Once upon a time, "authenticity" was supposed to be effortless. It was what you had before society corrupted you-your unfiltered self, unmediated by brands, algorithms, or the pressure to perform. But in the 21st century, authenticity has become not a state of being but a strategy. It is something we do, not something we are. From influencer captions declaring "no filter" to corporations marketing "real ingredients" and "real stories," authenticity has evolved into a kind of currency—one traded in the marketplace of attention, where the appearance of honesty often counts more than the truth itself.
This obsession with “being real” is paradoxically artificial. Social media, the supposed playground of self-expression, is in fact a stage for the carefully curated authentic. The blurry selfie, the “just woke up” look, the confessional caption about burnout—each is engineered to signal sincerity. In an economy of endless performance, authenticity has become the most persuasive mask. It’s what media theorist Alice Marwick calls “calibrated amateurism”: a deliberate effort to appear spontaneous. The effect feels intimate and raw, even though it’s been rehearsed, filtered, and A/B tested for relatability.
The corporate world has learned this lesson well. Brands no longer sell perfection; they sell imperfection. Dove celebrates “real beauty.” Burger King boasts about “moldy Whoppers” to prove it doesn’t use preservatives. Even tech companies, those temples of the synthetic, insist on “real human connection” as their mission statement. The word “authentic” now appears so often in marketing that it has lost its original meaning—if it ever had one. What was once a moral or philosophical ideal has become an aesthetic, a look that can be packaged, priced, and sold back to us.
The performance of realness reshapes politics. No longer can voters tolerate polish; what they expect is "plain speaking." From populist rallies to grassroots campaigns, politicians gain trust not through expertise but by eliciting the appearance of being uncoached, projecting the illusion of "telling it like it is." It's given way to the politics of performative imperfection, where fumbling words, awkward gestures, and unscripted outbursts are less gaffes than gestures of authenticity. To appear too articulate, too well-prepared, is to risk seeming fake.
But perhaps nowhere is the cult of authenticity more intense than in personal identity. We're urged to "live our truth," "be ourselves," "show up as our authentic selves." Yet the constant imperative to be real can feel exhausting, even oppressive. The question "Who am I, really?" becomes an unrelenting project of self-branding. As authenticity becomes an expectation, it loses any of its spontaneity. The more we try to show that we are real, the less real we become.
At its core, this phenomenon reveals an anxiety about modern mediation. We are surrounded by screens, algorithms, and AI—technologies that make us question what’s real at all. Our craving for authenticity may be less about sincerity and more about reassurance: a desperate attempt to locate something stable in a world of simulations. The irony is that the more mediated our lives become, the more performative our authenticity must be to feel believable.
There's something oddly hopeful, however, in this performance of realness. It suggests that people still hunger for the connections, the moments that pierce the façade. Even if the authenticity we witness online is contrived, it points to a deeper desire to be seen and known, to escape the flattening effects of digital life. The performance may therefore not be a lie but a symptom—a way of signaling our shared search for the real in a world that feels increasingly unreal.
Ultimately, the cult of the authentic has less to say about truth than about longing. We perform realness not because we are fake but because we are afraid that authenticity might no longer exist without performance. Being real is an art form in a culture built on appearances. And perhaps, if we're honest, that's the most authentic thing of all.