Beyond the Frame | Cowboy Clothes and Sunday Best
Left: “Carter<br>Family promotional portrait.” Victor Talking Machine<br>Company, c. 1928 ( Public<br>domain). Right: “Gene Autry publicity still,”<br>c. 1940s ( All rights reserved)
I was recently interviewed for an episode of Ruined by the<br>Internet? entitled “Digital<br>Humanity: From Real Minds to Synthetic Hallucination?.” We discussed<br>how synthetic content and AI is challenging how we establish digital<br>identity and the notion of authenticity.
While much of the last thirty years of internet punditry has focused<br>on “the attention economy,” I believe that authenticity has<br>remained just as scarce as attention. The internet was<br>positioned as a medium that promised to bring us more connected and<br>closer together. Authenticity should have been an afterthought in this<br>world. But intermediaries have always distorted what’s real, as<br>exemplified in the most “authentic” of U.S. American music, country<br>music.
Country has a variety of roots. One of the most important is<br>Appalachian music. The Carter Family (seen above, left) emerged from the<br>hills of Virginia to bring this music - soon to be known as country<br>music - to the masses. Like many performers from the Appalachians, they<br>performed in their Sunday Best, a.k.a the clothes they might wear to<br>church.
So where did the signature cowboy hats and spurred boots of “America’s Favorite Singing Cowboy,”<br>Gene Autry (seen above, right), come from? Not the Appalachians nor the<br>plains of Oklahoma. Depending on how you tell the story, it’s some<br>combination of Hollywood Westerns“Hollywood didn’t call the tune, just the dress code.<br>Gene Autry and other Western-cowboy-outfitted artists were much more<br>popular in B films of the 1930s and 1940s than were their<br>Southern-hillbilly-styled counterparts like Roy Acuff. So, emerging<br>honky-tonk artists like Patsy Montana, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Rex<br>Griffin, and Webb Pierce donned cowboy-styled outfits to sing their<br>hillbilly songs of life’s travails. Increasingly backed by hot,<br>electrified instruments, they shaped the sound, lyric, and look that has<br>been at the core of country music ever since.” ~ “Ten Things<br>You Didn’t Know about the Origins of Country Music” by Richard A.<br>Peterson, author of Creating<br>Country Music
, New York record label executives, and Chicago radio<br>broadcasters. The people who directed the image and themes of the genre<br>knew nothing about riding horses, corralling cattle, or even driving<br>pickup trucks.
In spite of this reality, fans expect that their country and hip hop<br>performers are somehow authentic.
Authenticity has at least two meanings: the first is a technical<br>definition where one must authenticate to prove your identity<br>to a website and the second is a social meaning where your identity<br>seems authentic to others. But this is a slippery basis of<br>trust and prone to subversion. Even worse, our identities change over<br>time.
The interview with Ruined by the Internet? covers this<br>ground and much more. I even give a few concrete answers about what to<br>do as online life becomes increasingly difficult to navigate. As I say<br>in the sample below - the internet is an unimaginably big place; there<br>is a lot of opportunity out there if you don’t like what you see.
The Conversation
“Digital<br>Humanity: From Real Minds to Synthetic Hallucination?.” Ruined<br>by the Internet?, July 6, 2026 ( Ruined by the<br>Internet?)
[Transcript sampled from the podcast discussion]
Gareth King (Host)
The statistics are telling us is that over fifty percent of online<br>content is now considered synthetically generated. Would you say that<br>[the dead internet] theory is reality now, or do we have a bit further<br>to go until things would be what you would consider a dead internet?
David Schmudde
[The internet is] unimaginably large. So, there is still plenty out<br>there that’s human generated. […] What I mean by plenty, I mean there’s<br>so much out there that it would take a lifetime to consume. I’m talking<br>about outside of what is being machine generated and also outside of the<br>centrally controlled platforms.
The question is really about findability. That’s the core question.<br>And there could be a case where all of this slop, all of this machine<br>generated stuff, plus the centralizing forces of these social media<br>platforms, there’s almost nothing else that can be found very easily.<br>And today I do concede, of course, that it’s probably most people’s<br>experience that they see a lot more AI generated stuff than they used<br>to. Maybe fifty percent of their timelines are AI generated.
Gareth King
For a lot of people, a huge amount of their time in the digital world<br>is spent, say, on a phone. And a lot of that time is spent on that<br>social media that you’d mentioned. And I think I’d love for us to talk<br>about the role that social media itself has played in getting us to this<br>point through the monetisation of attention.
I read something from the head of Instagram who was basically<br>explaining to people that the way to be...