Thanks for this.
It was particularly interesting to me how PKD's themes of simulacra, Disneyland, and Watergate closely matched those of Jean Baudrillard who wrote[1], somewhat more pessimistically but very much in the same vein as PKD, in 1981:
... Watergate. You remember this. Nixon. Wiretaps in the
plants. Deepthroat. All that jazz. Watergate was the exact
same fucking thing as Disneyland—an imaginary thing whose
only purpose is to distract us from the fact that every
last thing is now imaginary. But where Disneyland is a
fictional magic land, Watergate is instead a “scandal.”
The real scandal beneath the surface is that there is no
difference between facts and bullshit. Both the CIA and
the journalists from the Washington Post who broke the
story use the same tactics. What Watergate did was create
a fiction moral compass of sorts. All politics are
permanently buttfucked, but if we occasionally point
fingers at some buttfucker who is doing some serious
buttfucking, it creates this sense that there are less
serious degrees of buttfucking and even possibly regular,
wholesome vagfucking. ...
[1] Kind of wrote - excerpted from a translation into modern vernacular of The Precession of Simulacra at http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article...