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by Ethan Nash
New Dawn 195 (Nov-Dec 2022)
from
NewDawnMagazine Website
We are the first digital inhabitants of a universe of pure symbolic
media exchange, living in an empty space of virtuality, where
subjectivity and objective truth have intertwined together.
At the core of this collective experience, we find a fabricated
system of meaning that limits human participation to that of
mindless spectator, while a digital
hyperreality is slowly born.
Follow The Signs
Images serve as a symbolic system through which people communicate
and culture is transmitted.
Some images contain a system of symbols
and are used for various types of communication.
Societies often share common symbols, and many symbols contain the
same basic elements.
Taken together, these symbols convey specific
meanings.
For example, we are all born into a society with a written system of
some kind, made of symbolic shapes called language which refer to
spoken sound.
None of us were the engineers of this system to begin
with.
A study of synchromysticism and numerological exploration can help
uncover secret languages encoded inside the realm of reality, and
which can be used to decipher meaning in unique ways.
A feature that makes synchromysticism unique to other forms of
synchronicity is its focus on esoteric mystical symbolism and the
use of communications technology to document, share and compare
synchronicities related to such symbols - from ancient traditions to
mass media.
By utilizing cryptic understandings of symbols, we can decode, map,
and predict future world events.
How?
Symbols channel a form of
collective mass unconscious in the human species in which the
subconscious realm can be influenced and dictated, hence altering
the conscious sphere.
Not only are symbols used to pre-program major world events on our
television screens, but they are in fact a present reality in every
single element of everyday life.
We are living a fairy-tale dream...
We have become so overwhelmed with symbols (translated as
'information') in the modern world that objective truth has been
blanketed to the point it cannot be identified authentically.
Analyses of objectivation, institutionalization and legitimation are
directly applicable to the problems of the sociology of language,
the theory of social action and institutions, and of religion.
A vast, simulated experience has taken over the world, and reality
itself is being sucked in with it.
Simulated Reality
We live in a world of signs where almost everything around us has
become a matter of signification, connected with explosive growth in
media and related to changes in the conduct of everyday life.
Our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with
symbols and signs, and human experience has become akin to a
simulation of reality.
You may be familiar with the term simulation - no doubt it has been
said many times.
But,
just exactly what does
it mean?
The
Baudrillardian concept of 'simulation'
refers to the idea of
creating a reality; reproduced and based on a foundation of widely
interpreted symbols. 1
Simulated reality appears so real that one cannot separate the
'real' from simulation.
Jean Baudrillard
(1929–2007)
In fact, simulation dominates the real, and never again will the
real have the chance to produce itself because simulation is all
there is, according to the French sociologist, philosopher and
cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007).
Simulated reality is not a singular concept.
The simulation itself
is made up of infinite imitations of the operations of real-world
processes or systems over time.
These are known as
simulacra...
Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality
to begin with, or that no longer have an original. Representations
stand in place of a perceived real or are simply the 'real' itself.
2
Inside the control structure,
these simulacra are not merely
mediations of reality nor even deceptive mediations...
They are not
based in a reality at all.
No attempt to hide a 'reality' is made.
Instead, all we see is a process of how symbolism in culture and
media constructs perceived reality, programming false understandings
and making lives and shared existences illegible.
Society has become so saturated with simulacra, and lives so
saturated with the constructs of society, that all meaning has long
been rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable.
The onslaught of television, media growth and the constant
bombardment of images, are now intended to represent reality. From
birth, humanity communicates and understands this way.
Importantly,
the simulacra are never that which conceals the truth.
The truth which is concealed is that there is no truth.
The
simulacra, or untrue, is the truth.
To better understand what this means, let's look at key concepts
found in studies describing the nature of symbols, simulacra, and
interactions with collective perceptions of reality.
Psychology of Illusion
Not only does simulacra refer to 'copies without an original' but it
can also be used to explain the lack of depth, meaning or 'realness'
behind signs that penetrate our technological lives.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin, as early as 1936, argued that,
"the presence of the original is the
prerequisite to the concept of authenticity",
...and that this was missing from a world of
mass-produced commodities. 3
However, in a modern, technology-driven digital age, this has
developed even further to the point that no original even exists
from which to draw the authentic from.
Prof. Frank Webster, author of Theories of the Information Society,
once gave the example of when a user downloads a song to their
phone. The notion of an original is meaningless as the downloaded
song has no physical original - it is a copy of a song downloaded
from a digital platform.
In his essay The Ecstasy of Communication, Baudrillard explains that
Western technological society revels in its over-exposure to images.
He defines this visual overstimulation as "obscene," when
"everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of
information and communication."
Researcher Steven Connor summarizes Baudrillard's concepts of
simulacra by stating:
"All of contemporary life has been dismantled
and reproduced in scrupulous facsimile." 4
This refers to simulacra; the reproduction of signs of reality that
are, in fact, created.
Connor also discusses how simulation ,
"the real and referential" then "takes
the form of manufactured objects and experiences which attempt
to be more real than reality itself."
For example,
violence is disconnected from 'real' world destruction
and recorded in cyberspace as signs and images to be consumed
through mass media, gaming, and digital outlets.
Death as a tragic event has also been eliminated, and any event
surrounding this theme is surrendered to media representations of
it.
Whatever the event may be, it is experienced as an 'image event' and
consumed through symbolic exchange. Put simply, the image precedes
the real, is consumed, and forms the reality itself.
War images on TV form the actual perception of warfare, while real
events on-the-ground - whatever they may be - are masked in a sea of
digital simulations.
Simulacra,
is the psychological concept that drives many other vast
deceptions.
From 9/11 to shooting events, the COVID scamdemic
- symbolic images are programmed daily.
Let's take a deeper dive into how these messages are transmitted and
what is responsible.
In the world in which we now live,
the image precedes the real, is
consumed,
and then forms reality,
what is deemed by the mind to be
the 'real'.
TV has been the primary generator of images,
which are
manufactured by unknown operators.
War images projected on TV
- and
all electronic screens -
form the actual perception of warfare,
while real events on-the-ground
- whatever they may be
-
are masked
in a sea of
digital simulations....
Symbolic Exchange
We are now more wired to our interfaces.
We react to the television
news rather than the world, to a computer program rather than social
interaction, to email rather than vocal communication.
In all these, we react to simulations rather than the immediate
environment. Simulation supersedes 'real' interactions and has done
so now for generations.
Andrew Murphie and John Potts argue in their book Culture and
Technology that the media can never convey the 'real', and with the
ever-increasing reliance on the internet, simulations are only
becoming more prevalent, thus reiterating how simulacra erase and
dominate the 'real'. 5
The internet is a simulacra creator, highlighting the importance of
symbolic exchange in cyberspace.
It is a copy-making machine, a tool
that effortlessly replicates things and passes them along.
A digital
realm in which nothing is authentic and everything is vastly
produced.
This 'creation' allows for artificial place-markers for real items
or events.
The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as
irreproducible real, and signification gropes towards this reality.
This process is known as 'symbolic exchange' - a form of value
exchange that maintains and organises social relations and
hierarchies.
The difference with other forms of exchange is that the
value of an exchanged object does not value the act of exchanging
it. 6
Let's think about a designer brand t-shirt vs. a regular t-shirt.
Is
there really any difference between the two?
Is the designer brand
actually worth $200 of raw materials, or is it simply the
marketplace of value symbols (brands) that drives the worth of this
shirt?
Symbolic exchanges are not aimed at establishing equivalence (equal
value) between two exchanged tokens, as with other forms of
exchange.
The opposite of a resource-based system...
This psychological game allows for creators of said object to
influence and dictate (false) worth, and it is this framework that
powers why humans value grand deceptions over critical analysis.
How on earth did humanity get to this point?
It all began with the beginning of 'modernity' following the
Industrial Revolution...
Here, distinctions between representation and reality began to break
down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items,
turning them into commodities.
The commodity's ability to imitate reality immediately threatened to
replace the authority of the original version because the copy is
just as 'real' as its prototype.
This continued until the birth of postmodernity in which this
process expanded with newer technology to the point the simulacrum
now precedes the original, and the distinction between reality and
representation vanishes.
There is only the simulacrum... originality
has been buried...
Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between
reality
and simulacra produces several outcomes including (but not limited
to) the following:
Contemporary media, including television, film, print, and the
internet, blur the line between products needed (to live a life) and
products for which commercial images create a need.
Exchange value in which the value of goods is based on money
(denominated fiat currency) rather than usefulness.
Moreover,
usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms to
assist exchange.
Multinational capitalism which separates produced goods from the
plants, minerals and other original materials, and the processes
(including the people and their cultural context), used to create
them.
Think of medicine and plants as an example of this.
Urbanization which separates humans from the non-human world, and
re-centers culture around productive throughput systems so large
they cause alienation.
Language and ideology in which language increasingly becomes caught
up in the production of power relations between social groups,
especially when powerful groups institute themselves at least partly
in monetary terms.
Through these primary methods, collective values of a society,
object, event, or story are directed and engineered.
Disconnection
from reality to simulacra until the 'real' is forgotten.
Next, let us examine the long-lasting inter-generational effects of
this level of mass illusion.
Here we go beyond many authors' work and adapt this information to
the digital age.
The Birth of the Hyperreal
In the modern world, we have moved from the ability to reflect our
reality truthfully to the ability to mask and distort this reality,
and to masking the simulated reality altogether.
Finally, with the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, humanity
has already begun the transitional stage to an era in which
simulation asserts precedence over reality.
Hyperreality refers,
to a simulation of reality that acts as more
real than the real or a created heightened reality.
In this hyperreal cyberspace, signs for consumption are constantly in
production, and this creates a new reality, as virtual reality
cannot be completely known. 7
We are already witnessing the building blocks of this era.
There is
a sharp connection between nature and technology in terms of what
becomes an icon for the 'lost real' in hyperreality.
Almost all
forms of online media act as a hyperreal experience.
As an example of social media,
Facebook markets itself as a
connecting tool; a user posts updates of their life to their friends
who can react and comment as they wish.
This platform acts as a digital reproduction of real life:
a
heightened version of real communication between friends, but it
does not reflect real-life interaction.
This is the hyperreal, a digital simulation of reality, where a
person ultimately uses Facebook to form an online identity and
persona more vivid than the 'real self'.
Twitter is hyperreality as well, as it bears no reflection to real
life and creates a sublime cyberspace where a user, once a rational
subject, becomes decentred in online communication.
As subjectivity becomes detached from materially fixed, embodied
contexts, it is dispersed and multiplied continuously through
digitization.
In this hyperreal setting, traditional social settings are erased as
a real human being is re-signified as a digital representation for
Twitter users to consume.
The pure symbolic media exchange of cyber interactivity is
understood as the opposite of social.
The subject does not experience 'increased interactivity' but
instead experiences 'subtle death'.
Interaction dies in this hyperreal cyberspace and becomes merely a simulation of
communication.
Chat rooms, for example, allow users to function as floating
signifiers capable of becoming anything that is describable.
Thus,
online, communication is replaced by sign consumption, and subjects
become merely 'floating signifiers'.
If we replace 'chat rooms' with Twitter, we may conclude that power
becomes a signifier of hatred.
Going beyond this space, the phone itself is a hyperreal product - a
product of pure simulated society which acts almost as an extension
of ourselves.
Astra Taylor, author of 'The People's Platform
- Taking Back Power and
Culture in the Digital Age', has explained the ways that
"big media,"
through search engine algorithms and data collecting, can "absorb
who we are" by gathering,
Absorbed from the real to a digital representation.
In the future, with the introduction of AR and VR systems such as
the Metaverse, enhanced by
AI and
5G underliers, almost all
observable reality will soon fall under the spell of the hyperreal.
The gamification of society and the introduction of controlling
technologies as a Trojan Horse of mind-numbing pleasure means that,
humans are willfully creating the end of their realities...
There is no original that created the rest, no seed planted.
Everything will soon be automated, and this automation produces a
series of new symbols for humanity to absorb.
Baudrillard stated that representation stems from the principle of
the equivalence of the sign and of the real, but,
"simulation
envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a
simulacrum."
Therefore, the concept of a 'real' underneath the
simulation relies on the principle of the real.
Hyperreality is the absorption of the real - whatever it may have
been - into an ocean of simulated, digital representations.
Infinitely created and replicated until the real is long forgotten...
Science Fiction Comes
to Life
The postmodern world in which we live and the approaching
post-postmodern hyperreal timeframe are argued to go hand-in-hand
with famous science fiction works of our time.
In his book Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science
Fiction, Gerald Alva Miller suggests that,
"science fiction
increasingly proves the genre that is necessary to grasp the
postmodern world around us." 9
Baudrillard notes that science fiction,
"is no longer anywhere, and
it is everywhere, in the here and now, in the very principle of the
surrounding simulation."
In other words,
he argues science fiction
is hardly fictional at all, it is merely waiting "in its crude
state" to emerge.
Are we really 'waiting' for this change to come?
Or is it already
here?
Miller believes this wait is over and the technology of contemporary
science fiction now,
"occurs in realistically depicted versions of
the present or even the past."
He calls television,
"a viral, endemic."
Baudrillard sees radical action such as destroying the system
as no
longer a real possibility.
This is because there is no system...
It is a simulated, collective
experience driven by symbols and images and programmed by those who
are controlling those very mechanisms.
We are slowly welcoming the immorality of consuming death as a media
spectacle.
Marleen S. Barr discusses the concept of post-postmodernism, which
she says exposes,
"the hitherto science fictional impact of
technology on society and culture... when what was once science
fictional comprises the very definition of reality." 10
Cyberspace becomes a space of pure symbolic exchange where humanity
disappears and subjects become nothing more than a sign or image to
be consumed.
Technology has been engineered as a weapon in which the human
subject is reduced to a mere sign for consumption...
This consumption
of a person is represented by reducing a subject to a mere symbol
for exchange, and even the event of death is consumed by hyperreal
media.
Dehumanization in the media, or reducing the subject to the object,
happens in hyperreality.
This is currently perpetuated by online
users who are still human beings themselves.
This important analysis of simulacra and hyperreality draws
attention to the need to see the human behind the image, to see the
subject behind the object, and re-humanize the subject in
cyberspace.
We must do everything we can to disconnect ourselves as much as
possible from the hyperreal that is currently birthing a world of
endless simulated experiences (the Metaverse is an emerging
example).
By doing so and looking beneath the surface, we can resist.
How...?
Because we recognize the 'system' that controls us does not
physically exist at all - it is an illusion.
Almost everything is an unauthentic copy of a copy, masking the fact
there is no original base.
Everything we have been told is a lie.
Therefore, I recommend you
throw away anything you have ever been told about the world and
begin to form an independent perspective from scratch...
When you do, and you also take this information into consideration,
you will uncover startling truths.
Footnotes
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www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
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www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum
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www.ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity/
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www.amazon.com.au/Postmodernist-Culture-Introduction-Theories-Contemporary/dp/0631200525
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www.books.google.com.au/books/about/Culture_and_Technology.html
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www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100546755
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www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMwyZbS4JTU
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link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137330796
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www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08854300600950285
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