The types of people that proudly call themselves “influencers,” and describe what they create merely as “content,” are so profoundly allergic to authenticity that it bewilders the mind.
Don’t believe me? Look no further than the usage of “unalive” in the modern lexicon.
The verb “unalive” became a thing because content creators (predominantly on YouTube) were being penalized by advertisers for talking about suicide and other heavy topics.
But if you’re flirting with the label “Drama YouTuber,” this puts you in a catch-22: The most sensational topics you can talk about today, which will get you the most views and therefore the most ad money, will also get flagged by automated systems if you say the word “suicide”.
So instead of not talking about those topics at all, you decide to do a lazy filter-evasion maneuver by using a replacement word so stupid it borders on ironic.
In isolation, this might be forgivable.
In aggregate, over many years and iterations, it becomes a calling card of the shallow, corporate sell-out behavior at every level of society.
It’s no longer just streamers and vloggers that use this lazy euphemism. The rot has spread to every subculture of every generation.
When you eventually hear someone in their 70’s say “unalive” without a tinge of irony in their voice, you might not think much of it, but it’s a little worrying.
Authenticity & The Internet
In information security, we talk a lot about authentication and authorization. Because these words are easily confused, they’re often abbreviated as “AuthN” and “AuthZ”, respectively. This confusion is exacerbated by “authentication” meaning both “signed with an identity you trust” and “integrity protected by Message Authentication Codes (MACs)” in different contexts.
Even if it’s not a formal security property, I would like to make the case for, at least in online cultures, placing a greater emphasis on valuing Authenticity (“AuthC”, following the above convention).
But to do that, I need to talk about a few topics that will make the kind of Hacker News commentators that complain about the furry art on my blog extremely uncomfortable.
“Furry? Cringe!”
As I’ve written about in previous blog posts, I get a modest amount of comments that are best classified as either “angry” or “disgusted” because I use a blue dhole as my online avatar.
(Art by Sophie)
When you actually listen to people who feel uncomfortable with furries, their reasons for feeling that way can often be distilled into a few rough categories:
- Furries are weird.
No argument there. But why is “weird” necessarily a bad thing? Who ever told you that was the case, and what arguments did they provide to justify their conclusion?
This sort of inquiry is often met with, “Well it’s just common sense!”
But is it really? If it’s so self-apparent, why can’t you explain it to me? - Thinly-veiled homophobia.
I wrote about the use of anti-furry rhetoric as a queerphobic dogwhistle many years ago (when I still wrote articles on Medium).
Fact: Most furries are LGBTQIA+.
Fact: Most of the anti-furry sentiment on the early Internet was motived by queerphobia, as SomethingAwful later admitted.
But it isn’t just homophobia. It’s also obliquely expressing a discomfort towards neurodivergent people (i.e., autistic people, who are also prevalent in furry). - Straight-up disinformation campaigns.
See also: The thoroughly debunked litterbox hoax.
This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list.
For example, I’ve heard from a few people over the years whose distaste for furries was the direct consequence of a personal bad experience with someone in the furry fandom, so they’d rather avoid interacting with it entirely.
Whatever the motivation, a lot of people see furries and project a sense of shame onto us. That’s what cringing is, after all.
Subtler Forms of Queerphobia
Much yarn has been spun about the larger cultural norms around the sexual roles of gay men. Namely, the belief that bottoms are somehow less masculine (and/or more shameful) than tops.
This manifests in a lot of Internet discourse, and culminates in a lot of jokes that at least rhyme with garden variety misogyny.
Inside the furry fandom, this dynamic is inverted: Bottoms (and, in BDSM terms, submissives) are significantly more prevalent than you might suspect.
Which actually makes sense: Furry is a sub-culture, after all.
However, even furries are not immune to stereotypes or gender roles.
A society that embraced the diversity of its populace, and the authenticity of the individuals that make it up, simply wouldn’t have this kind of emotional or cultural baggage associated with the role you take behind closed doors with other consenting adults.
We do not live in such a society. Instead, we as a whole are ruled by our baser instincts; especially fear.
Fear Of The Bark
I am a nerd who hacks alone
And when I’m reading the dark web
At night or trolling Hacker News
When the prose contains fangs
I sometimes feel my heart pangs
At fursonas’ barks and mewsFear of the bark, fear of the bark
I do not think it is possible for me to apologize enough to Iron Maiden for writing this parody.
I have a constant fear of art with fluffy ears
Fear of the bark, fear of the bark
I have a phobia that someone’s proudly queer
If you interrogate queerphobic beliefs for any significant length of time, you will always find an element of fear at its foundation. This is why these words are suffixed by a derivative of “phobos”–Greek for “fear”.
Straight people generally tend to assume that the receptive role in sex between men is less manly (and therefore the manlier person is always the top). When you ask why they assume this is the case, the obvious answer is because in heterosexual sex, the man is usually penetrating the woman. When you bring up pegging, they often get uncomfortable or wholesale reject the possibility of ever exploring it. When you ask why, they get indignant. They’ll describe such acts as either non-masculine or gay, and suggest they would feel humiliated if they ever practiced them.
You can talk in circles on these topics for hours and not get anywhere, of course. But the reason for the extreme negative reactions from some folks is simple: Fear.
Fear of not meeting the self-image they have in their own mind.
Fear of loss of social status for failing to meet an arbitrary masculine ideal.
The aversion to furries in often rooted to similar fears as queerphobia–namely, the loss of status associated with seeming unprofessional or perverse (depending on whatever preconceived notions the person has about furries and sexuality).
Fear is just one kind of incentive that has a profound impact on human behavior. Another powerful one is greed.
A person’s pursuit of money could be either or both of those things.
Insensitive Incentives
Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.
Some rich guy
Inauthentic behavior is almost always the result of the incentive structures that exist in our society. The prevalence of “unalive” as a euphemistic verb for committing suicide is just one example from recent history.
But consider also the existence of:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Spam emails
- Multi-Level Marketing schemes
- Motherfucking Casinos! And in recent years, sports betting.
These things only exist because of incentive structures found throughout society.
Do you think Google ever wanted the SEO marketing industry to be a thing? No, they just wanted to write a search engine that gave valuable results to its users, and then to sell ads. (And, eventually, ads basically became their entire existence.)
Whatever subtle thing about any system you design provides a slight economic utility will become an incentive, and if an incentive exists, you can be damn sure about how most people will behave.
Even if a particular individual might be hard to predict, there are a lot of suckers out there, and you can make up for one wise-ass in sheer volume.
This is why coordinated inauthentic behavior has been a thing for many years.
We cannot talk about coordinated inauthentic behavior without talking about slop.
Sloppy Woes
At its core, slop has always been with us in some form (e.g., spam), but the advent of Generative AI has made the problem significantly worse, as Kyle Hill pointed out about the science videos on YouTube.
So-called Artificial Intelligence, as realized today, is really just a bunch of linear algebra with a shiny coat of paint.
By itself, AI (even generative AI) isn’t inherently good or bad; it’s value-neutral. (It’s just math!) What makes it good or bad is how it’s used.
So consider this: What sort of person experiences glee at the prospect of using Generative AI to displace entire creative industries?
Certainly not someone who values authenticity.
The recent wave of memes rendered by OpenAI in “Studio Ghibli style”, despite Hayao Miyazaki saying about AI, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” really drives the point home: The most disrespectful, self-serving, inauthentic fuckwits are the ones most excited about AI.
You Can’t Spell AILMENT Without AI
It’s not that everyone that uses AI is a soulless fuckwit that wouldn’t know creativity if it cup-checked them. It’s that the sort of people in that category are overwhelmingly bullish on AI for entirely shallow and self-serving reasons.
However, there are terrible people that use AI to extremely harmful effects, such as generating a list of countries to tariff and accidentally including uninhabited islands.
AI is extremely attractive if you have a lot of wealth, and abhor having to pay wages.
AI is extremely attractive if you’re an imbecile that holds experts in the utmost contempt.
AI is extremely attractive if you’re a hostile adversary hoping to flood a nation’s populace with large volumes of bullshit and disinformation.
AI is extremely attractive if you’re a soulless, joyless husk of a human being.
There’s no wonder it’s so damn popular with the worst people you know.
If software eating the world was revenge of the nerds, then the advent of AI is revenge of the bullies.
It’s a real shame for the people who had legitimate academic interest in machine learning, and dedicated their lives to researching and developing this field to help humanity. Now they’re bunched in with the rest of the carnival.
Nor Any Drop To Drink
It probably seems rich, from a certain perspective, to blog about authenticity to an audience that largely does not know your legal name or even what you look like.
People that express surface-level gotcha responses to this post are the exact kind of gutless dipshit that yearn for the day the biggest boot (artificial superintelligence) arrives for them to lick.
The fact is, the people who read this blog are much closer to knowing how I really feel than most people that know my name/face but not my fursona. I argue that my blog exhibits a greater degree of authenticity than it would if I signed everything with the name on my government ID and didn’t include a fursona at all.
Choose Authenticity
It will become an increasingly uphill battle to find and curate online spaces that thrive on authenticity. I still think it’s worthwhile to do so.
Inauthentic behavior has been around since long before ChatGPT, but there’s no doubt it has been made worse in the years since.
The Hacker News crowd will continue to promote AI and suppress anti-AI sentiments. You can divine this from how pronounced AI is in their monthly “Who is Hiring?” thread.
Meanwhile, queer, kink, and furry spaces have largely (though not totally) ostracized the use of AI. These are, by no coincidence, also the same communities that understand and value consent–unlike the tech industry at large.
As the powers that be promise to continue drowning us in AI slop while accelerating climate change, while maintaining control over the incentives that shape most media narratives, it will become challenging to find authenticity in the near future.
Don’t look to influencers. Don’t look to “content” creators.
Find the outcasts. Enjoy niche hobbies. Be shamelessly weird in all the right ways that hurt no one. Build real bonds with other people.
Talk to your neighbors. Find people you can help, and find others who can help you. We’re all in this together, for as long as we each live. Might as well make the best of things while we can.
As for me, I will continue to commission artists to draw art for me without AI, and write these blog posts without using AI, without the perverse incentives of money. In a way, I’m putting my (lack of) money where my mouth is.
Addendum (2025-04-04)
A few people have suggested that the term “unalive” originated from TikTok, not YouTube, where the fear was having your videos deleted, not merely demonetized.
That’s certainly possible (I never really used TikTok–autoplay videos always piss me off–so I wouldn’t know firsthand).
However, the way this phenomenon manifested with YouTubers was “teehee let’s skirt the rules in the laziest way possible” because they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. That there was some precedent on another platform is interesting.
Separately, one person quipped that authenticity is actually a practiced facade (e.g., as per Oprah) and the word I should be using is genuine. I think the very notion of practiced facades are kind of the antithesis to authenticity, and that these words are interchangeable in practice.
Header art: MarleyTanuki, Johanna Tarkela