Before I begin, a disclaimer: this is not a comprehensive discussion of Baudrillard’s work. I am not a scholar of Baudrillard’s work. The man wrote like a prophet, make grandiose yet esoteric claims that ten people can interpret in eleven different ways. He tended to cite movies more often than other scholars. So consider this piece not an attempt at an authoritative summary of Baudrillard’s work, but my personal take on what I get out of him… and why I think they’re wrong to focus on the Internet.
We Live In a Simulation
The later part of Jean Baudrillard’s career was marked by a shift in focus as he traveled through the domain of media studies and into the void beyond. From this void was born an esoteric critique, the focus of works such as The Ecstasy of Communication and The Perfect Crime. Essentially, Baudrillard argues, human nature is to seek the truth, to describe the world and explain its every aspect in excruciating detail, and in so doing we construct a model of the world in our cultural consciousness. When we think about the world, then, we are really thinking about this model, which we call “reality”.
The problem is that this reality is a simulacrum. In other words, it is not a faithful set of references to things that exist in the physical world, but a cultural memeplex that perceptions of the physical world are mapped on to. This is because, of course, the physical world is unknowable. As Baudrillard famously claimed, the Gulf War did not take place, not because there was no fighting but because the whole narrative of the war was a media fiction, a part of our shared constructed reality that events in the physical world were matched up to to embellish. But critically, the narrative came first. The “Gulf War” was born, and the fighting followed.
Many things are simulacra: for example, sex. Sex is “real”, in the sense that human beings’ physical bodies do in fact differ from one another in largely predictable and largely correlated ways. On the other hand, sex is a simulacrum, because it is a constructed system of values and meanings — tied to the opposing categories of male and female — that are mapped on to perceptions of the physical world. What is Real is the presence of an organ in a certain place and of a certain size; what is “real” is that this organ is a penis, or a clitoris, or that it exhibits a certain deformity, or that the body it is attached to and therefore the person that that body is are of a certain sex. The construct exists first; its physical embodiment follows.
(Baudrillard probably would take special umbridge at the above paragraph — in the tradition of the French psychoanalysts, he seems to regard the masculine and the feminine as very fundamental principles of the world, and locates the feminine in the symbolic: the realm of seduction. I think he is wrong to do so, and the above is a small part of why. Maybe someday I will write the rest.)
Glitches In the Matrix
As might be obvious, there is a tension here. On the one hand, we demand truth, reality, in all of its detail and significance, and we demand it now! On the other hand, Reality is unknowable, and impossible to make much meaning out of. Simulacra are the solution, allowing us to construct “the truth” by assigning hazy glimpses of the Real their place within a sprawling, comprehensive cultural fiction in which everything has its proper significance.
But the disappearance of the Real is a problem. The longer this simulation is kept up, the more baroque it becomes, and the less grounded it is in the symbolic order from which it sprang. There is no need for the simulation to be uniform between all people on Earth; instead, it easily shatters and frays, with every person living in their own reality, their own personal simulation of the Real. This takes away from the purpose of the simulation in the first place: as people come more and more to inhabit their own personal semiobubbles where different objects have different significances and the sky is different colors, they are less and less able to find meaning in interaction and community, and the great shared reality fades from view.
Baudrillard Didn’t Write About the Internet
Now this is my ultimate point: it sounds like I am describing a social media echo chamber, or the information chasm between the left and right, or any number of other features of the modern world, and I am. Baudrillard absolutely wrote about all of these things, but only in the sense that they are all embodiments of this one trend. He did not write about the Internet. He wrote about how human societies construct systems of meaning, and how these systems of meaning are ultimately uncontrollable by the humans who create and inhabit them. This is, in other words, not an outgrowth of the Internet, or of attention-driven social media, but of human nature itself, and he published The Ecstasy of Communication in 1988!
So when people bring up Baudrillard in discussions regarding social media, or echo chambers, or the great communication breakdown of 21st century America, I feel that they are, to some extent, led astray in the same way as The Matrix (1999).
The Matrix makes extensive reference to Baudrillard’s work. In case you don’t know, in a very early scene, Neo pulls a data drive out of a hollowed-out copy of his book Simulacra and Simulation. Later on, upon breaking Neo out of the Matrix and greeting him on the bridge of the Nebuchanezzar, Morpheus says “welcome to the desert of the Real”, in reference to the rot Baudrillard envisions in the neglected, supplanted-by-simulacra Real. Allegedly, Simulacra and Simulation was required reading for the actors, and the Wachowski sisters sought to use Baudrillard’s philosophy to critique the consumerist, media-driven society of the modern West.
But there’s a problem with The Matrix: in real life, you can’t escape. The simulation Baudrillard writes about is indeed a prison of the mind, but it is also, to some extent, a necessary faculty of the mind. Reality is unknowable. To meet the demand for transparency, knowability, the simulation is essential. So there is no “desert of the Real” to escape to; there is no end to the consumer society. As Baudrillard sees it, once the simulacra have taken over, that’s reality now, and the only way out is through.
Concluding Thoughts: Computers on the Mind
I think if there’s anything to take away from this, it’s a certain amount of skepticism when computers, the Internet, and LLMs are blamed for the disappearance of kitchen table issues, lasting consumer identities, real-world community, and so on from modern America. It’s a well-worn meme on social media to point out that maybe everybody models human cognition with a computer simply because that’s what was new and trendy when modern cognitive science was taking off, and maybe modeling the runaway semiosphere with the Internet is making the same mistake. Perhaps broadcast media, mass consumer advertising, and social media have accelerated the rate at which the Real has receded, but then again, perhaps they were not the original force that set it on that path.
Stay tuned for an unconventional analysis of There Is No Antimemetics Division, which will for some reason be the place I locate this counternarrative. Alternatively, if you like video essays, I’d recommend Big Joel’s on The Lorax, which locates this Baudrillardian theme of the inescapability of the simulation in a place you probably wouldn’t expect.