A brilliant and necessary essay by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy:
Being a legitimate self now requires one to be publicly identifiable, authentic and, increasingly, fully authenticated. What began as a celebration of individual uniqueness that avidly encouraged the production of digital evidence is evolving into an elaborate system of verification that will treat any trace as a potentially suspect record. As fake versions of ourselves start to circulate, we may soon find ourselves caught in endless cycles of proving and defending the reality of our own existence, submitting ourselves more and more to a machinery of institutionalised scepticism that would have repulsed the early internet’s champions of identity play and experimentation.
And:
Individuals equipped with the capacity to search the network and query large language model (LLM) oracles, and in possession of the self-confidence and the means to broadcast their findings, tend to become an authoritative source of opinion. At least that is how it feels to them. We can also understand why knowledge produced in this manner is often so emotionally charged. The more people invest in researching and developing their own understanding, the more their pursuit of knowledge transforms into a form of personal revelation, where everyone is both seeker and interpreter of their own truth. What began as an exercise in independent reasoning becomes a matter of belief, belief defended all the more passionately because it seems to have been self-discovered rather than externally given.