Authenticity: Reclaiming Reality in a Counterfeit Culture

Most books that I have written about in Authentication & Brand News™ (ABN) are of interest because they examine the problem of counterfeit products or consider how brand owners can fight against these counterfeits.

This book takes an intriguingly different approach to fakery. Written by Alice Sherwood, a Research Fellow at the Policy Institute at King’s College London, it examines the phenomenon of our counterfeit culture and how we can reclaim authenticity in that culture. Sherwood’s approach is more philosophical than technological.

The book is in five parts:

• Basic Instincts, which sets out and analyses the human instinct for pretence

• Natural-Born Fakers, describing imitators and mimicry in nature

• On the Authenticity of Things, which looks at the growth of money counterfeiting and then the evolution of brands

• Selling Authenticity, which relates the author’s discovery of anti-counterfeiting organisations, examines brand reputation and then the challenge of fake medicines, focusing on the anti-malarial artemisinin

• A View From Now, which relates the author’s own experience of being duped by an imposter, then moves in to virtual reality and the conspiracy theories prevalent on the internet.

In other words, Sherwood covers a wide spectrum of real and fake, authentic and counterfeit, as seen in human society, the animal kingdom, brands and the world of computers. She uses anecdotes and examples as she cross-references, weaving through history and some ingenious individuals to examine the motivations of practitioners of fakery and those trying to combat it.

It’s almost invidious to extract examples from her numerous tales, but… there’s the enmity between Sir Isaac Newton, in his capacity as Warden of the Royal Mint and William Challoner, a counterfeiter of the coins the Mint produced; and the lawsuit and counter-lawsuit of French fashion guru Yves Saint Laurent and the American Ralph Lauren – which leads Sherwood into a provocative discussion of the value of intellectual property rights.

In the chapter on artemisinin, she quotes Nicholas White, who says of the counterfeiters ‘you’re killing people. It’s pre-meditated cold-blooded murder. And yet we don’t think of it like that’.

If only the World Health Organisation and law enforcement agencies would be this blunt, maybe society and our political leaders would take more notice of the insidious problem of fake medicines. Sherwood concludes here that ‘fakery and inauthenticity are… not a private matter… Authenticity is indivisible’.

Despite me describing it as philosophical, this is an easy read, thanks to Sherwood’s deftness and lightness of touch in her writing. As philosophy, though, and as evident in the quote at the end of my previous paragraph, it gives an excellent underpinning of the need to not only fight the fakers but to make society aware of that need.