20th Century in the sense that Obama was so she tried for facile consistency, which translates as "fake" against the background of evidence. Obama, although half "white" had black skin and he pushed his blackness, as a sign of authenticity, Fake again, but playing the race card is harder to argue with. He naturally did nothing for black people or their cause, just helped cover up Americans' endemic racism.
Fake, fake, fake.
Trump's triumph was Whitman's: "I am large, I contain multitudes". He had style without substance. Hillary had neither. Where Trump was just a buffoon; Hillary, a proven war criminal, was just despicable. Where Obama pushed "black identity" and Trump pushed "white male" identity. Hillary pushed "female identity" which didn't work that well since she was also trying to be ballsier than any male.
Fake news, fake politicians. And ...fake YOU! Especially if you self-identify as a "liberal" democrat.In the Age of Fake, whither the True Believers? I have a former "friend", who recently wrote me that he would not read any article I posted on Facebook (Fakebook) unless he agreed with the headline.
Now, he thinks that he "thinks". He thinks he is educated and intelligent. He thinks he is "liberal". But he takes his
beliefs from other peoples. So is he any of these things. He calls me "his old friend" but we are not friends at all.
My "old friends" reality is what Baudrillard calls "hyper-reality" --meaning that his 'beliefs" refer to a reality that does not exist, a convenient form of denial in these troubled times. Such people fashion an identity, what used to be called and still is called a "Self". It is not a simple copy, however--it is customized, with off the shelf addons. But still fake. Cheap and temporary. So my "friend" does not think for himself. He takes on faith whatever the greatest purveyors of "fake news" -- WaPo and the NYT and CNN say. Fake, fake, fake. The real person died long ago. RIP.
As I said, it is all about technology.
With so much information, you get to choose your "truth". The assumption of relativity means that you don't have to analyze or fact check or parse or search or engage in dialetic. What you believe is right.
"Fake" is a word that you use for opinions that you disagree with. Are they really "fake"? You don't know because you don't bother to find out. You just that that Someone Else is pretending.
How many times have you heard someone dismiss your ideas with: "I bet you read that on the Internet". This is usually said with the unspoken thought "the Internet where you have to analyze and compare and figure out facts, rather than the mainstream media which give you a simple -- cheap and temporary-- answer.
Technology is about convenience. Ancient man could dig up tubers with a stick. But a shovel made it a lot easier.
Reality, however, is not always convenient, and not always consistent, which is why we have hyper-reality --basically anything we want. Electronic LSD. Virtuality? You don't need real world things.
We can see some of the results in low rates of sex worldwide -- and (fortunately) declining populations. Smartphones and "social" media and porn mean fewer face to face, touchy feely relationships, which are ever so inconvenient and don't yield the immediate satisfaction of an emoji or a good wank. The best relationships must be online. Just swipe right or left.
Fake people. Fake relationships. BUT.... with Facebook, Whatsapp, Line...you get to tailor your image -- safe from getting caught out until those sexted photos get published. Never, ever publish sexy photos of the REAL YOU! Learn to fake it.
When the world comes to an end, it won't matter. Cheap and temporary. And anyway, it never was.
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