Postreality Bites: Air Travel and Authenticity in 2023
Postreality Bites: Air Travel and Authenticity in 2023
A new series about how reality isn't what it used to be. In this installment: a record-breaking day for U.S. airports and Merriam-Webster's 2023 word of the year.
Ever since I started yapping about “Postreality,” I’ve gotten questions about what exactly I mean. Is it an extension of the notion of “Post-truth?” (in some ways!) Is it that I believe that there’s no such thing as reality? (nope).
Postreality is the reality paradigm that follows Modernity. Modernity arose in the wake of the Renaissance in Europe, built on ideas and social customs established through the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment. One outcome of Modernity is that reality was framed as a monolith; the notion that there is only one reality and there are universal values. The Industrial Revolution accelerated Europeans’ ability to assert these ideas all over the world through force.
Postreality, meanwhile, bubbles up in the wake of World War II and has come into full force through the advent of computing and the Internet (and the specter of human self-extinction through nuclear weapons). It gives rise to more decentralized approaches to reality. New communication tools—particularly digital ones—have placed reality-creating and -breaking tools in the hands of many. This has led to some of humanity’s most valuable progress and some of the scariest aspects of contemporary society.
I elaborate on the idea here, but you’re all set for the purposes of Postreality Bites. In this series, I curate odds and ends that capture some aspect of the postreal condition.
New Record for Busiest Day at U.S. Airports
Sunday, November 26, was the busiest day ever at airports in the United States. The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened 2,907,378 passengers for more than 51,000 flights. The previous record was actually logged on June 30 of this year, with 2,883,000 passengers traveled ahead of the Fourth of July holiday. Wild to imagine that nearly 1% of the entire U.S. population traveled on this one day.
Records always grab eyeballs, but the reason this one caught my attention has to do with energy. I’ve been reading Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, which makes the case that societal collapse due to climate change is inevitable, and that instead of trying to take action to return to previous normals, we need to instead prepare ourselves through deep adaptation. Cheery! I’m also a regular listener of The Great Simplification, and Nate Hagens consistently makes the point that we’re likely in the downslope of the “carbon pulse.” In other words, oil and other energy sources that have historically been easy to obtain will become more difficult—and therefore expensive—to acquire.
With those lenses in mind, when I see not one but two record-breaking days in a single year, my mind jumps to future scarcity. How much longer will the average person be able to afford this much air travel? When will air travel become a luxury good? Will airline tickets be subsidized by taxpayer dollars in order to sustain the companies and infrastructure? Travel has been an integral part of my own life—in what ways will the very notion of “travel” change in the years to come? How will future generations feel when they see a map like this? Even if we do manage staggering breakthroughs in energy ranging from improved battery technologies to fusion power that keep flight costs manageable, what will the experience of flying be in a world with more volatile climates and extreme weather events?
Check out the latest episode of the Urgent Futures Podcast, featuring award-winning artist Lia Halloran and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne:
And don’t forget to subscribe to the channel on YouTube!
Merriam-Webster announces Word of the Year 2023
The famed dictionary publisher announced its word of the year 2023, following 2022’s “gaslight.” The word? “Authentic,” beating out related terms like “Deepfake,” “Doppleganger,” “Dystopian,” and, uh, “Rizz.”
They explain that the word saw a substantial increase in search volume, spurred by conversations about “AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.” They write:
Authentic is what brands, social media influencers, and celebrities aspire to be. Elon Musk made headlines when he said that people should be more “authentic” on social media. Apps and platforms like BeReal make recording “authentic” experiences their main purpose. No matter how much artifice and calculation goes into the production of these videos, as Rebecca Jennings of Vox puts it, “wherever people are supposedly being ‘authentic’ on the internet, the money will follow.” Ironically, with “authentic content creators” now recognized as the gold standard for building trust, “authenticity” has become a performance.
Some folks have expressed frustration that this is the word of the year, but I think it’s perfect. It demonstrates how language and ideas evolve in Postreality while simultaneously serving as the ultimate validation that the word “authentic” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. Like “literally” before it, in some cases it might even mean its historical opposite. “Authentic” becomes more of a riff, its own kind of performance. Given its connection to celebrities and influencers, it’s also a vector for power, money, and fame, something to be cleverly wielded rather than effortlessly embodied.
Under Postreality, when ideas enter the public dialogue, we swarm them with takes—oh, the takes—coming to collective consensus (and dissensus) about what exactly we’re talking about, why it matters, and what it means for the future. Taking a long view, what we’re doing is establishing new techniques for fostering collective knowledge and dialogue.
It also reminds me of an idea in the graphic novel/essay The Extreme Self. Social media architectures have been built for engagement—to keep you on the respective site/app as long as possible—and this often translates to extreme content, the stuff that will surprise or provoke. Thus, we are subtly (and not so subtly!) encouraged to present extreme versions of our selves—perhaps rooted in real beliefs but cranked up to 11. And of course, these extreme selves don’t operate in isolation, they interact with other people, who themselves are engaged in their own extreme self performance.
Taken together, this swirl changes us all, not only in terms of how we are on the Internet, but the ways we metabolize these versions of ourselves (and other people’s selves) in our meat bodies. That authenticity is now fully whipped up in this swirl speaks volumes about the changing relationship of the self to society under Postreality. Doesn’t a self-conscious awareness of being perceived as authentic negate “being true to one's own personality, spirit, or character”? It’s a rabbit hole of abstract thinking.
As the notion of authenticity relates to AI: I could (and will!) spend multiple future posts and podcast episodes addressing the subject. But with synthetic media like digital twins and deepfakes getting better every passing day—to say nothing of the rapid pace of development in generative tools—questions of what exactly comprises “authentic” expression will only become more complicated for the foreseeable future.
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