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Paper short abstract

Accelerated authenticity manifests amidst the dynamics of speed, visibility, and competition. By referencing Eriksen's notion of overheating, we can characterize its expressions as common practices that seem essential and empowering but that are persistently draining and never entirely fulfilled.

Paper long abstract

This paper develops the concept of accelerated authenticity to describe how subjects in late-stage capitalism pursue a notion of a true, or real self in a world that is rushed and overheating, drawing on Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s anthropological framing. Such a pursuit occurs under the duress of ever-shortening time and market logics that combine to form ‘market time’, in which constant verification and displaying of the self in a hyper-surveillance reality has become an almost intrinsic practice for many. Eriksen’s work describes a world that is for many both local and globalized, shaped by simultaneous crises of environment, economy and identity. Global processes are intensified and sped up in ways that produce clashes, or what Eriksen has called ‘clashing scales’ between global systems and local lives, spaces and places.

An autoethnographic and conceptual analysis reveals how market time and platform affordances render authenticity both a normative expectation and a fluctuating objective, intensifying the paradoxes of the now: information overload, the lack of slow time and the sense of a contraction of the present. By referencing Eriksen’s notion of overheating and Harmut Rosa’s framework of social acceleration, this paper partly explores South African transitions post-1994 to demonstrate how global acceleration interacts with local narratives of categorization and acknowledgment. Accelerated authenticity functions as an identity technology, one that engenders fatigue, competition, and ongoing self-surveillance, despite its promise of empowerment. I conclude by proposing 'cooling' strategies that recalibrate attention, re-time practices, and reintegrate identity work into slower, relational, and collective modalities.