Issue Thirteen: Ancient Creatures in a World of Copies
Synthetic Authenticity is the official aesthetic of 2026, in my humble opinion anyway. If you haven't named it yet, you've felt it for sure — that slightly uncanny sensation when something is trying very hard to feel real.
This used to seem like something that appeared only every once in a while, when an individual that crossed my path was maybe trying a little too hard to not appear as though they were… well, trying hard — to fit in. That seems charming and novel now, if I'm being honest.
Let's discuss. Things I am seeing out in the weird wild world of IRL/Virtual reality:
The deliberately misspelled label. The “handcrafted” product with the rough-edged brand presence, manufactured at scale in a warehouse in… New Jersey, China, or who knows where!? The corporation that’s done its homework on vulnerability and posts accordingly to present a no-name brand as unique and special. The resort sending out influencer applications so the right people can make the right content to sell the experience of authenticity to everyone else.
Commercialization doesn’t just enter markets. It colonizes feeling.
And here’s what I need you to understand before we go any further: this is not simply a marketing problem. It’s not a trend you can out-strategy. What’s happening right now is something deeper and stranger, and I think we need to look at it clearly — not to panic, but because clarity is the only thing that actually protects you.
After all, that’s why you haven’t unsubscribed from my newsletter yet after all… maybe?
WE ARE ANCIENT CREATURES
E.O. Wilson, the biologist, put it plainly: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
He said this in 2009 for Christ sake? Sit with how much more true it feels today.
Our nervous systems were built for a world (i.e. the community we lived in post hunter/gatherer mode) of perhaps 150 people, direct consequences, and information that arrived slowly enough to actually process. I am lucky to say that when I try to count the people up in my life — cough, my community (though I really hate this word right now)—I can actually get there. Instead, we’re running our creative businesses inside an attention economy optimized for immediacy, emotion, spectacle, and brevity—what journalist Derek Thompson recently called the “Everything Is Television” reality, where politics becomes theater, science becomes storytelling, and news becomes performance. To be honest, none of which is genuinely entertaining, and all of which is problematic at best and destructive and toxic at worst.
I think it’s clear and we can all agree that in 2026, we have been programmed to think everything is urgent, which leads to our believing that nothing is truly important. And when everything is a performance, nothing simply is.
BARF. But also YIKES.
This is the environment our businesses, our selves, are living in. Not because we chose it—though we maybe acquiesced and should have revolted. But because technocracy has colonized every channel we use to reach the people we’re trying to serve. How naive we were to think advancements in tech, barriers to entry over a decade ago that dropped (only to rise even higher than I could have imagined, though I’m not surprised we landed where we all are now) and culture shifted as we entered more firmly into the 21st century post-Great Recession!?
So, SO, SO naive, to speak plainly.
I’m sharing all of this with you not to overwhelm, but because I think a lot of creative entrepreneurs are walking around feeling like they’re failing at something that was never designed for them to succeed at in the first place. That deserves to be named out loud. #sorrynotsorry
THE COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY
Here’s where it gets even more interesting—and more urgent. (Brace yourselves.)
There’s a concept getting serious attention in art and philosophy circles right now called recursive resemblance. Art historian Patrick R. Crowley writes about it in Artforum this month in the context of AI and mimesis:
“[G]enerative AI models, trained on internet content, are increasingly training on their own output. The concern isn’t just that dominant content crowds out more diverse, marginal voices. It’s that the recursive feedback loop introduces compounding errors — approximations of approximations — until what feels ‘real’ is simply what is statistically likely to appear.”
I hate to say this, it’s certainly not the world I want to live in. But as working people it’s imperative to say it — we are not even chasing truth anymore. We are chasing pattern recognition.
That said, and crucially maybe — this isn’t just a technology problem. Crowley traces the concept all the way back to ancient Greek mimesis, where the word for likeness and the word for likelihood share the same root. Representation was never about accurate replication. It was always about plausibility. What convinces. What gets through.
Which means the question in 2026 is no longer: is this real? The question is: does this feel real enough to function as real?
BARF, again.
That is the world our competitors at any scale have decided to acquiesce to and operate in. The world of plausibility. The world of close enough.
If you are a reader, or client, or salon member of mine… as I would presume you to be: I want you to feel the full weight of how different that is from what you’re doing. After all, you are Weird Specialties. We are not the masses, but the dissonance.
And because of this, I want you to understand why it is the best possible news for you.
The thing that doesn’t collapse
Corporations can try to manufacture rawness. They have the budgets, the trend forecasts, the consultants who specialize in making things feel human. They can try to fake edge. They can fake warmth. They can fake imperfection at scale. And for the average consumer/person, that will work.
What they cannot fake is actually caring. Caring is one of a few of my Weird Specialties. And all of those I have ever worked with own this characteristic too. Let’s discuss more deeply.
Not caring as a brand position, but caring as an orientation — the specific, embodied, sometimes inconvenient way that you as a founder are genuinely present to your work and on behalf of your people — your people being ALL the folk you engage with, depend upon, and support with your work/business. The reason you lose sleep over #fillintheblank. Integrity is embedded in how you operate inherently.
Earnestness — real, unperformative, occasionally awkward earnestness — is the last thing that doesn’t scale. It simply doesn’t survive the “optimized authenticity” brief. It requires the person who is the business to be genuinely, sometimes vulnerably, present.
In a world of recursive resemblance, that is a structural advantage. A lot of work, yes, but truly something special.
Your competitors are getting better and better at producing the plausible version of caring. You are the only one who can produce the real version. And the people you most want to work with or sell to — the ones with taste, with discernment, with the ability to feel the difference — are increasingly desperate to find it.
What I’m sitting with (and you should be too)
I want to be honest with you: I’m reading (and listening to) more than usual right now. The pace of change feels genuinely disorienting, and I take seriously my responsibility to give you and my clients signal, not noise.
The influencer-as-search-engine reality is real. The pressure to fit a creator’s visual language—which was imposed upon them by technologists who make money through imposing additional barriers and bars to jump over—can force us into effectively disappearing from our entire market segment. That shit is real. The friction between customers who want your service/product and customers who want to be photographed near/with your service—that’s real too.
Presentation is performative. It blurs the line between real and unreal. We need to be asking ourselves about what that means for our… brand dinners, influencer activations, gifting strategies, etc.
If I’m asked to one more “authentic dinner party,” only to arrive and realize this is a marketing opportunity that was not forthcoming in its intentions—and walk away with not money for coming, pressure to post about it, and not a gift to take home, or one I don’t want—I’m going to… BARF AGAIN AND AGAIN.
And it isn’t just digital spaces where this is playing out. I’m a skier. I’ve been watching it happen on the mountain in real time, and it is something else entirely. Air Mail reported on it this February—the “ski girlie” phenomenon, in which influencers sporting skintight Skims suits and camera-ready blowouts arrive at Aspen and Courchevel less interested in the sport than in striking the perfect pose. One former competitive Alpine skier turned instructor at Courchevel described booking a private half-day lesson, only to have her student stop twenty minutes in, hand over her phone, and announce: “O.K.! Time for pictures!” What followed was a three-hour photo shoot. The slope as set. The instructor as photographer. The mountain as content.
This is not a minor inconvenience. This is what it looks like when synthetic authenticity colonizes something that was never meant to be content—a sport, a subculture, a genuine community built over generations. The people who actually ski, who built that culture, who know and love it, are being quietly displaced by the performance of it. And the slopes, the hotels, the mountain businesses are overwhelmed with disingenuous opportunists who have no stake in what they’re extracting from.
Sound familiar?
What I can tell you is this: the small creative businesses I am watching thrive in these bananas-ass moments of cultural chaos are the ones who stay closest to their actual customers—not their imagined audience, not the algorithm’s preferred customer and those eyeballs’ preferred zone-out platform on which they endlessly “watch” things—and I implore you to keep asking one question before you do anything else:
Does this resonate, or does this reach?
Reach without resonance is just noise wearing your face. And in a world where noise is infinite and free, resonance is the only thing that actually converts.
The practice
Discernment is not passive. It’s a skill—and like all skills, it atrophies when you stop using it deliberately. A few things I’d put in front of you right now:
Ask the quality-of-inquiry question—Not how many leads, but: are the people reaching out actually the people you want to be working with? If the answer is drifting, something in how you’re presenting yourself has started performing rather than expressing.
Notice what you’re watering down—The specific, idiosyncratic thing about your business that makes you slightly hard to explain at a dinner party — that is almost certainly the thing worth protecting most fiercely. Diluting it for reach is trading your only real competitive advantage for metrics that don’t convert to the work you actually want.
Slow down the content impulse—Not forever, but the businesses I respect most right now are posting less and meaning it more. One thing that is genuinely true is worth more than five things that are merely timely.
Practice earnestness on purpose—In your emails, your proposals, your client conversations. Let yourself mean it out loud. Say the thing that’s actually true instead of the thing that sounds right. It will feel strange — we have been trained, all of us, to smooth it down. Do it anyway. The smoothing is where the signal dies.
The corporations will keep getting better at faking the thing. The recursive loop will keep compressing. The plausible will keep crowding out the real—for them.
You are an ancient creature. Your Paleolithic nervous system, with all its inconvenient feelings and genuine responses and embarrassing investment in outcomes—that is not a liability in this environment.
It is the last thing they cannot replicate.
What I’ve been reading, watching & listening to
Patrick R. Crowley, “Recursive Resemblance”
The piece that cracked this whole issue open. A genuinely rigorous look at mimesis, AI model collapse, and what it means that reality is now measured by likelihood rather than truth. Not light reading. Worth every minute.
E.O. Wilson, The New York Times
E.O. Wilson on technology, human nature, and the mismatch between our ancient nervous systems and our godlike tools. The quote that anchors this newsletter. I keep coming back to it.
Carolina de Armas, “Ski Girlies Just Want to Have Fun”
The on-the-ground dispatch that put a face on something I’ve been watching happen all season.
Read it if you can get through the paywall—worth it.
“Endless Slop, Cancer Cures, or Robot Apocalypse? Derek Thompson on Our AI Future”
Thompson’s “Everything Is Television” theory is the most clarifying framework I’ve encountered for understanding why the current information environment feels the way it does. Start here if you haven’t already.
Episode on mindfulness and commercialization. A useful gut-check on what happens when the thing that’s supposed to be outside the market gets absorbed by it. Relevant to every creative business operating in wellness-adjacent spaces right now.
