DEEP FAKE

Deep Fake

Deep FakeTikTok Now, “Casual” Instagram, and the quest for authenticity

On September 15, 2022, TikTok announced the creation of “TikTok Now”—a new feature on the app’s homepage that will prompt users to post a ‘candid’ photo of themselves at a different moment every day. According to a statement released by the company, this not-sothinly veiled attempt to replicate the popular photo-sharing app “BeReal” was designed to “bring the authenticity of TikTok to a whole new creative experience.”

Even TikTok can’t deny the writing on the wall: At least when it comes to social media, “authenticity” is the new standard that Gen Z is chasing. Long gone are the days of preplanned Instagram themes, posting schedules, and the Millennial-pink ‘Instagram Aesthetic.’ In this new, supposedly more ‘authentic’ social media era, fans worship influencers for being ‘just-like-us’ and disparage celebrities for their un-relatability: Emma Chamberlain’s dark eye circles and crying selfies now reign supreme while the Kardashians have come under fire for photoshopping their classic glam shots. The mid-aughts ‘Indy Sleaze’ aesthetic is back— bringing with it the return of bootcut jeans, flash photography, messy makeup, cigarettes, and even irony itself (at least according to trend forecaster Sean Monahan). Whether you’re posting deep fried memes, ‘Being Real’ or carrying a disposable camera, the vibe shift is well underway, and TikTok doesn’t want to be left behind.

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BeReal, and presumably TikTok Now, certainly aren’t shy about demanding ‘authenticity’ from their users (Be REAL! Right NOW!). However, even without such direct instructions, users from across various platforms have been slowly gravitating towards more ‘authentic’ posting styles for the past several years.

For instance, 2020 lockdowns gave rise to the now ubiquitous Instagram ‘photo dump.’ These 10 picture carousels tend to be a hodgepodge of selfies, pictures with friends, sunsets, and blurry snapshots of random objects: funny road signs, chipped coffee mugs, literal garbage, you name it. The caption is generally something casual, yet vaguely contemplative. Maybe “life lately”—no capital letters. For some users, photo dumps are merely one element of the broader push to ‘make Instagram casual again’—a phrase which first rose to prominence on TikTok during the early months of the pandemic. Amongst its Gen Z proponents, this common refrain is a reference to the app’s earliest days, when it wasn’t uncommon to post red-eyed group shots, highly saturated selfies, and pictures of the spaghetti you ate for dinner last night. It implicitly assumes that the app’s first users in the early 2010s thought relatively little about how their content was going to be perceived—a belief with realistically little historical basis, but one certainly fueled by Gen Z’s general nostalgia for the mid-aughts (or maybe just the Instagram we remember from middle school). While the ‘casual’ Instagram movement might reference a largely imagined past, anything might seem more casual than the era of hyper-curation we’re just now crawling out of. The ring lights, the Facetune, the BBL’s—from at least 2015 onwards, social media users have been chasing an increasingly unrealistic set of beauty and posting standards. So at the very least, BeReal devotees and casual Instagram users seem desperate to escape this culture of perfectionism. They’re calling bullshit on like counts, on phony filters, on the pressure to conform. Instead, we’re meant to be casual. Be real. Be authentic.

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But have they succeeded?

“Reality TV is not reality,” concluded @ cozyakili in a December 2021 TikTok, referring to photo dumps and ‘casual’ Instagram. “It is attempting to convince the viewer that what they are watching is, in fact, real life, but it’s not.” As someone who’s more than once spent several hours trying to make a photo dump appear more ‘effortlessly cool,’ I’m inclined to agree. While BeReal is still the most popular app on the U.S. iOS App Store, for some members of Gen Z this enthusiasm has already begun to curdle. It’s becoming more and more common to see friends conveniently post a few hours ‘late,’ when they just so happen to be at a party, walking through an apple orchard, or scaling Mount Everest. Sooo unreal of them.

Try as we may, we can’t quite seem to act ‘casual’ on Instagram or ‘be real’ on BeReal. We can only pretend to be. ‘Casual’ Instagram hasn’t actually freed us from the pressure to perform. It’s merely given us a new, ‘too-coolto-care’ aesthetic to performatively replicate.

But you already knew that, didn’t you? After all, self-awareness is part of the aesthetic.

In fact, self-awareness might be closer to what we’re chasing than ‘authenticity’ when it really comes down to it. ‘Casual’ Instagram has become obsessively self-referential. If being ‘casual’ really means being ‘too-cool-to-care,’ then it seems only fitting that the most ‘casual’ posts and users have learned to poke fun at the fact that they’re even posting at all.

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In a viral (and immediately memeified) i-D article, Rayne Fisher-Quann identified an increasingly popular form of selfie-face: a distant, yet vaguely seductive glare that she fittingly names “the dissociative pout.” This alleged “duckface of a nihilistic age” often appears within what writer Amy Francobe has deemed the “meta-selfie.” While mirror selfies are nothing new, today’s most popular iterations tend to be, well, even more meta—users often contort their phones to show the act of taking the photo from behind, snap a selfie in their MacBook’s PhotoBooth, or even hold a physical camera. These ‘meta-selfies’ draw unique attention to the photo-taking process itself, creating a sharp contrast between the ‘self’ taking the selfie and the ‘self’ being showcased. I may be objectifying myself, but at least I’m aware—or as my pout suggests, at least I’m unhappy about it. In the same way, crying selfies or otherwise ‘embarrassing’ pictures offer a meta-comment about the absurdity of posting itself. Wouldn’t it be soo funny if I were to seriously post this? If I were to earnestly overshare my eye infection on social media? I’m not just performing, but overtly performing my performativity in order to let you know that I know I’m performing.

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At least for a certain subset of chronically online Zoomers, this distant, even ironic approach to posting has slowly become the default. It’s also the polar opposite of what we saw in the mid-2010s. In May of 2015, Kim Kardashian published Selfish, a picture-book collection of her favorite selfies. Despite the inevitable backlash she received, Kim’s ability to own the selfie—duckface and all—feels quite emblematic of the previous era’s general attitude towards social media curation. In fact, even just posting a #SelfieSunday back in the day required some level of earnest participation in the exercise of social media itself. Performance simply was the goal—take it or leave it.

Gen Z has by no means abandoned this desire to perform, but we do find it pretty cringey to commit to such performances. To post with anything that might resemble Millennial-level earnestness. No, the duck face was too sincere, too desperate, too humorless—too cloyingly performative. Instead, we post vaguely detached selfies, nihilistic captions, and ‘unpolished’ dumps somewhat begrudgingly, somewhat ironically—like we’re all supposed to know by now that Instagram is stupid and a sham. After all, if we’re desperate for authenticity but still utterly adverse to earnestness or even displays of outright optimism, we’re inevitably going to land on nihilism. Or at least the aesthetics of it.

While many Gen Z-ers may consider themselves more evolved than their cringey millennial counterparts, it probably goes without saying that the shift from Kim K to Emma Chamberlain as ‘It’ Girl hasn’t exactly been a breakthrough in terms of representation—both are white, thin, able-bodied, and conventionally attractive. And just like these representational shifts have been largely superficial, Gen Z hasn’t actually left performativity behind so much as we’ve doubled down on it. Today, the goal is no longer just to perform, but to let everyone know that you’re performing. And in this attempt to show how much we don’t care, we’re actively copping to the fact that we do. In the case of the meta-selfie, our obsession with proving this ‘authenticity’ has actually allowed the performance to permeate yet another layer—cannibalizing the actor in addition to the character we’ve chosen to portray.

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We often discuss authenticity as an issue of self-congruence: We want the freedom to let our outer self reflect our true inner-self. However, I’m struck by just how often these allegedly ‘authentic’ trends, such as the meta-selfie, paradoxically draw attention to my own split existence. To the fact that I am first and foremost a self conceiving of a different self. To how, on social media—as in real life—I can’t quite seem to observe the world straight through my own eyes. Instead, I’m perpetually looking down at an image of myself going through the world. It’s why I bring my New Yorker tote bag to the coffee shop, so I can seem mysterious and informed and Rory-Gilmore-esque. It’s why I took up running, because I liked the idea of being someone who runs. It’s why my childhood bedroom is still filled with half-filled journals, because when I was 10 (and then again when I was 11 and then again when I was 12) I decided that Clever Girls always keep a journal and that I would like to be Clever like them.

In order to know myself, I must first consume myself, as if I am not myself at all. I am perpetually conducting my own character study, writing and then performing my own narrative as fast as I am living it. And social media turns this vaguely annoying habit (or potentially unavoidable feature of consciousness) into something urgent, undeniable, and willful. Posting physically requires us to adopt the perspective of an outsider, to engage in an active form of self-surveillance.

On Instagram, I want to seem cool and enchanting and effortlessly ravishing. On BeReal, I want to seem funny and popular and oh-so-interesting. I authentically want to be authentic, but the fact that I want it so badly makes it impossible to approach the project without some level of premeditation. This desire is entirely antithetical to the idea that we can simply be as we are, in the moment that we are. I first must imagine the specific type of ‘authentic’ person I would like to become—someone cooler, more down to earth, less neurotic, more authentically ‘authentic’ than who I really am. So, when the BeReal notification sounds off, I might just switch my computer tab from my crowded email inbox to the readings for my Emily Dickinson seminar. Maybe that’s less authentic according to the BeReal purists, but it certainly makes me seem more interesting, which I authentically want to be. In fact, maybe there’s something even more authentic about my desire to perform this more coveted form of authenticity. Who am I if not someone who’s desperate to be and appear more interesting, more likable?

Whereas online, I’m fixated on lighting and angles and designing witty captions, offline, I’m picking up hobbies like props and wearing clothes like costumes (do these earrings seem like something a Cool English Major would wear?). I don’t have many draft tweets, but I am constantly filtering my own thoughts, attempting to be more profound and less self-centered and more romantic. Because to be a character rather than a ‘self’ is such a deeply seductive fantasy. Because offline, I’m not actually ‘real’ in a Girl Who Doesn’t Know She’s Beautiful type way, but in a way where I compulsively buy tank tops and I cry when my hair looks greasy and I sometimes forget to listen when other people talk. And when I fail to make eye contact, I’m afraid it’s not quite as endearing as a ‘dissociative pout,’ but off-putting and unattractive. And while offline I want to be liked so desperately, so urgently, social media allows me to pretend that I just don’t care at all.

Yes, The Girl Who Doesn’t Care What Anyone Thinks of Her is yet another character I can attempt to play. And even though I know it’s a sham, I’m also not quite ready to give up the act. To hope that one day, I could simply become a bit more one-dimensional—that my essence could be confined to the screen just like the girls in books are confined to the page. To hope that one day, I could actually become the type of girl I post as, a deliriously likable archetype, a heroine of my own creation. Someone who is exactly how she intends to be seen. Someone who I authentically want to be.

SARAH MCGRATH B'24 really hopes you like her.