Authenticity Optional: The Unreal Internet of 2025

On manufacturing "realness" for personal & political gain.

Late last month, music content creator and marketing expert Finn McKenty, aka “The Punk Rock MBA” announced his retirement from YouTube in a stunning way. McKenty was known for his deep dives on punk music, which seemed very well researched and were beloved by many. Going on Jesea Lee’s podcast, he stated that he was only creating this form of content because he saw it as an easy way to get money, and now that he’s made enough money, he is quitting. Simple as that.

“I don't really have any interest in music. I was just doing it for the money, and I hit my financial goals”, said McKenty. It seems absurd that he would devote so much time to a subject matter that he had literally no interest in, clarifying in the same interview that despite having videos exclusively dedicated to bands like System of a Down, he claims to have never heard a System of a Down song; “for a lot of [the videos] I just like, literally just read Wikipedia”.

This Anthony Fantano video covers the story in depth, simmering in the irony that someone built a career commenting on punk rock, an artistic movement most known for its raw, unabashed authenticity, despite having no interest or personal connection to it. In my mind, there’s a lot to gleam from this story, the first of which being never trust a “marketing expert” to make quality content that comes from the heart.

What I’d like to meditate on here is the question of authenticity and what that means in the context of a monetized Internet. As I’ve written about before, the arc of modern media can be summarized as follows: first, there was traditional media, where every TV show and advertisement was specifically curated by networks and marketing experts to put forth specific images of the life you ought to be living and what acceptable political discourse should be. Then, there was the early, non-monetized Internet, which connected human beings and allowed creatives to rise to prominence without having to appeal to the gatekeepers of traditional media. In this more democratized era—at least that’s how we believed it to be—“authenticity” was valued heavily, as creatives were perceived as breaking the mold by being “real”, aka not spouting heavily-curated ad copy and showing their everyday lives through genres like vlogs, Get Ready With Me videos, and more. Podcasters, YouTubers, and commentators across the political spectrum built brands around their realness, “saying the things the lamestream media is too scared to say”. On YouTube in particular, the word “You” is literally in the name of the platform, signaling that this content is by the creator for the audience with no middleman. This was an unprecedented shift in how humans communicated that we are still reeling from the impacts of.

Recently, however, we’ve been living in the monetized Internet, where creatives are forced to compete inside of just a few algorithm-powered platforms (including TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and a YouTube unrecognizable to the platform of the same name from the mid-2000s). Success under “platform capitalism” is driven by engagement, which is a bit more decoupled from a creator’s “authenticity”; typically, the biggest creators are ones who make their viewers the angriest or the most shocked. MrBeast has become the most successful YouTuber, but I don’t know that anyone would call him “the most authentic”; as many have pointed out, by intentionally creating only videos with the most clickable titles and thumbnails, he’s shaped himself, his entire brand and identity, around the goals of the platform, not the other way around.

Authenticity, it turns out, isn’t what it used to be. Finn McKenty pretended to like punk rock for years, got wealthy from it, then abandoned it without a second thought. It’s by no means the only example, either: plenty of people fake their lives for profit. Far right commentators have been revealed to be paid off by a Russian disinformation campaign, yet they still have their careers. Do audiences simply not care about realness anymore? Have we passed Peak Authenticity, or are we still living with this illusion that online personalities are real unless proven otherwise? How is “being real” still in demand when it’s so easy to fake?