The Synthetic Self

The supermarket peach is always perfect. Smooth, scentless, unnaturally firm, and engineered to survive a week of neglect. Bite into it and you’ll find something vaguely fruity. This, apparently, is progress.

Spontaneity now requires scheduling. Rebellion arrives fully branded and optimised for 4K playback. Life’s inevitable messes, like the stumbles, the doubts, the contradictions,  still occur but we’ve developed ways to crop them out. Nothing needs to be real anymore, so long as it looks convincing enough.

We consume news like we snack: frequently, forgettably, and without much nourishment. Grief has become a kind of theatre, performed in stages, captioned for convenience. We curate identities through devices, fine-tuning ourselves. Even our beliefs are served back to us, making conviction become more about comfort than clarity.

A neoliberal world, unbothered by questions of meaning, concerned only with performance.

And perhaps that’s the unsettling bit: it no longer feels unsettling. No one’s asking to go back to something more authentic — assuming we’d even recognise it if it reappeared.

If everything now is an imitation, a glossy replica of something lost or forgotten, then perhaps the only thing left is the question:

What, precisely, does that make us?