Adam Pash

This post is about authenticity on the internet in relation to Horse_ebooks, twerk fail, 40 Days of Dating, and 300 Sandwiches.

The internet is having a fresh moment of discomfort with authenticity.

On Monday, Susan Orlean revealed the non-bot identity of Horse_ebooks — a two-million-follower popular Twitter account largely believed to be a bot — resulting in a cascade of troubled reactions and some extraordinary and thoughtful analysis.

Earlier this month, Jimmy Kimmel “tricked the internet” with an fake twerk fail video that grabbed some nine million views before Kimmel let everyone in on the joke.

Both Horse_ebooks and the twerk fail video had skeptics, but by and large they were assumed to be “real,” and their respective reveals got a lot of people very worked up.

The internet as a mass media machine is still pretty young, and I think much of the reason authenticity is still an issue is due to that newness. We’re by no means, for example, uncomfortable living in an authenticity gray area when it comes to things like reality TV. You don’t have to be a sophisticated viewer to understand that much of what you’re seeing on most reality TV is only real to the extent that the people are real (like, they’re using their real names) but that many of their interactions are scripted or manipulated to tell a story that’s not exactly real.

But reality TV is also a nicely demarcated genre (with sub-genres), so we can label and compartmentalize it with expectations that are consistent with its pseudo-authenticity. Head to YouTube, though, and you can find an abundance of “real” but uninteresting twerking videos; similarly, Horse_ebooks appeared to be a beacon of profound signal among the noise of its fellow Twitter bots.

I’ve gotten into small arguments about the extent to which authenticity should impact your enjoyment of the thing itself. In the twerking video, a real woman really caught on fire after twerking. (Ha?) The Horse’s word soup delivered profound moments of poetry, whether or not the ingredients were human- or machine-chosen.

I think it’s easy to identify why people would prefer that both were “real” — there’s something special about finding moments of order in chaos. It’s like experiencing creation second-hand. A YouTube search for twerking has an astounding 3,230,000 results. To most of people, 99% of them are noise. The joy is in discovering the transcendent video among the banal. (Not that I think Kimmel’s video was transcendent to begin with, but it was to a lot of people.) The thing is special because it is real. Because a moment of randomness created this thing. ¹

This genre isn’t reality TV, though. It’s essentially the America’s Funniest Home Videos genre. Kimmel’s twerk video was an America’s Funniest People video masquerading as AFV, and everyone knows AFP is fundamentally inferior to AFV.

But there is a reality TV corollary doing quite well on the internet at the moment. It exists in the form of attention-getting gambits like 40 Days of Dating and 300 Sandwiches. The former involved two friends/very successful graphic designers dating as an experiment for 40 days. The latter involves a woman who’s boyfriend tells her he’ll marry her if she makes him 300 sandwiches.

Both were taken seriously, as though they were actually real things that real people were doing for themselves or for art and not for the purpose of selling a movie or TV show, which 40 Days did quite successfully. That’s fine; the internet is a great place to get old media money spent on new media trends. ²

The 300 Sandwiches woman may not be so lucky, mostly because I think she miscalculated the reaction people would have to an absurdly regressive gimmick, but the intention is clear. She doesn’t truly believe that making sandwiches will get her a husband. Her straight-from-the-archives-of-Carrie-Bradshaw writing should make her intentions pretty clear:

Was our happily ever after as simple as making him a few sandwiches?

Great question! No, it’s not that simple! But you already knew that. Unless by “happily ever after” you meant “financial success through selling the rights to my list of sandwiches,” in which case, maybe. Your odds don’t look as good as 40 Days, but we also live in a world where Seth MacFarlane has 800 shows currently in production, so this might just work out for you.

Anyway, I’ve talked myself into a corner. I don’t have any grand takeaway. At a gut level, I’m completely convinced that authenticity matters, or at least clarity of authenticity. Like most people, I don’t like being duped. Years of working on the internet have also made me pretty cynical, so my initial assumption is that everything is fake until proven otherwise.

Then again, art doesn’t really care about my discomfort or my gut — or rather, it’s supposed to challenge my gut — and that’s to the benefit of everyone. So… I don’t know. Horse_ebooks is still fun to read. I’d probably watch a 40 Days of Dating movie because I like romantic comedies even though there are so few good ones. I can’t find much to like about Kimmel’s twerking (before or after the reveal) or 300 sandwiches.

Well, except that SATC line. That was pretty hilarious.