This is going to rip a hole in your brain that you cannot plug. It's going to permanently change the way that you see stuff. There's so many symbols and signs that human beings are experiencing a simulation of reality.
These simulations are not just mediations of reality. And they're not even descriptive mediations of reality. They're not based in reality at all.
[Music] This is your everyday life. This is your life. The shirt you're wearing right now, the room that you're sitting in, the boundary between real and something that's unreal has been permanently blurred.
As in, we cannot go back. We cannot return to the original. [Music] Jean Bodriard is famous for having written this incredible book called similacra and simulation.
My favorite quote, we live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning. Have you really just ever felt like your brain is constantly being hit with facts and updates and opinions, but none of it really sticks? In our world of endless content, real meaning gets lost in that noise.
Bodriard saw this coming a long time ago. And it sounds crazy. Shouldn't more knowledge, access to news and history and science make everybody smarter and better informed?
Bodriard's answer is kind of tucked away inside this collapse of the real into the simulation. One of Bodriard's biggest ideas is that we're no longer dealing with reality. We're dealing with simula.
And when he talks about simula, these are copies of a world that doesn't exist anymore. Everything kind of refers to something else. So, in the past, a picture captured of a moment of real life.
But now, the photos that we take are filtered or AI generated or staged just for social media. They're not records of reality. They're designed representations of how reality should look.
A painting of a king used to refer to an actual monarch. And a king nowadays is an emoji, refers to no one. It refers to an idea.
It's a simulation of something that cannot point to what it's referencing. A hyperreal world does not distinguish between a war where people are getting killed and a viral Tik Tok dance. Both of those exist as content and meaning becomes flattened.
If a memory of an event is shaped entirely by news clips and social media, do we even need the event itself anymore? What should seriously terrify you is that we're already at a certain point where it doesn't even matter if something is real. It only matters if it feels real.
Simulation is a process that begins with a model that generates a sign or a symbol that's meant to represent reality. So as the process of simulation advances, these signs lose their connection with the original thing that they were meant to represent. The signs take on their own life.
They become what's called simula. They're copies that have no original. It's a simulation of itself.
[Music] There's four levels of similacra. This is a faithful or what you would call true copy where the representation is clearly an artifact of a real and unblenmished original. So this is a perversion of reality here.
So either intentionally or unintentionally we're distorting the image of the original. They still have a link to the original but it's been changed. These mask the absence of a profound reality and they create a facade that looks real or natural but it's not tied to any original form.
These have no relation to reality at all. They are their own what he calls simulacum. Here this line between like real world and the world of simulacum becomes indistinguishable.
You cannot tell the difference between fourth order simulacrim and reality. [Music] There's a fascinating story in the book. It's about this tribe called the Ephuago people.
When the ethnologists first set foot in thisago territory, they were just captivated by their social systems and these intricate rituals. And the scientists came to document the authenticago way of life. But here's where things get really interesting.
As the fuagago people became more and more aware that they were being observed, they started to act a little different. The rituals became way more elaborate and started changing and modifying themselves and they started wearing a lot more traditional clothing a lot more often. So the tribes people were now performers acting out an idealized version of their culture to the scientists.
[Music] So all of these works that they put were published around the world. So over time theago tribe themselves started referring to these academic texts to understand their own traditions. So new generations that are now influenced by these published works adopted these documented customs as the new standard of culture.
The line between real and represented was gone. Let me give you another example here of this fourth order similar. How is Walmart a simulation?
It's this giant sprawling space. It offers everything that you want. Medicine, hairspray, clothing, groceries, whatever it is.
It's not just a supermarket. It's what this book refers to as a hypermarket. Everything becomes a sign.
Everything's a representation of something else. The produce is clean. It's uniform.
It almost appears artificial. You go to a farmers market, vegetables don't look like that. So what's natural is made into something simulated to reconstruct our expectations.
But why do we have that expectation? Because we saw it in the media which was a simulation of that thing. Let's go to Disneyland.
It's not just an amusement park. It's a super intensified simulation of aspects of the world that we inhabit. In their bluntness as an overt space of fantasy and commerce, it becomes more honest than the outside world that pretends to be real.
So Disney World serves to camouflage that the rest of the world is also a stage. It's also artificial. If you ask a random person to draw a picture of a princess, what will they draw?
That's our definition of real. That's in your head. You define what a princess is based on a simulation.
The simulation takes over around age two or three. So the hyperreal becomes more important than things that are actually real. [Music] Think of your social media profile right now.
It's supposed to be a reflection of you, but how often is it a carefully curated presentation for all of us so that you on social media with your complexities, your flaws, they're all smoothed out. This is a representation overtaking the original. You become a simulation of yourself.
Bodriard in this book argues that our consumer society is a hyperreal world where the consumption of images and signs and symbols don't just mask reality but they become it. Take the brand Nike just do it tagline have transcended physical products. Think about Mac is separated from the products to represent an idea a lifestyle.
So the simulation the brand image has overtaken the reality which is the product politics the simulation of the candidate becomes more critical more important than their abilities or their beliefs. Why do they win? Because we all of us prefer simulation.
We want it more. It's more important to us. Just think about everything in your life.
We're in a world with fake meat, fake fabrics, fake celebrities, fake personalities, fake plants, fake grass. The trouble is that our dopamine comes from these places instead of real things. We're addicted to simulations.
We get addicted to simula. We've sold our soul to hyperreal things. It's impossible for us to think in terms outside the simulation.
So, can we get back to real? I'm wondering this, too. Some people might say that we're past the point of going back to it.
Like, we're so deep in this world of fakes, even if we tried to get back to what is real, there'd be nothing left. There's another side to this, and there could be little pockets of realness out there. They might be small, they might be hidden, but they're moments or places where what you see is what you get.
So, think of a genuine smile from someone you've never even met before and how that just feels. Think of art that's made just for the love of making the art, not for the selling of it. I think the key is to just know that the world we're in is filled with illusions and distractions.
And we might not be able to completely get out of this, but we can definitely become smarter about navigating it. So just remember, anything that takes you further from who you are is the simulation. Clothing, ego, marketing, ads, buildings, neon lights, branding, labels, all simulation.
Essentially get back to nature. We are nature. That's one of the big illusions that is is similacro is convincing you that you're not nature anymore.
That I need to go spend time in nature. Bring back some kind of depth in your life. Slow living.
And remember that no matter what your opinion is of something, you're misinformed to a degree. The more certain someone is in your life, the more you should be skeptical, including yourself. Maybe the most radical thing that you can do today is slow down and unplug.
