Brianne Garcia

What we get in an “authentic” cultural product is still a simulacrum.

…The middle-class admiration for authenticity is predicated on the patronising condition that the little man shouldn’t get too big for his boots.

…The authenticity-obsessed want something to be real, but they’re on a hair trigger to cry foul if it seems too real to be true.

The cult of authenticity, in other words, begins from an assumption that most things are fake, and in doing so ensures that they will be.

No type of consumption – food, coffee, clothing, literature, film, pop culture – is safe from the “unexamined hunger for authentic culture”, which “can rapidly turn into a witch-hunt.”

Great read on our craving for authenticity in a time when the separation between IRL and everything else is murky plane, and not so much a defining line.