About desire, authenticity, and moderation
When we ponder our place in the world, we typically couch it in terms of our evolution as individuals or a group. We map both our shortcomings and aspirations on a historical trajectory. If we emphasise our frailties, we speak of the current state as one of decline. And if we focus on our strengths, we discern a trend towards some inevitable greatness.
This is a story-telling device that can be found in ancient and modern theories alike. Like a telenovela, the characters change but the plot is the same. Hesiod speaks of a lost Golden Age of man, the Bible tells us about the Garden of Eden, Hindus have the yuga cycles, Marxists describe the early humans as innately communist, nationalists take pride in their nation’s glorious past, pop culture fans will rave about how wonderful their favourite decade was, and so on.
At all times, the core descriptive statement is that we had something special that we lost. The prescriptive conclusion that sometimes follows is that we ought to regain what was once ours. I call this the “retrospective desire”. Its counterpart is the “prospective desire”, which is essentially expressed as a form of enthusiasm for the ever-moving future: a claim that things will naturally improve and all intermediate problems will eventually be sorted out. “Eventually” is the operative term in such an outlook, as it bases its faith on an indeterminate future that cannot be predicted with accuracy yet cannot be ruled out as a possible world either.
Both perspectives are correct in their own way in terms of describing what was and anticipating what may be, yet both can distract us from the present.
- The retrospective desire can make us feel powerless in the face of the prevailing conditions: how can we, as individuals or groups, cope with the challenges when even those who were in the original state of greatness, and thus superior to us, failed? This is a thought that forces us into inaction because it prefigures whatever immediate goal as futile.
- At the other end, we become complacent the moment we assume that there is an inexorable transition towards our betterment, however that is defined. The resulting inaction can make us sloppy and unprepared to benefit from what we expect to happen. This same complacency may in turn render us fragile in the face of various challenges.
A friend, who is a musician, once told me that you hear the base when it is not there anymore. The idea is that we recognise what we had only after it is gone. We otherwise take it for granted and, in so doing, underestimate it.
The person driven by the retrospective desire can fall in the trap of never enjoying what they have, for the past, literal or figurative, is always better and in a sense “real”, so there is no want to grow attached to what is available. Same for the other direction, as we can keep thinking about how better off we will become as soon as this newer thing or relationship becomes current, only then to daydream about the next iteration that promises to bring even more joy, and so on in what effectively are shifting sands that we cannot build anything on.
In both cases, we escape from the present to place our hope in something untainted—albeit not incorruptible—that exists elsewhere. A distant past, an alternative reality, a future history, some other plane of existence altogether, but never in the here-and-now. What we have is inherently undesirable, disposable, shallow, or anyhow not worthwhile compared to the putative truth that lies in that notional beyond that we believe in.
I am pragmatic, working with what I have. I draw from both perspectives, as I am neither a panegyrist of some glorious past nor a cheerleader for the blissful future to come. While I can reason about the decline and rise of a culture, I frame it in such a way as to inform present considerations, in line with practical reasonableness. For example, I appreciate face-to-face interactions and strong bonds, though I also recognise the utility of text-only exchanges. One does not preclude the other. What matters is to find a sustainable balance.
When we examine phenomena in our life, such as the pandemic of loneliness all around us, we can think of them as instances of imbalance: there is too much digital exposure and manufactured happiness, for example, and too little personal connection. Taking a retrospective view to claim something like “computers have destroyed us” would ignore all the gains we have had thanks to information technology, while the prospective view that “innovation will fix this too” downplays how it is technology that created the problem in the first place.
Media do not merely enable an experience: they condition it. Media cannot be neutral, as the conditioning is disposed a certain way. If I meet someone in person, the medium is the space where we are collocated. All the information that we communicate is informed by the space. Same principle for a chat application.
The question, then, is not one of abolishing the filters and of living without media, but of finding a configuration that is effective given certain values that we have. Knowing what the values are is key to both (i) be mindful of the objective and (ii) to avoid fetishising the medium.
If we think of technology as inherently harmful, for instance, we can only wonder where the limit is. Say we abolish computers and the Internet. Why stop there? Why not also get rid of beauty products as those too effectively put a mask on people? And why not do the same for equipment like basic tools, on the grounds that “real men” only rely on their own strength to get things done? Before we know it, we end up romanticising the average animal life. Only then we have to also accept the brutality of nature, which we tend to forget in such thoughts. Again, then, balance is the goal, not ideological purity.
The aforementioned plot underpins current debates about authenticity in the wake of Artificial Intelligence. You take the average message nowadays and you know it was written or at least retouched by AI. Salaried programmers are barely writing any code themselves. They still understand what is going on, more or less, though their grasp of the technicalities is rapidly diminishing, as the bots handle the implementation details (and increasingly every other part of the job). Same for the arts. It is thus easy to conclude that technical acumen both of the engineering and artisanal kinds is being eroded and, ipso facto, people are not as adept as they think: i.e. they are faking it.
It is thus tempting to conclude that a reversal would take us to a better place where people are real. Before AI, we can argue, engineers actually knew what they were doing and artists were truly masters of their craft. Except that we can find plenty of exceptions to qualify such insights as relative. Which year exactly should we go back to? Once we look there, we will find all sorts of other problems; problems that, by the by, AI can address. A reversal would, furthermore, imply that those supposedly authentic people of yore are more valuable qua authentic than whatever benefits this new world has in store for us. This is a claim that can, at the very least, be strongly contested if, say, AI helps us find a cure for cancer: how many would give up the remedy to have authenticity?
David Schmudde weighs in on this debate in an interview with Gareth King for the Ruined by the Internet? series: https://schmud.de/posts/2026-08-10-cowboy-clothes.html. The gist of David’s commentary is that authenticity is nuanced. It is not as simple as stating that the pre-AI days were about real people, as there was artificiality of varying degrees practically everywhere, from the boutique view of country music, to how people presented themselves online in flattering ways.
Indeed, if we commit to the valorisation of authenticity, there is no principled reason to stop at AI or digital media at-large. Does a person with a nice haircut fake it at some level? Do they not wake up with their hair all over the place? Are nice clothes fraudulent because they conceal the imperfections of one’s figure? Is an athlete’s achievement inauthentic owning to the use of specialised equipment, such as shoes? And how about the diet and training regimen one needs to follow to even be an athlete: are those fake in the sense that the average person does not live that way or that the athletic cause do not necessarily contribute to some real public good?
It helps us then to acknowledge what we are thinking when we make arguments for or against a state of affairs. We are making value judgements on the basis of some frame of reference. Those can even be unknown to us, as we have taken them for granted and never thought them through. Bringing them to our attention can make us identify our most realisable wants in the here-and-now, and thus potentially sort out the problems we have and for which we currently believe that solutions only exist in the “elsewhere” I covered above.
The Greeks cultivate tragedy because they accept the indeterminacy of the world we live in. There is no pure experience to be had. Whatever we get is in a state of admixture. If we invent technology to, say, keep us warm in the winter, we have also created the conditions of dying from suffocation, of burning alive, of starting wildfires, of polluting the environment which will then be harmful to us, of killing each other with more potent weapons, and so on. The wielding of fire, which is a metaphor for know-how and, by extension, technology, is neither good nor bad, both good and bad. We cannot have the nice parts without the ugly ones.
This state of admixture is true for our life as a whole, starting from the everyday things. To love someone, for example, means that you trust them, open your heart to them, at some point be in proximity to them, and thus expose yourself to the possibility of suffering immense pain from them. But you cannot both love and also not be exposed to that kind of risk.
What matters, then, is to apply judgement. To figure out where the balance is and how to subsist in moderation. When to be welcoming and when to be cautious. What to take and what to leave.