Countless people I’ve spoken to have said that they are craving “authenticity” on the internet. Everything looks like a performance, everyone is either selling something or building a brand, every piece of content is either an ad or an agenda, and everyone is faking expertise of one kind or another.

I’ve come to believe that we are all practitioners of the very hustle culture we eulogise and villainise in equal measure, of “fake it till you make it”, of “market yourself because no one else will”. No matter our intellectual views on the subjects, the simple act of being here makes us complicit in the culture we love to hate.

I’ve also come to accept with some humility that to be online is to seek validation. For your writing, achievements, choices, creativity, knowledge, interests… anything and everything. And that is okay, because most if not all of us have been wired and conditioned to be this way. Only a true stoic might be able to escape the travails of the internet, if at all, and modern society is not designed for such stoicism.

The trouble is that intrinsically, none of us decide to log in for validation. In our minds and hearts, we just want to “express” ourselves, “share” our thoughts and life, and hopefully find our tribe or “community”. Socialis animal after all.

Extrinsically, however, we still serve the common condition of performance-begets-validation. All the life’s a circus, and we are its clowns.

And so, as we recognise the new needs of internet culture — the craving for “authenticity” — it is natural for new content (performance) formats to emerge. Formats that feel more raw, more analog, more personal. It doesn’t make us more authentic. But it makes for a splendid performance of authenticity.

The simple truth is that the internet is the last place anyone should log into to seek “authenticity”. The search for authenticity on the internet itself is quite inauthentic. Why do you seek that which you do not live? Accept the purpose of the place and use it for your gains — social, personal, creative, financial, spiritual — whatever your needs may be. You are free to perform “authenticity” because it is very in right now or invent a whole new direction if you dare, but never forget your role in all of this: to entertain and to be entertained.