"Just be yourself!" It’s the guidance given to people throughout all modern times. Whether it’s dating advice, a job interview, first day of school, or anything involving being social, the long-held wisdom is that it’s best to be honest and true; be yourself; don’t be fake. The advice is well-meaning. It’s useful to not pretend or lie or be fake, because you can’t keep that lie up forever. Eventually you’ll be found out and it will be harder to dig yourself out of that mess. The follow-up to this advice was usually, "Never apologize for being yourself."
This is what is also termed "authenticity" – you presenting your authentic self to the world. Authenticity is also used a lot for high-profile people. Do they walk the walk or just talk the talk? (Not sure if that’s a proper saying, but it fits here). And if these people don’t present a level of authenticity, the accusation is "fakeness". "They’re so fake!" And that was considered pretty brutal, because if you can’t be respected, why are you a high-profile person, unless your goal is infamy?
When the Internet came about, there was a complete epidemic of inauthenticity. where people could say and do things they would never normally do just because the Internet gave them anonymity. There was a lot of hand-wringing and worry about how normally upstanding citizens were behaving badly on the Internet and what can we do about it. Oddly, the advice, "just be yourself" was not really offered. Because, in the online world, people can take on a persona, and that persona is being authentic to itself. It’s just that the persona is a terrible person. To quote Billy Joel, "They’re the faces of a stranger, but we love to try them on." It’s like role-playing, just as a villain.
Well, I hate to say it, but all that analysis and explanation turned out to be wrong. It’s not role-playing. It was always about the anonymity, and it was always the authenticity. What’s different now is that the online world has become the real world, where anonymity doesn’t matter anymore.
if you look around there are a lot of people out there that are taking the advice of "just be yourself" and doing exactly that. They’re being horrible people. And they also listened to the secondary advice, "never apologize for being yourself" and that has actually become a greater mantra for how they live their lives. If you’re offended, that’s a you problem. Go ahead and try and cancel me, I have more supporters that cheer on my behavior than you do. Even if I don’t have more supporters, who needs you and your kind anyway?
When the stigma of being shunned and cast out means nothing, and there is no benefit to being a polite citizen of the world, where do we go as a society? What greater motivation can there be when fear of isolation means nothing? And within that question is the upsetting knowledge that it was the Internet that caused it all. What started as an opportunity for bad people to act out their inner desires individually, lead to a discovery of other like-minded malcontents. And after years of testing the boundaries, they’ve all decided they have numbers large enough that isolation means nothing. So, where do we go from here?
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