The Authenticity Hoax Quotes

“The object of their desire, the “essential” core of life, is something called authenticity, and finding the authentic has become the foremost spiritual quest of our time. It is a quest fraught with difficulty, as it takes place at the intersection of some of our culture’s most controversial issues, including environmentalism and the market economy, personal identity and the consumer culture, and artistic expression and the meaning of life.”
― Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves

“The sharpest version of the argument that the Internet is bad for democracy comes from Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. In recent years, Sunstein has been fussing about the rise of what he calls the “Daily Me,” the way the Internet permits highly personalized and customized information feeds that guarantee that you will be confronted only with topics that interest you; they screen out those that may bore, anger, or annoy you. As Sunstein sees it, the Daily Me harms democracy because of a phenomenon called group polarization: when like-minded people find themselves speaking only with one another, they get into a cycle of ideological reinforcement where they end up endorsing positions far more extreme than the ones they started with.”
― Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves