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objectivism is popular cause 95% of us think we’re the top 5% smartest

so life is a performance. yes, we choose our role moment to moment, and yes it would be disingenuous to say that our choices are really limitless. being human and herd animals we are limited but what we feel is the limit of what others expect of us.

but that’s a tangent though. life is a performance, and as it is a performance there is a certain quality to it that we call authenticity. it’s hard to pin down, but i ran across a few things that got me to thinking about it

so let’s start by talking about alt-sex cause people love alt-sex or so i’m told. at the defcon jeopardy game (drunk social event for hackers) there was a girl there whose job was to basically dress up like a dom and hit people who answer incorrectly. she (and all the previous incarnations of her) did a great job, people had fun, cheering was had, but at the same time it was clear that she wasn’t a domina, not really, and i was wondering about why exactly.

it’s not a question in context in this case, i’m not speaking of attempting to subdue a room full of boisterous drunks, i’m talking about the reaction i had as she was still walking in before hand. it was one where the instant reaction was  ”aww, sweetie, i know what you’re going for and you certainly dressed the part, but you’re doing it all wrong. no idea how, but you are”

the dom thing isn’t attire or any physical action, in the end it’s something that’s an immediate emotional reaction. you either instantly understand upon seeing the person, or you don’t. if they don’t broadcast this authenticity in the first moment, there is no way to sort of back up and try again.

i guess i don’t mean in the first moment, but in the first moment it’s “turned on”. it is a performance and an act. keep in mind that those words don’t mean it’s “fake” to me, just that it is something we consciously choose to do. it’s fake only in the sense as our performance of being students, teachers, parents, or children is fake just because it’s possible for us to theoretically not act that way.

and i’m not saying that this is about some magical quality that comes from being in a culture. that’s stupid. it is absolutely possible to fake the performance with enough authenticity to make it real to anyone, but you would find that as you do so, you would no longer be faking it. yes, it’s catch-22ish. as soon as you pretend it well enough, you’re no longer pretending.

example 2: i was at a show not too long ago, 3 bands played. 2 of them were ‘normal’ to me, 1 of them the singer and frontman never felt like one. he dressed like a frontman, he spoke one, he sang into the mic, but at no point did i believe it. again, the authenticity wasn’t broadcast.

this is something i’m a bit hypersensitive to now that i’m fronting the band for real. the live show is a double performance, the band pretending to be the band, and the audience pretending to be the audience. if the singer can’t act like a band, soon the audience will feel stupid acting like an audience. there’s words that we use for it that vary from genre to genre, ‘energy’ being a common one, ‘feeling it’ is another, ‘getting us’, whatever. in the end it’s ‘we believed your performance, you believed ours, and we chose to have fun tonight’

another example: nerd core. yes, i’m taking, you kicking and screaming, from bdsm to geek rappers. let it go.

two rappers: mc chris, and mc plus+

mc chris:

mc++:

(what the hell, we don’t get pics of the girl dom but we get two nerd dudes?)

life’s a bitch, deal with it. btw, i originally wrote “pasty white dudes” but having googled him i now realize that mc plus+ isn’t very pasty. thanks for making me lose a great phrase.

so here’s the thing. i believe mc chris. and i don’t mean that i take what he says literally since that would include believing he owns a batmobile with a mcdonald’s inside, but the authenticity of his performance is there for me. i’m saying that when he talks about being a geek, i emotionally relate to him. i don’t feel it from mc plus+. and i’m not questioning mc plus+’s street cred, inasmuch as that term can possibly apply to someone who not only never claims to spend time on the streets but in fact claims to never leave their bedroom. i really believe he is a geek in real life, but his performance of being a geek doesn’t feel authentic.

“how can you possibly come across inauthentic at being yourself?”. because yourself is an act. because this requires performing a swagger and not just being geeky. and because there is more to this bravado than simply stating it and having the balls to hold a mic in front of a crowd of people, and that something is enjoying it to the point where you forget you’re only pretending to be enjoying it.

fourth and last example, this guy:

tim minchin performing “if i didn’t have you”, at the secret policeman’s ball.

btw, that’s officially my favorite love song of all time now.

there’s a geek culture thing to this song, like him trying to explain the word special as he’s using it, those 3 lines have more honesty in them than pretty much all other love songs combined. not just in what he’s saying (cause for all i know whitney will in fact always love you and is just as truthful), but in how honest his performance of it is. it’s someone who first screws up by saying his girlfriend/wife isn’t special, then tries to dig himself out, then realizes that even more importantly he’s now being ambiguous about what he meant by the word ‘special’ and the best way to explain that is with statistical analysis.

this post probably would here go on to start talking about dimitri martin and his palindrome, and then finish on comparing the comics smbb and “the warehouse comic”, but at this point i finished showering and stopped pondering this.

oh, and also something about how our ability to detect authenticity being in part our exposure to the role at hand. i’m positive i have a different standard of authenticity of a domina than 99% of defcon, probably 95% one way, and 4% the other way. or thereabouts.

here’s a hacker jeopardy pic in either case:

the phrase “hey, nice ____” really seems to mean “oh hey, i just noticed you have ____. i was just thinking earlier that i would like to have ____ and you reminded me”

most recent was me taking my burning man bike onto an elevator. the thing is dirty, the chain looks like it was processed through a horse, there’s duct tape holding the left gear shift together, and the thing is a $30 bike to begin with. a random guy on the elevator looks at it and says “nice bike man”.

no it isn’t. a cursory glance would tell you it’s not a nice bike in it’s current state, however a similar cursory glance at you leads me to think that perhaps you were a person who was just thinking that biking sounds like a good idea, what with gas prices and exercise and all.

i have similar attitude to people who say “nice tattoos”. i think it’s more often than not a mental follow up to “oh hey, i sort of want tattoos and you look similar to what i’d be shooting for, image wise”.

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apparently today is “over-analysis of harmless societal rote performances”

one of the people interviewed for the Helvetica movie mentions that he thinks that the democratization of design is going to end the concept of “eras”, concepts like 60s being the era of modernism, 70s were a backlash, 90s were the grunge, etc. the idea of designers as a closed culture, one that shares influences, and all know what the others are doing, is going to be made obsolete as millions of people start teaching themselves the processes, going into it with no knowledge of the past, and very willing to simply trial+error until they get something that appeals to them

i want agree and disagree. on one hand we do still see trends, things like the rounded corners of the first wave of web2.0, which implies that simple hivemindedness can duplicate the effects of single points of distribution and design monoculturalism. on the other hand, how long did that trend last? one, maybe two years? and what percentage of the world was affected? it seems relevant to me, but a disproportionate amount of my design exposure comes from websites. that whole fad was probably not even a blip in the actual design world

i talked about the same phenomenon showing up in audio and music culture. i’m not sure if it will be possible for a genre, a culture, to start and grow into an actual world phenomenon starting from now. there simply might be too many people speaking at the same time for anyone to be heard.

counter-example: dubstep. counter-counter-example: dubstep. yes it’s a genre that is clearly different and clearly new, but on the other hand it hasn’t grown a visual culture, it isn’t growing very quickly, and i don’t think it has lasting power in the sense that the things it came from (jungle, dub) have, did, and do.

not that it really matters much to the average person. we will have helvetica corporate brands and 4 person guitar rock on radio, and the average person will be perfectly ok with that, because really, why shouldn’t they. you can’t worry about every damn detail of your life 24/7.