The End of the Authentic Self

Chapter 6 closed on the collapse of one kind of clarity: the legibility of the link between an owner and the consequences of what they owned. Authorship was the engine beneath that link, and when authorship became impossible to locate cleanly, ownership lost its moral grip. Chapter 7 turns to a parallel collapse, but the one in question now is more intimate. It is the legibility of the link between a person and the signals other people use to recognize them. The face. The voice. The handwriting. The body in the room. Until very recently, those signals were trustworthy not because they were impossible to fake, but because faking them was expensive enough that most people did not bother.