We’re All OnlyFans Models

Living in Byung-Chul Han’s Transparency Society

The Artist's Model, Tea by Angelo Garino (1920)

Ours is a society of fetishised transparency. The demand of the day is to bring your “true self” to the world. Modern people are forced to be themselves when being oneself is a horror beyond imagination. Progressive companies, for instance, want us to bring our so-called authentic and unique selves to work. Implying there’s something to you outside of being an employee; they want all that excess-existence. But we all know if people were truly themselves at work, most of us would get fired. Let’s say someone is an urophile (a person who gets sexually aroused by urine) and decides to bring this other side of them to work, saying, “Today I will be myself, and I’d like my colleagues to piss on me so that I can get turned on,” how would Human Resources react? I assume this isn’t the authenticity they want. Leaving aside my obscene example (forgive me, I have a vulgar sense of humour), most people dislike their jobs, working purely to pay the bills and survive. Even those who lie to themselves, claiming to like their jobs, don’t enjoy wage labour. You could love your vocation but still not want to be owned by a corporation, deal with workplace politics and attend excrescent corporate meetings. And so, outside of vacations and the usual fake sick leaves, we psychologically cope with the ugly reality of work through useless training workshops, myriad career planning sessions and having an office dog. Truth be told, if people unreservedly expressed their frustration with work and indeed brought remnants of their subjective truths to work, most companies wouldn’t survive, as the inherent tyranny and dark underside built into any business would be too traumatic for even the CEO and board of directors to handle. 

The tyranny of transparency has created a tragic reality where people can’t pretend anymore. We can’t psychologically bring ourselves to play a role in society, hiding what we prefer to be hidden. Not that there’s an authentic you behind your assumed social role because our inner truth is the lie we construct to be able to live with the misery of our actual lives. But neoliberal postmodernity doesn’t even allow us to live in this indispensable fiction. To our agonising detriment, we must constantly be ourselves by excavating for some bona fide kernel of who we are. The individual is forced to bring out their true selves when there is no truth within them to bring. The clamour to self-examine with clichés like “be your true self” exhausts us. As Žižek says, if you truly look into yourself, what you find is shit. It’s a mistake to assume our deepest motives are humanistic ones of love, truth and justice. Most of us are full of envy, jealousy, self-centred selfishness, etc., and we lie to ourselves more than anyone else while being oblivious to our narcissism. If humans have a soul, it’s an ugly one. And so, living an ethical life would be never bringing what’s inside us out into the world. If you treat people with decency and respect, endeavouring not to partake in acts that exacerbate racism, sexism, exploitation and so on, your inner ugliness is irrelevant to being a good person. In that sense, isn’t our social mask liberating? By pretending to be a good person, our social life allows us to truly be good regardless of the shit inside us. What’s more, even if all your goodness is a facade, it fundamentally changes your inner life as you discover this new truth about yourself through society. Sadly, though, our times are gradually robbing us of this emancipatory potential that we gain through the Other. Through the ideology of fetishised transparency, we’re made to feel guilty of being inauthentic and sinning by keeping a part of ourselves from the world. But this part is purely virtual, inexistent in reality, so the guilt persists as we can never find this unadulterated self. The commandment to “Speak your truth” has annihilated our ability to live out any truth.

That being said, we have to problematise transparency itself. Isn’t this demand to be transparent a performance we must put on? We’re allowed to be transparent only within the existing ideological landscape; that is, the quasi-Maoist struggle sessions you see online are rarely about neoliberal society’s social and structural issues where humans are reduced to puppets of capitalism. Instead, they’re solely individual ones. It’s typical, for instance, to see people being “vulnerable” on social media, talking about their flaws, insecurities and the likes, consequently receiving high praise. But aren’t such public confessions a peculiar kind of performative vulnerability? Don’t we take on the aesthetic of being vulnerable or our “true self” in order to please the unyielding gaze of the Other? When people cry on camera, talk about their mental health, post pictures of their stretch marks and excess body fat or write an essay-length pseudo-feminist caption of why they’re posing with their hairy armpits, isn’t all of this an inauthentic performance of authenticity? Truth be told, ours is the best time to understand the acclaimed Shakespearean line:

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

(As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7)

I recall watching an interview with an OnlyFans model who claimed that most of her fan requests aren’t sexual ones; rather, they want her to “be herself,” showing them her typical day of making coffee, cleaning up the apartment, and maybe for those with a peculiar taste, let’s say, a live-stream of her going to the toilet. We all know, though, that no one can consciously be themselves, knowing the gaze of social media is upon them; as in, can you mindlessly be yourself knowing strangers are watching your every move? I wager not. So, isn’t the bizarre nature of her life that she has to perform even the most mundane aspects of daily life? Her existence is even more bleak than what’s portrayed in The Truman Show because, in her case, unlike Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), she’s fully cognisant of having to perform while nonetheless pretending to be authentic. Frankly, if I were an OnlyFans model, I’d much rather have sex on camera than have the pretence of authenticity when making my cup of coffee every morning. That would be hell.

But in a way, aren’t we all OnlyFans models? Isn’t social media, in its myriad forms, the technology postmodernity deserves? In our times of pornographic vulnerability, people have taken self-expression to the point of obscenity: Byung-Chul Han’s Transparency Society is a society where people have nothing to hide, eroding away ambiguity, mystery, secrecy, veiling and the romance of privacy, leading to an unenchanted, bare and mechanical world. The boundary between our private and social lives has disappeared; people are pressured to prolapse their innerness to the world. To unapologetically be yourself is the commandment from on high. We’re all putting on a show of “who I am,” and like an OnlyFans model, life is presented as a spectacle to amuse the gaze of the Other. From sharing our travels and workout videos to crying on camera and posting a black square online when yet another black person is murdered unjustly, our performance is the boundless test of what our master accepts. Be it our social media followers or colleagues at work, our culture’s only meaning exists in performativity, in which we find our truth through performing for the Other while, in reality, being mindless agents of capital. And, of course, when ideologues say you can wake up to the truth and step outside the matrix, this is the biggest performance of them all. Don’t be duped: there’s no stepping outside of our symbolic fiction, as truth lies in the lie itself. You find yourself through others.

Much like the proverbial godfather of postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard theorised history is over, there is no metanarrative as there always was for human cultures, and we’re pathetically scraping for vestiges of meaning. The universalism of our time isn’t any positive substantiality like those Enlightenment thinkers hoped for of reason, human rights, etc., but a shared loss of a dead God, dying cultures and privation of symbolic meaning. All we’re left with is to Nietzscheanly will meaning into being. But can we be the artisans who work from a groundless fabric? Only time will tell. And yet, does time exist without history? Perhaps not. It’s clear that being human in our times is a futile endeavour. We then reside in a single datum: To perform is to be human.

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This is an excerpt from a longer essay I’m writing on ontological narcissism and human subjectivity. You can find the working draft here, and feel free to comment on it.