Last week, Julien Smith wrote about how Akon’s prison time was fabricated. The people who comment to that post talk about how his career is doomed and all. And while I don’t know enough about him as an artist to comment on that, the story does show an important point.

I found out about this from a blog post, as shown above. With the internet, where word spreads faster than ever, fakes can easily be exposed. And once exposed, the word travels faster and wider than ever before.

Akon managed to fake it for the start of his career without being discovered. At this point, even if his reputation is shot, he’s already made enough money to give him a (more than) decent life, I think.

But for my generation – the millenials? We’ve grown up in this world of super-connectivity, a world where you can’t fake it anymore.

Faking it is becoming almost impossible. You’ve got to be real to succeed.