The Illusion of Honesty

As late capitalism winds down, more and more production is being diverted into the attention economy. Meaning, capturing attention is becoming more important than actually making anything.

The currency of capturing attention is honesty.

Everywhere you go on your late capitalistic travels these days, you’ll be exhorted to be honest. Be honest with your customers. Be transparent in your brand. Be honest about what you’re looking for in relationships. Be honest about who you are as a human — use that as a net to capture attention — then monetize the shit out of it by modularizing honesty-capsules and placing them strategically across all your forms of branded content. It’s ok to repeat as long as you adjust each honesty-module to target the emotional vertical of each of your brands.

None of this shit is really honest of course. Those who excel at honesty propaganda are those who are best at marketing their own lives — arranging the mess into coherent narratives that make their audiences feel safe and not dismayed.

Real honesty is frightening to most people.

Everyone in Hollywood will tell you they want you to be honest, and they believe they want you to be honest. Honest in strategic, discrete doses that can be monetized by corporations inside movies and TV shows. But for instance, very few people in Hollywood want you to be honest about the systemic discrimination you experience. It makes people very uncomfortable, no one knows what to do with those feelings, and they mostly just resort to arguing with you about your years of lived experience.

If you get real honest — if you tell stories that don’t have redemptive endings or business lessons, if you get raw and ugly and dark, if you reveal rage, if you tell stories in which — instead of you being the hero, you just got fucked over or got stuck or still can’t find your way out of the story and the story has no end really — people shut down fast.

They don’t really want you to be honest. They want you to package an honest-feeling story in a way that feels redemptive and makes you sound like the hero.

That’s what guys mean when they say “stop playing the victim.”

“Seem honest in a way that makes you seem like you always win so I don’t feel uncomfortable.”