The question of whether something is authentic or not appears to relate to two axes:
As all categories of this sort, these are continua to describe things that do not lend themselves to absolute, perfect fits of one label or the other. Some, like the rationalist's real impersonal universe, try nonetheless.
By real I mean like a rock: no matter what you say, it - or at least the underlying matter constituting it - is still there. (And if what you say is You with the jackhammer, break this rock and clear our path
, the resulting multitude of rocks and dust remains.) There is something underneath the surface perception that, if known, becomes a connection to a greater world beyond our subjective interpretation, its existence and particularlity independent of our knowledge or will.
To clarify, by real I do not mean merely (but may include):
By arbitrary I mean the fact that we would call a certain composition a rock and not a pebble, gravel, lava or dust.
A predominantly urbanized, industrialized subculture with an economy where the biggest commodity is information is one where people prima facie value the arbitrary over the real.
A different society where people have more immediately noticeable and direct vested interest in the bison herds in the right place at the right time, the rain falling at the right times in the right amounts, etc. may be more inclined to value the latter as the important one and the former as a necessary evil at worst and helpful ornament at best.
This distinction is less about the thing itself and more about our relationship and approach to it. While people will disagree about what is or is not a real person, we can all agree that the following at the most abstract level are true:
One would probably find a world of purely one or the other to be unbearable: an inescapable hell of exposure and shame on the one hand, or a solipsistic hell of meaningless isolation on the other.
It is also possible to have a mix of the best of both or the worst of both. The worst of the personal, to clarify, is not the din of being lost in the uncaring twittering crowd - that is about as impersonal as it gets - but the "ordeal of being known", all while fully cognizant of it and wanting none of it.
The true world of the rationalist is real and impersonal. The personal is relegated to a separate universe, a multitude of isolated wills that observe and act upon a mechanical, passive it that constitutes our (however grudgingly) shared environment.
The true world of the ancient predecessors of Western civilization, with their gods and ancestors and karma and appeasements, is personal and arbitrary: it's all about who you know, and the what eventually follows.
The core Christian belief is in a transcendental personal Reality that is the only true and self-sufficient one over all the others. Though lacking this monolithic unity, the persons of the world inhabited by animists and autists are assumed to be Real each in and of themselves, with the relations and laws of the (neurotypical) "civilized" ancients having a secondary, subservient existence.
At its best, an arbitrary and impersonal world can only be a subset of the universe: a system of rules that one happens to get lost in sometimes as a special interest, but which one would be far too happy to infodump about to actual persons once one has exited the world of that system. At its worst, it truly is the universe reduced to a fungible anonymity in which love is literally nonsensical (not merely dismissed as irrational for being against self-interest), when everything is dictated by (merely) made-up, unaccountable systems of deeming and pretence that are real only in the suffering they create.
A modern, comprehensive bureaucratic state is often invoked as an example, though there are less immediately coercively brutal implementations:
Just as we've gotten used to being able to pull out our smartphones whenever we have a spare moment or need to settle some dispute or trivia, we'll reflexively ask Glass the answer to a question, or to snap a photo, or to check the news real quick, or to look through our Facebook and Twitter stream, even at moments when we probably shouldn't. And since the amount of effort it takes to do so will be so much smaller than it is with a smartphone (which is already terribly small), we will do all of it with that much more frequency. No event will be complete without taking a photo and posting it to our social network of choice, because unless it's documented and unless we've stuck it in everyone else's stream, then it didn't really happen.
I don't think that's a positive...
But at some point the post-manufactured-consent monopolization can become, by design, its own form of coercion:
the end goal is for every single product to have no connection to reality whatsoever. Developed by ppl who you cannot find out about because they're all contracted, sold as one part of an incredibly weird and confusing whole (or better yet forced upon you), and marketed to Fans who like an Idea and become idealogues fighting for something that doesn't exist.