Authenticity by Alice Sherwood — the fight against fakery

In an age of counterfeits, conspiracy theories and carefully curated social media profiles, many of us seem to be looking for ways to make our lives more “authentic”.

We shun supermarkets in favour of artisanal farmers’ markets, we use the hashtag #nofilter to signal that what we are showing the world is some kind of representation of reality; and those of us who can afford it spend millions on artworks that would lose virtually all their value if it turned out the artists responsible for them were not who they said they were.

But what does authenticity actually mean, and why should it matter anyway? Can we ever know who our “authentic selves” are? And if we do value it, what is the best way of getting more authenticity in our lives? These are some of the questions that Alice Sherwood, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London’s Policy Institute and director of an open-source intelligence company, grapples with in her book Authenticity.

As she points out, there are two main ways that we use the word, and they have “almost completely opposite meanings”. The first — and until quite recently the primary — sense, she writes, is verisimilitude. “This is a kind of authenticity that is outwardly focused, objective, evidence-based, and, above all, public.”

The book suggests we are going to get some ideas on how we can fight back against fake news . . . But who gets to decide what is and isn’t ‘authentic’?

The second meaning is rather more nebulous. “Born of our impulse for self-discovery and self-creation, personal authenticity is about being true, not to external reality, but to your own, internal sense of self,” Sherwood writes. “Looking to feelings rather than facts, answering only to the voice within, this newer kind of authenticity is subjective, inwardly focused, and most of all private.”

While the book is full of riveting examples of deception, imitation and imposture, it often seems unclear which of these two meanings the author is talking about. Given their somewhat contradictory meanings, we are left not quite knowing what the core thesis of the book is.

Its subtitle, Reclaiming Reality in a Counterfeit Culture, suggests that what we are going to get are some ideas on how we can fight back against a world of misinformation and fake news, and indeed that is what the book’s final chapter is devoted to. But here we come across another problem: who gets to decide what is and isn’t “authentic”?

Sherwood celebrates what she calls the “armies of truth” without ever really grappling with the reality that there are often competing — and clashing — ideas about what that truth is, or that the “fightback against falsehood” might have its own biases and blind spots or might sometimes veer into censorship.

“Facebook . . . can take any post, video, or image that makes a factual assertion, have it checked out and, if it is false, track down every instance of its publication on their platform,” she writes — as if “checking out” whether or not something is “false” were simply a matter of typing it into some kind of truth machine; as if there hadn’t been many examples of such platforms labelling content “false information” that turned out to be nothing of the kind.

The book is at its best when it is describing real-world instances of fakery, such as the inspiring story of the great early-20th-century imposter Stanley Clifford Weyman, a “conjurer of delight” whose career was “one of aspiration, not deception”.

A particularly captivating section comes when Sherwood introduces us to all sorts of examples of mimicry and imposture in nature. We learn, for instance, of the neglectful and parasitic cuckoo finch parents who dupe other birds into bringing up their chicks, often proving fatal for the other birds’ own young.

“Nature . . . [has] generated what, in a human context, we would call crime — egg counterfeits on a par with any art forger’s, con tricks with sleights of hand as slick as any grifter’s,” she writes.

Authenticity is a thoroughly enjoyable debut, which raises many interesting questions and gives the reader much to chew upon. Sherwood doesn’t always provide satisfactory answers, nor clear threads that link her ideas, but given the complexity and diversity of what she is tackling, maybe she feels it would be inauthentic to try.

Authenticity: Reclaiming Reality in a Counterfeit Culture by Alice Sherwood, Mudlark £16.99, 416 pages

Jemima Kelly is an FT columnist

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