authenticity

This week Rhode Island repealed a law which criminalised lying online (maximum penalty: a year in prison). Apparently, the law was enacted to fight online fraud, but the breadth of the drafting meant that it could conceivably apply to all sorts of online communications. It's interesting that this law was ever passed, but what I think is particularly interesting is that in the coverage of its repeal the standard line has been "well... everybody lies online". Of course, it's persuasive that criminalising lying in one communicative context while it is simply frowned upon elsewhere is problematic and chilling on free speech and for these (and other) reasons it's great that the law was repealed; but the framing of online dishonesty as something everybody does got me thinking about authenticity online and the way that we think about 'the truth' in networked publics.

Would we be so quick to say that "everybody lies" in the meatverse? Do we conceive of everyone as fundamentally untrustworthy in our day to day lives, or is there something specific to the digital realm that encourages this view?

Of course, evaluations of 'authenticity' online lack the situatedness, the physical and verbal cues of a similar assessment in the real world, and I'm sure that informed the development of a view that online identities were merely masks that could not be trusted as you couldn't 'reach' the person behind them (to verify, or to shame; to regulate); no doubt this is why things like the friendster 'fakester' scandal reverberated so far.

However, part of me wonders whether the vision of the online self as a slippery, untrustworthy, un-pin-downable fiction is becoming outdated these days. We are entering the web 2.0-verse of multi-sited, transferable online identities, with online histories and online reputations - we are fleshing ourselves out online. People are more truly fixed as themselves in more places online than they have ever been. Surely at some point this new version of online citizenship will overtake the shadowy who's who of the irc-verse?

Indeed, even now we seem to be seeing less of a discourse around the need to secure identity and more of a resistance to corporate/legal solutions to identity authenticity (eg debates about online passports or real name policies). To me, the discourse around truth and authenticity vs performativity and play seems to be increasingly pregnant with the desire to hold on to a notion of the web as a 'lawless frontier'; increasingly pregnant just as this view seems, for good or ill, to be  becoming increasingly untenable in the corporatised web we live in now.

So where does that leave us? Worryingly, I feel like Rhode Island is repealing its law at a time when the law is becoming redundant anyway; that the challenge is no longer a matter of finding ways to insist upon authenticity but rather a question of how to find room for any kind of multiplicity...