You Are Not Immune To Authenticity,

Hans-Georg Moeller's Profilicity, and two case studies in how we're probably heading already past it.

There are many variations of “You are not immune to propaganda” or “You are not immune to influencing” or “You are not immune to echo chambers”. I wish here to propose just one more to the pile:

“You are not immune to authenticity.”

Sounds like a bit of a flip, but hang on with me. I’m not going talk about what is or isn’t directly authentic but the nature of authenticity intersecting with social-profiles and culture. We’ll go through two case studies, both similar but from different angles with wildly different executions.

Trust me, it’ll be interesting because at least for my self-interest, it scratches at all my complaints with Moeller’s Profilicity and why I’ve been falling back to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens a lot recently. I cannot help to think that somehow Profilicity is already out-dated in a sense just as the Internet speedran the human development between destruction of teleology, as well as the Sincerity-Authenticity-Profilicity cycle.

To get what I mean, I’ll take Moeller’s example of Profilicity from the start of his book¹. The case of Jiayang Fan, a New Yorker writer covering a Meitu party in China. In the article, she criticises filtered photos, selfie obsessions, classical narcissism and even gives a story of a brave old lady who didn’t fit in as the wife of a janitor who was removed from the party. She decries Chinese culture for lacking in authenticity because of all of this so-called death of natural beauty, while having a curated photo for her position at the New Yorker. Moeller identifies that the not-quite-reality profile picture matches her profile with the other New Yorker writers in articles, and all of her other social media profiles follow suit with curated, specially picked photos to present. The Chinese photo-filters however, are used in the same way makeup is, it has become natural and authentic in a way because the mask-that-is-not-a-mask is apparent. Yet the journalist looking down upon this and trying to call for the older sincerity of the lady, is acting in the global, accelerated, more implicit way of Profilicity. Her curation of her profile is more underhanded, more artificial but also more naturally-come-about than authenticity.  

As Moeller says:

“The very calls to preserve our supposed authenticity only show that the age of authenticity has lost its credibility.”²

THE PLUS SIZED “INFLUENCER”

1)

Influencer is white, an heiress, blonde with blue eyes. Goes to Disney all the time. She’s been crafted from a child to be the perfect influencer. She’s got that generic voice, she’s got the TV marketing cadence like she went through puberty on TV-shopping-pills. She trained the pet man in her life to know the exact angles and present fashion items on a little spinning tray.

Hell, she’s even obese but got the #girlboss energy. The “delulu” and prop little dog. She exudes all the semiotic value a lazy marketing scout could want could want beyond the big follower numbers. If I posted a picture of her during the Gamergate era, she’d probably be considered one of the cancers killing gaming. She’s just missing the raw dog neoliberalism feminism, which is probably considered a positive sign value nowadays anyway. Somewhere out there, she has a bunch of girls shit talking her in the same way she epically owns mean girls on the running trail.

You are not immune to being a mean girl, by the way.

She is exactly what Moeller would expect of a modern influencer profile. She’s the got the perfect “profile”. She’s flexible with whatever sponsorship she’s on because she’s never really sponsoring her own product. She self-differentiates so much that she can go from makeup hun, to Disney queen to running maestro fit lady within a year or so. Nothing is rooted in self, because whatever her “true-self” is, is contradictory. It teeters on a Lacanian cultural schizophrenia, except it’s not really towards capital, or trends, or anything really. Chaos, but not quite chaos-chaos. Structured chaos. Will-through-chaos. Chaos magician chaos. Probably what we need more of.

See this contradiction is different than the contradictions Moeller puts out. Such as “Jiayang Fan simulates authenticity as a counterpart”, Influencer represents the reversal; She is not sincere, since her mental and social identity is not coherently locked into the sincere role enactment – but she believes in that roleplaying the beautiful, wanted influencer that she will gain this sincere identity. To their supposed inauthenticity; She’s not authentic in a “mask that is no mask” sense, in the social going your own path sense – but can’t she keep spilling out that it relies on others, it still requires inauthentic feedback. Moeller makes use of second-order-ontology from Nicklas Luhman, where we interact with everything modern times not from the root experience, but 2 or 3 different “frames” or layers from it.

This is perhaps, my issue with Profilicity as a concept. What of someone who works in the opposite way? An ontological reverse.  If your real experience is the false profile?

2)

But you see, Influencer, is rather unsuccessful.

Not in the money way. She has followers, she has money and gets sponsorships. In the influencing way. In the convincing you way. Her identity is flexible because her sponsorships haveto  keep jumping between different areas, and she often even conflates things to show faux-sponsorships. The only people that seem to buy-in are companies that skim a profile check and that’s it.  Quick and dirty semiotic checks at worse or just a numbers game at best.

The type of deal where people will sit around rationalising it “Why do gym/fitness companies sponsor her when she has terrible form, bad gait?!” with an answer of “Oh see, fat people sit on gym memberships…” This nonsense rationalising is only for people to mean girl sign-profile themselves all the way down.

But that’s not Influencer.

See, Moeller understands there is a paradox within as Profilicity operates in “social validation feedback loops”³ as being artificial cum natural. He compares it to fashion, what is cool can become uncool in months, what once was fashionable becomes natural, it’s this artificial to natural paradox. Profile validity is fragile and unstable, schizophrenic, in a post-modern sense. Bad gait or running form is untouchable because it’s a type of sign-value pragmatism that is all the rage in abstracted HR departments filled with nothing-doers. This naturality on the constructed profile can then live happily, whether unified or not.

But that’s not Influencer.

Tess Holiday, the famous fat-model who had fits about beach snaps fought with this then navigated it with ease. When her profile was desecrated by unflattering, unfiltered photos with cellulite ripples through her legs she called upon others – to throw sign value attacks at trolls, to talk of selling what real fat bodies look like. She turned what should’ve been a crack in the profile to a reinforcement of her activist, strong plus-sized model image. She even tries to steal from authenticities’ buckets by saying everyone knows that professional fashion shoots look special anyway. This sort of distance claim, the sort of pretending of authenticity while missing the authentic is what the New Yorker journalist forgot above. In the Chinese authentic mask-that-is-not-a-mask culture, everyone knows and plays along with fake, airbrushed photos. This, as Moeller notes as uniquely western, nostalgia for authenticity. She’s plays off of that nostalgia to reinforce her profile, a clever squeeze through the cracks. Airbrushing debates will never go anyway when it’s gone from sword to shield.

But it’s still not Influencer

Ash Fatlip is a “infinifat” influencer who has shockingly good influencer and activism powers. She weaves stories, gets the same sponsorships as our Influencer – but keeps them. Instead of taking it to the haters, instead she acts sort of litigious in nature. Akin to a politician’s skill at worming through cracks to turn it into semiotic attacks on the opponents side: “Why is it okay to speak of plus-size bodies like they are public property”. She keeps this distance, her projection is always a projection. It is curated, and filled with infographs to obscure anything that can fall through. She only shows herself when she needs to in targeted ways, and never pretends to be anything beyond that. Her profile is so hard of a projection that it could walk and talk exactly like her, except it doesn’t hurt as much or gets as many weird looks etc. Anyone with a bit of reasoning could probably cut through what she posts in these infographics or see the bizarreness of her issues being her size, but you aren’t going read that. It ‘aint for you. She not only completely protects, curates and sustains her profile, but keeps it validated with targeted precision.

But that, yet again, isn’t Influencer

Hell, she doesn’t even have a unique profile from others. Where did the narcissism go? She’s a classical fashion model with that anonymous profile that is still the perfect profile, y’know.

3)

This is where Profilicity struggles for me. It’s easy to throw about “Identity consists not in representation of a role or a true self but in having a profile that is different from other profiles. “⁴ or talk of simulation or sign values. Influencer in her wonderful stumbling through this capitalistic hellscape of profiles, stumbles upon a type of will. She is neither onion nor peach. She has no role nor mask combined with a schizophrenic profile⁵. The best in which I can say is that she has her ontology that Moeller gets from his media philosophy background inverted. Ash and Tess understand that they are obese and plays ball with it with their respective areas. Both drunk their own koolaid so hard that the projection is backed by sheer powerful straight psychology. Influencer, however, is not grounding her profile in anything, but forcing reality to bend to her profile in such an explicit way compared to other ladies. Simply, that by making this profile, somehow, this will become her. If she projects the perfect profile, then she’ll become the profile perfect. 

You can map a lot of the weird contradictions, like the cpap machine, as a back and forth. She knew it was a bad-profile thing, and an ugly thing. So when she tires of living with it, she reinvents it as “cpap cuties” or uses AI to turn it into a cool astronaut picture for Instagram. She’s more Matrix than the Matrix, she can’t tell if she’s in the map or the original city but she’s smacking that ground saying this is now the real city.

That’s the ultimate split here. The other bigger ladies turn Profilicity into profit, ego and validation. They fight and play in the world of multiple-frames of ontology. Influencer is trying to make Profilicity reality, to make the first frame, the raw experience the profile. In Huizinga’s terms, she gets to edit top down, from culture to the play. That’s a lot to stake, because Profilicity can survive with constant reinforcement from peers and validation, but can’t really stake reality against that. Reality is supposed to be a pin, or at least as much as you want to ignore sceptics and philosophy of mind friends.

See, Moeller never really talks a lot about “stake”, but loves to talk about the outcome of stake. What I mean is, you stake your profile when you dump a hot take. Your chips are your sign value badges and then you bet them against the public. “Virtue Signalling” is when you buy in some more chips before you bust out and make a shitty apology video. Those PR crisis companies are supposed to manage how much you staked.

This doesn’t apply to Influencer, she has nothing to profile-stake, because she wants the profile to real for her first. When she reacts to trolls, or “shitty” comments (a lot of the times they aren’t even deliberately hateful, just things like “maybe no cottage cheese in the pie?” ); When the old lady on her running trail made a comment, she snapped because they stake their profile onto her reality which you can’t stake. All of it borderline fantastical, and delusion or narcissism gets thrown around but she’s just telling you to stake instead. However, when she has no stake back to give the old lady, she flunks. When she meets the old lady again and makes another Instagram video, and the lady doesn’t recognise her or doesn’t say anything Influencer can only be shitty back because her profile didn’t turn into reality.

This drinking of their own kool-aid instead of waiting for your kool-aid to be done fermenting offers a different approach to Profilicity. A strange version of Oprah’s “Manifesting” or whatever that old trend was. Fake it until you make it works in sincerity because the role churns your identity into usefulness. Faking it works in authenticity because people will believe the masks and cover for their own mask. In Profilicity it works because that’s how you get the sign value machine churning or create the Fyre Festival. Doesn’t entirely work when your ontology is the wrong way, when you need reality to “fake it” for you.

Perhaps it’s closer to Nick Land joking about the end goal of capitalism is to make everyone autistic.

What’s fascinating though, is she’s never immune to her own authenticity, she’s never immune to her own true self. People look for authenticity, even if it’s an authentic-adjacent profile that’s curated. An authentic profile is not the same as an authentic person.

Probably fucking sucks to live through that distinction though.

But hey, Disney will still treat you like a princess after your fifth go on the buffet.

The Awareness Youtuber “Cheerleader”

1)

Cheerleader is beautiful, blonde, and perfect in everyone way. Former competitive dancer, former cheerleader, Masters in Education. Perfect minimalism life with a backdrop and plant pot straight out of a stock background. She made her start doing fashion reselling tips, living the fashionista, consuming money going husband-is-away-but-I-have-independence profile perfectly.

Strikes gold on her YouTube when she starts to do Anti-Multi-Level-Marketing videos. She does do her research, she seems super authentic, everyone responds well. Educated, beautiful, strikes and cuts through all the MLM hun bullshit like a fedora tipper atheist slicing through apologia arguments. Conveniently she begins to phase out her older profile, and leans towards her the background in education. She virtuel signals all the correct things in her video.

Even when her “Horror Stories” trips up and she gets someone sending in a fake story it’s a moment for education. When another horror story lady complains about a hun-doctor telling her she’ll get Diabetes, but then uses an obfuscated medical term for diabetes, Cheerleader can skip past it with educational talks of believing persons of colour and attacks on indigenous people. You know she’s just so goddamn smart she will teach you – by reading the dictionary definition from google – about white saviourism.

Can’t moan, I listen to her in the background and the people who listen to her videos are probably not going to know the 10 different variations of the ‘beetus. Her tears are real at stories, she’s articulate and doesn’t scream. On the face of it, it’s as sincere or authentic (which ever word you want to use on reddit.) as a youtuber ever can be while keeping degrees of privacy. Does her research y’know? She’s not like, whatever the fuck happened with illumnaughty or that one dude with the funny voice who read MLM reddit posts then got depression.

…then she starts a new series called “Influencer Insanity”, and It’s popular…

2)

Episode one, the pilot, was inspiration for this because it was so uniquely completely alienating. The mask had slipped a couple times before, her defence and ultra rationalisation of makeup for kid dancers caught me off guard but that just makes her more authentic right? The mask-that-is-not-mask rational youtuber mode at its finest, most purest and distilled.

This ‘aint no authenticity son.

In the video Cheerleader posts “restock” culture reels from Instagram. She indulges them as real or real-enough to make Baudrillard spin a bit more, despite also pointing out that some are ASMR focused, deliberately MORE artificial. Waxing lyrically about how “nobody lives like this!” and how she’s educating people – poor people as she points out – that this is fake, that nobody really lives like this! You might think your are inadequate! All those people commenting might not know this! No trust in those women to make a choice.

She shows some ice cube tray person with loads of shitty extra syrups and such. This influencer, bless her heart, is trying to cram as much drop-ship bait into the video as humanly possible. Even her tongs have gloves on. She’s max selling in a way that old TV shoppers WISH they could’ve done (when they actually had to still be authentic and sell a mask that is not a mask). It’s equivalent to the Chinese netizens who trust each other on their fake filters and photos, the sort of natural artifice that becomes at least somewhat more sincere than the TV guy yelling about the slapchop. They’ve transcended past Luhman’s thoughts on advertising as the saviour for truth by being obviously fake while pretending to be true. It’s just fake.

Yeah, it’s easy to overestimate the average intelligence, but it’s also easy to trust the average intelligence.

The comments are all talking about how they’d fall for this because they too were poor and feel inadequate, none are really saying that Cheerleader would’ve saved them, more that they are in agreement that yes, they are also no longer poor and have good money sense and don’t believe. Second, are those who decry their own profiles about how inadequate they now feel, because they’ve been primed and sign-value attacked (accidentally) by being put in the category of “you probably fell for this.” This is where Profilicity pokes its nose over the fence and reveals itself just in the same way Moeller said it does the for New Yorker journalist: “In this way, the critics reproduce and proliferate the very same profilic conditions that they critique.” All of this is staking and trading profile sign values, coming from the educator in the correct ones.

But Cheerleader, she’s smart. She’s got a masters in education y’know?

This is where Profilicity also starts to bit fun for me. To paraphrase Moeller talking on Luhman on advertising: “Advertising died on the cross for the media’s truth” – by which he means that advertising being deliberately false, gives “truth” to the other media. Or at least in this case, “inauthentic ASMR consumer selling videos, died on the cross so a mummy influencer can be seen as true”

Moeller says authenticity isn’t credible anymore because it’s falling short, but perhaps so is having the perfect profile. Which probably means we’ve gone past that era. Autistic stimming videos, but now for consumers and capitalism.

3)

At the end of the video, Cheerleader falls into this trap. Into a specifically beyond-Profilicity-type of trap that can only exist in Profilicity. When you move forward, the thing behind you becomes nostalgically real. Especially when you are a curated, smart, educated profile whose is above such things – or a deep south American who feels that he fought for sincere roles and not whatever the fashion “authenticity” his son is LARPING in.  The “facebook society” nostalgia that Moeller says.

So Cheerleader, at the end offers some guidance. She doesn’t really, instead she advertises some Instagram that she believes are authentic. They’re still selling you Chinese factory crap, but these have better sign value. Minimalism, anti-consumption, over-elaborate storage containers for your Costco shopping. She keeps repeating nothing but sign value platitudes about “anti-consumerism” and asceticism with no real regard to reality, roles or utility. Everything is white, with a couple green plants. Everything is completely curated to look like the perfect – but still consuming – profiles. Trash, in sense that I wrote about here, but from an ontological sign perspective; in comparison to a cabinet passed down that is still functional, long lasting and made with craft that might not be IKEA minimalist consuming. There’s never storage for nick-nacks or sentimental things; things that go beyond the test of time that one keeps for years. Just consumables and children’s consumables. It’s alienating to someone who has an ugly ass hand knitted bag of knick knacks next to their computer and funny magnets holding up loved ones’ notes or drawings.

In a sincere world, this part of the video would be educational: How to get these items without going through the Instagram lady; how to use Ali Express; how to help your friends and family get brandless versions of items. To teach your sisters how to reverse image search so you don’t have go through Instagram. To educate, as Cheerleader constantly reminds us she has background in, via sincere roles that she’s playing as a teacher. You can say she’s just an entertainer, but that’s not an authoritative enough sign value to pass these judgements.  

In an authentic world, she could educate about how to set up your own drop shipping, or how to replicate these stores. She would educate by peeling back the mask that these people were and show how “inauthentic” it was, and use this to then achieve the education that the sincere world could have.

In the current state, the only education is that you should be anti-consumer, not believe anyone lives like this, and if you have the sign value of “poor” try to hide it with minimalism consuming. It loops, it loops, it loops, it----

Conclusion

Profilicity and authenticity, funnily enough, sit in the same place that scientology does. Which is probably a comparison that Moeller would strike me down for, but I mean it in a slippery slope way. In a validation way. In the same way Cheerleader talks about “love bombing”, in the same way that Influencer talks about “concern trolling”. Validation shots.

An old therapist named Theramin Trees specialising in religious indoctrination and cults, once talked about the slippery slope that leads to an educated, smart and well off man falling in with the cult of scientology. They get him through the door with unrelated classes, friendship and general eases to the stress of modern life. Slowly it escalates with more and more horsecrap until you are piloted by alien spirits and divorced from everyone else. In such, authenticity in the world of Profilicity becomes a sort of painkiller addiction that gets dangerously close to the brain. Moeller notes that Profilicity is artificial, becomes natural, then cycles with social validation. One drip feeds themselves bit of authenticity to try affirm their profile, but eventually authenticity begins to expand the cracks. Influencer struggles because authenticity is a bridge that doesn’t let the Huizinga order be reversed fully. You can’t peel a peach like an onion all the way down when you stand as a lone will. Cheerleader has gone so far into only ever knowing Profilicity that the former age, that was already deceptive, seems correct and anything lower than that worse. Accidentally destroying some of her watchers profiles by drip feeding them authenticity into their profiles’ cracks.

And people will gravitate towards the cracks, no matter how one tries to block, cover or even pretend to not have them.

It's what makes me struggle with Profilicity, or to even think we have accelerated beyond it. Moeller makes consistent use of the word “accelerated”, but I cannot help but to think we’re already past Profilicity. Going into something weirder, more insidious where the profiles are maintained not directly by social value but something else, more systematic. Something where instead of profile trying to replicate authenticity, that there is a call back to sincerity, but ontologically the wrong way. I bring up Huizinga’s Homo Ludens a lot because I find it fascinating to consider what happens when you reverse his sincere order. When culture dictates ritual dictates rules dictates play. A lot of my ethics work recently has been dissecting the layer of “capital” out of the Huizinga chain to try return to bottom up (play to role to ritual to culture) instead of the culture-war bonfire on this fake-added layer.

Both examples go far beyond many of Moeller’s examples for explicit Profilicity, and gets too caught up in wider, systemic control via profiles (and wokeism). Which is needed, but the great thing about the machine plugging wires into false profiles, is that not everyone really consents to the wires, and reality means wires get itchy, painful and in the way.

This is where Influencer sits, gleefully drinking alcohol and mania to bury her authenticity because her profile isn’t making her reality “sincere”. Authenticity is supposed to die on the cross to make your profile believable, not die to make your reality “sincere”. Her culture is supposed to dictate her rituals and eventually her play to be the ideal of how she wants to be. Her audience who try be nice, or helpful or even share their own ideas are shot down because they aren’t playing along with her profile, but because they are playing along with her sincere reality.

And so despite Cheerleader’s repeated remarks about Christianity, and religious abuse in MLMs, she was quiet and refused to add her own commentary about an MLM horror story which wasn’t about MLMs (just the tactics are similar) to someone who had a bad religious mission. Convenient information about missions are left out, the comments are split between moaning about their (voluntary) mission or thanking Cheerleader for being respectful. She had to “stake” her authenticity and profile by telling the story to her audience against the sincere roles off camera of her family and religious friends.

Funny then that, the profile that cracks at authenticity, ceases at sincerity.

It’s almost like somehow above the clouds, we end up touching the ground.

1. You and Your Profile P.3

2. Ibid 10

3. Ibid 32

4. Ibid 133

5. From Rosemont’s Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion that Moeller references repeatedly in response to sincerity. Onion is a person formed by layers of social roles and responsibilities - a peach is a mask with a solid core inside.