Just a Robot Keeping It Real

One of the surprising outcomes of the social media era of the Internet is its internal contradiction between the endless possibilities for fiction, identity play, performance, and lying, and the profile structure, with its insistence on a single, unified, and quantifiable self. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists “you have one identity” while the entire history of Internet culture suggests one, in fact, has many. As a result, the meaning of authenticity becomes a crucial point in determining the future of online life, and in this respect, it represents a contradiction that the world of performance is uniquely familiar with. This project reconsiders virtual performances of authenticity and realness as platform-specific social texts, using performance theory to complicate the idea of univocal self-construction in online life. I present the story of Miquela, a virtual Instagram influencer whose complex creation story and dramatic reveal prompts large and nebulous questions about the nature of authenticity, performance, and self-branding in social-media space. I develop three forms of authenticity that Miquela deploys throughout her career to perform as an influencer and Instagram microcelebrity, and update connections between authenticity, intimacy, and self-image to adapt to late-2010s ways of self-branding and personal storytelling online. Further, I argue these same tools are reflected by corporate brands to further compel audiences to entangle brand identity with their own selves. The tropes of Instagram self-performance are deployed across a spectrum of personal, political, social, and capitalist modes, with authenticity enabling this new height of context collapse.