Escaping Baudrillard's desert may prove more difficult than your map can provide.

LOOK AT THIS TWEET, YOU UNCULTURED SWINE.

THIS HAS BEEN FORETOLD AND YOU DID NOT LISTEN TO THE JEREMIADS OF THE PAST, NOW YOU MUST SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES TODAY.

ATTEND

It helps if you think of our modern culture as not a hodge-podge or mixture of varying different ethnic, national, and supernational cultures, but an overarching material culture that is germane to all modern humans.

That is, our culture is that of the post-television, post-internet representational sea of information. Your main method of learning what is going on in the world is to log in and start receiving data.

But as we have seen in the past year, it is becoming shockingly easy to create convincing-ish fake data, from outright lies and propaganda to edited videos to AI-generated fakes. And it is going to get harder and harder to discern "reality" from "simulation."

Jean Baudrillard spelled all of this out for you back in 1981 in Simulacra and Simulation. Even in what now seems the benighted low-tech 1981, Baudrillard foresaw where this was all leading.

Baudrillard's key insight was that humanity had replaced the immediacy of reality with signs and symbols, things that stand for or exist in place of the real. They are not mediations of reality or relational to it; they replace it.

Mass media and its consumption, through television, videos, and now the Internet, YouTube, TikTok, etc., have constructed a perceived reality, or simulacra, that we no longer have the ability to tell the simulacra from reality.

Think of the current state of Israel and Palestine. Every day each "side" of this conflict produces hours of video, tens of thousands of words, photographs, interviews, etc. How can you, as the viewer, critically separate fact from fiction as to what is going on?

The short answer is you can't: a caption below a video may be misleading. The video could be from months ago, or show something completely different. But as you lack essential context and information, your interpretation of the video is based on your prior knowledge.

Or more aptly, what you THINK you know. The video could also be fake, meant to confirm your biases and priors. Or it could be fake and intended to shake your confidence in your biases and priors. The point is: eventually the simulacra will be so good you can't tell.

And that point, you no longer live in reality; you live in a hyperreality created by mass media specifically to fool you, to drive information and opinion in a certain way, and to make you believe things that do not match up to actual reality.

Baudrillard described four stages of sign-ordering:

• In the first stage, you create signs to be things; they are faithful images or copies, or otherwise tokens for things. This is the Heideggerian being-at-hand, where our cultural products derive value from their place in the world with us.
  

• In the second stage, we begin to question whether the sign is a faithful copy. In this gnostic stage, we begin to see the appearance as "evil" or twisted, in the same way neoplatonists began to doubt the goodness of the material world.

  • The second stage is the stage of late capitalism, where we begin to suspect material culture is being altered or deliberately created to lead us down a specific path, where there is a dual nature to the objects of culture that conceal a hidden meaning.

• As the second stage progresses and we become less sure that material culture reflects the real world, we slip into the third stage, where the sign now actively resists and pretends to be a faithful copy, but there is no longer a referent.

  • In the third stage, meaning is conjured artificially and the truth is concealed. This is the "order of sorcery," where the powerful and wise control all of the power and the rest of us are left to gawk at wonders and miracles performed in town square.

If the third stage sounds like 2023 going into 2024, welcome to the desert of the real, folks.

• To know where we're going, you have to appreciate the fourth stage, however. In this stage, the simulacrum no longer even pretends to be tethered to reality. A sign points only to another sign, and it is iterated to infinity. Meaning is now circular.

We produce cultural products which refer to other cultural products which never refer to anything being-at-hand. Your time, your effort, your material possessions, your wealth, your reputation: they all exist within the big computers.

All human life is now totally artificial; there is no critical awareness of our situation and material culture. We produce, we consume, and history ends.

The global community becomes nothing more than a mass market; people are reduced to their marketing demographic segment.

It doesn't matter what is true, it matters what the media can make you believe is true. And if there are competing versions of truth (say, Fox News versus MSNBC) then the global drivers of culture will sell us the products we need to engage in simulated conflict over truth.

You can see these processes at work through the mass media, owned by large corporations bent on extracting as much profit from us as possible.

Things are now worth what you'll pay for them, not how useful they are to you. You will buy things you don't need to signal status to people who do not care.

Goods will be produced in one country and sold all the way around the world to people who have no need of them. The people who produce them will wonder why it is being produced, why their resources are going to something shipped thousands of kilometers away.

Rapid urbanization and overcrowding of cities will separate man from the natural world, reducing him to a cog in a machine, defined and valued by his capacity for output rather than his creative genius.

You see this already with plenty of people dismissing the humanities as a "useless" form of study, and directing people to learn "STEM" so that they can be better little obedient producers for the machine of culture driving. Learn how to push a button to make a widget, and never question why you are making widgets at all. Don't worry, we'll give you plenty of company scrip for the widgets you make, so you can buy more widgets and maybe some cogs, which our media branches will tell you that you need in order to happy.

and you will believe them, because why would the nice people who give you scrip to buy widgets and cogs lie to you about the state of the world and whether you should be buying widgets and cogs?

which leads to the last and final phenomenological change of the fourth stage: language and ideology itself will be weaponized against you, devoted to the creation of power imbalance relations between social groups.

The wealthy will have not only power but also the divine right to be so; think of every bootlicking blue check on Twitter/X who fawns over a demonstrably foolish person like Elon Musk. They say, "Well Musk has a lot of money so he must be producing something of value!"

How can you make that determination? You've lost any criterion for value decades ago; now all you have left are signs which point to other signs, caught up in a corporate-media dominated world that uses psychological tricks to convince you of a "reality" that doesn't exist.

Your very language , shaped by that media, and the ideas it propagates, are set up to blind you to anything resembling truth. Your history class will teach you who the great men are, just ask the corporations that publish the textbooks.

And don't worry, Texas students, Dennis Prager has some cheap Korean animations to show you what is true and what is not; no need to think for yourselves, your corporate masters have thought it all for you and packaged it up nice and neat for your consumption.

Baudrillard analogizes this all to Jorge Luis Borges's "Del rigor en la ciencia," a very short story. Read it here:

This is the "finest allegory of simulation." The map now precedes the territory; we have confused the thing we created to represent reality (culture) with reality itself, and now we have no way back to the genuine article.

In other words, once the genie is out of the bottle, you don't get to put him back. Human intellect has created its own demise: simulation so good it is becoming hard to tell what is true and what is not.

Without correspondence to the real, our truthmakers become more abstract. We collapse into holism and coherentism, which requires new truths to be consistent with what we already believe.

But what if what we believe is a lie?

Eventually, rationality itself as a heuristic for understanding reality collapses when we no longer impose a condition on reality that it must be rational, merely pragmatic or useful (to a given end).

Who cares if the humanities are really useful, do they make money!?

Anything that makes money is automatically good, and the wealthy have obtained this because they have more good than others of us. And if we want to be good, we had better start acting like them so we can be good too. Or else we will starve and die.

So says the dominant cultural paradigm. And good luck arguing against it; to do so you would have to be schizophrenic or self-destructive. You'd need entirely new concepts of truth, meaning, value, desire, labor, and so on.

I wonder if any thinkers set down a blueprint for that kind of thought, some way of rescuing us from Baudrillard's desert?

As it stands now, you at least understand the world in which you inhabit, a fake simulation presented to you as if it is horribly real, and one in which you will never surmount your ignorance and blindness.