“It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981) “For 400 years,” says Catherine Austin Fitts, “we’ve had a model of the human, a model of the economy, a model of the planet that is a machine model, and it’s fostered great productivity in some ways, […]
Jean Baudrillard was a French social theorist who became known as a prophet of artificial reality. His most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), concerns the point at which representation loses connection with reality, and ultimately displaces it, trapping humanity in a synthetic world of copies of copies, images without originals, references without referents: a closed circuit of artificiality, where that word loses all meaning since it’s all there is. He defines the stages through which simulation must pass to arrive at our present moment, and projects a world which is neither real nor unreal, but hyperreal.
THE MURDEROUS CAPACITY OF IMAGES In Simulacra and Simulation — 1981 — Baudrillard was announcing, not predicting, the ‘death of the real’. He ironically reveres Disneyland, which he says ‘is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding […]