I always liked his observation that Disneyland was created in order to make the rest of America seem real.
Fun fact: one of the lawyers who helped buy land for Disney was ex-CIA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Helliwell
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Simulacra and Simulation
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: one of the lawyers who helped buy land for Disney was ex-CIA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Helliwell
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going to respond to your other comment here since it got killed:
i think a lot of art could be described as fashionable nonsense, and hyperreality is an artistic philosophy. it's interesting to contemplate the root concept of a map overflowing its territory, however consuming long tracts of resulting thought is questionably useful. i didnt mind reading some of baudrillard's cool thoughts books, application of hyperreality was well translated via small vignettes of thinking. but i couldnt finish the book discussed here, it's still sitting somewhere bookmarked.
re this comment:
it's clear that the powers that be will use any tool to maximise power. that's the point i gleaned from this comment because i dont identify as left or right. this is a left leaning forum, attacking the left as a whole is inevitably going to result in personal offense to left identifiers. therefore your point probably won't get translated, reducing the usefulness of these words to baudrillard levels.
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#13The idea of a copy with no original is even more relevant than when the book was first published as it has become possible to use AI to generate fake images. (e.g. the million "Look what they took from you" slop accounts on Twitter that post nostalgic images of "traditional values" with clear anachronisms or inaccuracies)
Current events have also been increasingly defined by fake images or videos that can be made very realistic-looking at first glance. There doesn't seem to be any effective mechanism to stop these kinds of lies from spreading. Social media incentivizes this content and whatever fact checking or correction that comes after is too slow to reverse the effects of the misinformation.
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: one of the lawyers who helped buy land for Disney was ex-CIA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Helliwell
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My mind tingles when I heard about three letters and subverting the public.
Reminds me of the CIA make Jackson Pollack and modern art popular.
The idea I come back to is that history has its own momentum. You may be able to nudge it in the right direction and accelerate things. But it’s hard to push against momentum. Examples of this are “industry plants” where an industry will try to create the next great hit, but reads the room wrong.
But if you work at the CIA you gotta believe you can subvert the public. “You can’t tell people what to think, but you can tell them what to think about”
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#15I think most of these issues are symptoms of the fact that "People are forced to take decisions in limited time, based on limited information and possible misinformation". It has nothing to do with the fact that general public are dumb or ignorant. How do you expect me to make informed decisions about the world if I am forced to work a day job and raise a family while taking out time for personal entertainment and recharging. To remove the constraints, one must imagine an alternative universe where a person can stop time, read and reason as much as he wants. In such a universe, these theories would fall apart.
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: one of the lawyers who helped buy land for Disney was ex-CIA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Helliwell
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Bro - Chomsky was an academic who wrote books, not an actual leader of the left, a group which is more than used to purging its ranks of the unpure anyway. It took Bluesky about 2 seconds to forget Chomsky as a person (though not all of his works) existed. Meanwhile the actual commander in chief of the armed forces right now was also, how you say, "deeply embedded" with Epstein too
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#17I like Existential Comic's explanation of the simulacrum concept, using football/soccer injuries as an example:
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#18I always enjoy the moment in The Matrix where Neo flops a hollowed out copy of this book open, to fish out some illicit mini-disc he’s storing in it.
I like that he had a very accurate criticism of their use of his influences in the first film (that the simulacra he describes wouldn't be so clearly differentiated from the real), and they ended up doing a better job in later films, as the Matrix's clear delineation from the real world was intended to lure the people into thinking their simulation was more real. The Matrix was the simulacrum after all.
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#19How readable and accessible is this book?
I am always attracted to philosophy and culture theory books, but more often than not they are extremely dry and academic, and sadly I require more excitement to hold my squirrel attention.
It is no wonder much more people have read the “Industrial Society and its Future” than anything by Jacques Ellul.
Re: Simulacra and Simulation
#20I always enjoy the moment in The Matrix where Neo flops a hollowed out copy of this book open, to fish out some illicit mini-disc he’s storing in it.
Recently re-watching the Matrix after reading this book, I had to exclaim - "Ha, that's not the real one, the actual book extremely thin compared to that codex!"
And it's just funny for what details the brain is unable to suspend disbelief...