Simulacra Explained: Jean Baudrillard's Theory of Simulation
I think the video is a well done explainer.
While reading the kinda angry book, my Computational Thinker's brain would translate to words like CAP-Theorem, heuristics, implied-in-fact contracts and Law of Leaky Abstractions. I'm living in a computer scientist simulation.
Do you think "Simulation" is an elegant word for describing what's going on? Also who is setting up all the simulacra?
View original on piefed.social
Application to contemporary politics
In Europe, where do most votes go to the green? In cities! Nobody living in cities still knows nature, absolutely nobody. All they know is the botany they see when leaving their appartments. Maybe they lived in houses with gardens in the suburbs before and left closer to the center. But the majority never lived close to nature. So space is left for symbolism of "true" nature. All the parks are simulacrons of nature, their preservation is way more important to cities than to farmers who live a completely different simulation of nature. Protection/conservatism have completely different meanings to both cohorts. Can we undo such simulacra differentiation?
A funny thing is that the real doesn't exist, nature isn't real, by Baudrillard terms, as everything was changed by us (oversimplification). I recommend reading his books, more sociologically he starts well in the consumer society, more definitions being at the symbolic exchange and death.
By definition, the ideal of nature stopped existing when humans participated and shrank even more later on.
Thanks, I'll look into the other books once I finished all three the Wachowskis asked Reeves to read. ;-)
edit: Having used the word "ideal" here... Platonic ideals are used to describe real objects as copies of which the original does not exist, therefore real objects are simulacra of platonic ideals. So reality has been a simulation, at least since Plato.
I found this: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1637&context=criterion
Part two: https://youtu.be/avooSt373lg