Jean Baudrillard was a French Post Modern philosopher (no he wasn’t Jewish) that wrote a book called Simulacra and Simulation. I wanted to share one of his ideas.
In his book he borrows an analogy from a guy named Borges. The story is: There was an empire so great and so powerful , that it created a giant map that was an exact copy of the empire. When the empire would gain or lose territory, the map would be expanded or destroyed. When the empire died, all that remained was the map. The map/ the simulacra of the empire was then where the people lived. The people then spent their whole lives making the map to represent their life, building and destroying the map to represent themselves while the abandoned reality fell apart from disuse.
He uses the analogy to explain how there would be a time where instead of using simulacra to reflect the reality, the simulacra would be what reality would reflect. After disuse reality would die and become simulation. I believe this shift occured in 2012.
In 2012 obesity became beautiful, truth became hate speech, fornication became experience and empowerment, man became a woman and woman became a man. Down became up and up became down.
We now live in the map, the simulation, the hyper reality. There is no longer any reality to distinguish between what is real and what is unreal. Reality has crumbled away from disuse.
There was a man named Marshall McLuhan. He wrote books about Media. In his book “The gutenberg Galaxy” he wrote about how once humans internalize a medium in the mind it alters the mind and how we see/ experience reality.
Before the invention of the printing press ~1450, all writing was manuscript . Manuscript was always “looked at” and spoken out loud. After the invention typography all written words were uniform, unlike in manuscript where every letter looked different since it was hand written by an individual. Once the medium of typography was internalized in the human mind, typography changed the way they experienced reality. Humans developed the ability to “read” silently in the mind. And once humans began to read, they continued to read even after lifting their eyes from the book. “reading” the world and “looking” at the world are two very different experiences of reality. The internalization of uniform interchangable letters led to the idea of mass produced interchangable parts which led to thing like books, the mass production of engines, guns, etc. Before the interchangable letters on the Gutenberg press, interchangable parts was an impossible thing for a human to imagine. Similar to how a nomad would never think to build a permanent structure. “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”.
With the invention of “face book” and other social media, humans internalized that simulacra they built of themselves and it stays with them even after they log out from the screen. The Simulacra which once reflected reality becomes the simulation and the reality decays from disuse. The map we created on the illuminated screen once was a reflection of reality. Now it is the simulation/clown world we live in and carry with us. We have abandoned reality and it is dead.