I was recently interviewed for an episode of Ruined by the Internet? entitled “Digital Humanity: From Real Minds to Synthetic Hallucination?.” We discussed how synthetic content and AI is challenging how we establish digital identity and the notion of authenticity.
While much of the last thirty years of internet punditry has focused on “the attention economy,” I believe that authenticity has remained just as scarce as attention. The internet was positioned as a medium that promised to bring us more connected and closer together. Authenticity should have been an afterthought in this world. But intermediaries have always distorted what’s real, as exemplified in the most “authentic” of U.S. American music, country music.
Country has a variety of roots. One of the most important is Appalachian music. The Carter Family (seen above, left) emerged from the hills of Virginia to bring this music - soon to be known as country music - to the masses. Like many performers from the Appalachians, they performed in their Sunday Best, a.k.a the clothes they might wear to church.
So where did the signature cowboy hats and spurred boots of “America’s Favorite Singing Cowboy,”
Gene Autry (seen above, right), come from? Not the Appalachians nor the
plains of Oklahoma. Depending on how you tell the story, it’s some
combination of Hollywood Westerns“Hollywood didn’t call the tune, just the dress code.
Gene Autry and other Western-cowboy-outfitted artists were much more
popular in B films of the 1930s and 1940s than were their
Southern-hillbilly-styled counterparts like Roy Acuff. So, emerging
honky-tonk artists like Patsy Montana, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Rex
Griffin, and Webb Pierce donned cowboy-styled outfits to sing their
hillbilly songs of life’s travails. Increasingly backed by hot,
electrified instruments, they shaped the sound, lyric, and look that has
been at the core of country music ever since.” ~ “Ten Things
You Didn’t Know about the Origins of Country Music” by Richard A.
Peterson, author of Creating
Country Music
, New York record label executives, and Chicago radio
broadcasters. The people who directed the image and themes of the genre
knew nothing about riding horses, corralling cattle, or even driving
pickup trucks.
In spite of this reality, fans expect that their country and hip hop performers are somehow authentic.
Authenticity has at least two meanings: the first is a technical definition where one must authenticate to prove your identity to a website and the second is a social meaning where your identity seems authentic to others. But this is a slippery basis of trust and prone to subversion. Even worse, our identities change over time.
The interview with Ruined by the Internet? covers this ground and much more. I even give a few concrete answers about what to do as online life becomes increasingly difficult to navigate. As I say in the sample below - the internet is an unimaginably big place; there is a lot of opportunity out there if you don’t like what you see.
The Conversation
[Transcript sampled from the podcast discussion]
Gareth King (Host)
The statistics are telling us is that over fifty percent of online content is now considered synthetically generated. Would you say that [the dead internet] theory is reality now, or do we have a bit further to go until things would be what you would consider a dead internet?
David Schmudde
[The internet is] unimaginably large. So, there is still plenty out there that’s human generated. […] What I mean by plenty, I mean there’s so much out there that it would take a lifetime to consume. I’m talking about outside of what is being machine generated and also outside of the centrally controlled platforms.
The question is really about findability. That’s the core question. And there could be a case where all of this slop, all of this machine generated stuff, plus the centralizing forces of these social media platforms, there’s almost nothing else that can be found very easily. And today I do concede, of course, that it’s probably most people’s experience that they see a lot more AI generated stuff than they used to. Maybe fifty percent of their timelines are AI generated.
Gareth King
For a lot of people, a huge amount of their time in the digital world is spent, say, on a phone. And a lot of that time is spent on that social media that you’d mentioned. And I think I’d love for us to talk about the role that social media itself has played in getting us to this point through the monetisation of attention.
I read something from the head of Instagram who was basically explaining to people that the way to be really relevant in 2026 was to be more human. The problem is obviously cutting through the rest of the shit out there. And I think what was so interesting to me about this post from this guy was that Instagram is such a huge culprit of being full of the slop, as people say. And it rewards that through its algorithm.
Why do you think he’s now coming out with a statement like that when the platform that he’s been overseeing has been driving so much of this awful stuff?
David Schmudde
Well, there’s a few ways to take that question, of course with Instagram, it’s not a recent phenomenon, but it has been the platform’s mission since the beginning to add filters, for example, to your photos. Are the filters making things more real?
And then after this “naive photo era,” when it became a real social network, are the images projected from the users of Instagram real? Like you know, the angles they’re taking, the posturing they’re doing. Are those things real? These are well-known aspects of the platform in its lifetime. And then of course, yes, today there’s a lot more AI generated content. This is part of the whole culture of the company.
The best analogy that I can think of is the role of the A&R person in the music industry. The music industry has always commercialized authenticity, but I don’t mean like in the sense that Jimi Hendrix was real or like Kurt Cobain was real. I mean in the sense that something like country music; what they were manufacturing in the end was a facsimile of what was actually happening in the Appalachians or what was actually happening in the South.
And it was through the lens of these men that lived in New York, right? And the point is it’s like they created country music as a “real thing,” but it was an invention of New York tastemakers.
So, in this case, whether it be A&R people in New York City or Instagram execs in Silicon Valley, the high level marketing speak here is the same: they want to proffer something that is “real” and “authentic” to the people who are listening or consuming or watching, even if it’s not. Because what is real in life isn’t all that pretty, right? And people don’t want to engage it all the time.
The Recording
Subscribe to Ruined By The Internet? using your favorite Podcast app. My episode, Digital Humanity: From Real Minds to Synthetic Hallucination?, can also be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. The show is also available on iHeartRadio and Amazon Music.