William Davies · The Reaction Economy · LRB 2 March 2023
![The Reaction Economy](https://ironwynch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/ea7d72770995-davieswat.jpg)
The quest for authentic joy or shock – or best of all, joy and shock at the same time – which drives reaction…
It is an infernal riddle of digital culture that ‘authenticity’ is constantly breeding its opposite: the ‘spontaneous’ event that proves to be no such thing, the ‘surprise’ that turns out to be staged, the emotional outburst that has been practised. TikTok is awash with apparently ‘authentic’ clips of humorous reactions (often based on pranks), the…