There seems to be a widespread obsession with “authenticity” at the moment. I think it might be the next “natural ingredients”[1. rather than supernatural ingredients?]. Having just been on an extremely long holiday I’ve seen a lot of people posing really hard to get their authentic selfies just right. There’s a lot of work that goes into curating a perfect life. It seems to harm that the people that observe only the most perfect snippets of that person’s life too. What about an app that makes the cost of signalling that perfect life a bit higher?

My first crack the problem is to treat it like Instagram, but make it super stripped back; just photos and videos. The key move is that whenever you take a picture, the app also includes 2 seconds of video either side. Then someone can see a perfectly posed photo, but if you swipe it left or right it moves through the process of pulling that crazy duck face if you are a fraud, or of you having a great time if you are “authentic”.

I still don’t know what authentic really means when used to describe something like an experience, but this seems to be able to at least give a sense of it.