A Refuge of Authenticity

Cultivating places of authenticity in an inauthentic world

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

Welcome to the age of disorientation.

Step into the digital world of 2023 and almost nothing you see, hear, or read should assumed to be real anymore. Not that anything digital was ever really “real” in the sense of physical, created matter — for that you would have to turn off the screen and go outside and listen to the birds or something. Bird song. Grass. Trees. Cool autumn air. A human companion. These things are “real” in a way the virtual or the digital can never be, no matter how hard Silicon Valley’s metaverse may try. However, the virtual world has done the seemingly impossible in the last few years: make itself more unreal and more virtual than it already was. Before 2020, almost every image you saw, article you read, and every soundbite you listened to was created by a real human somewhere on this earth. Human creativity as mediated through a machine — a second best, perhaps, but still the output of “humanness.”

But now, everything has changed.

Now, every image you see, every sound you hear, and every article you read in this virtual world has to be questioned. Is this real? Is this the output of a real human’s creativity? Does this beautiful mountain really exist? Has this song really been sung? Are these the perfectly written thoughts of a human writer? Or are these all the products of the Machine gone wild? Who can really know…

Welcome to the Age of Inauthenticity.

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Artificial “intelligence” has forced a paradigmatic shift in the virtual ecosystem; no habitat in the digital creative realm is free from its invasive and pervasive influence. Nothing can be assumed to be true any longer — its authenticity must be questioned. Questioning everything uses up a lot of brain capacity. It is exhausting, it is disorientating — and this is now our life. Ever-increasingly, the domain of the real and the authentic is ceding territory to the rampant “progress” of the artificial. More and more images are going to be fake, portraying events and moments that never happened, except in the imagination of a machine. More and more essays and articles are going to be the perfectly-prosed paragraphs of the machine — regurgitated and synthesised thoughts and information that once originated from real people. And more and more voices are going to be cloned to read out words and sing songs that never were spoken by the victim of the voice cloning. Human creativity is fast approaching being made redundant, that is, at least in the eyes of those who are content with unoriginal, second-best productions from the Machine.

“No point hiding or retreating” shout the techno-modernists, “AI is here to stay.”

“This is your life now, embrace the Machine and all will be well!”

Liars, the lot of them.

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But what then are we to do? (thus echoes the perennial question) What should we who care about real creativity, who want to resist the Machine, and who hate the idea of the increasing artificiality of the world do?

One solution: (and it is the ultimate one) go outdoors and be confronted with the pure masterpiece of Creation, the sheer authenticity of the created world in all its beauty and raw sublimity. Listen to the birds. Stand in awe of the mountain. Read a classic novel under an oak tree. Get your hands dirty in the life-giving soil. Experience real life to its fullest.

However, for most of us in this machine-dominated age, as much as we would like to spend our days outside in the sun, this solution cannot sustain us. We still need to put bread (real bread) on our tables, and our money comes from doing business on and with machines. You are reading this on a screen anyway. Thus, our resistance and our action must occur in the very places where the Machine rules the roost. In the virtual world we can’t cede all the territory to the fake and fraud. We cannot give the artificial total dominion of the worlds we have created. We must resist the gravitating pull.

What we can do is provide a service and an offering of true creativity to those who are going to become increasingly burnt out and disorientated by the Age of Artificiality. We can cultivate places where the ‘real’ rules the roost and where true beauty can flourish and shine. What we can then do is create ‘Refuges of Authenticity.’