/lit/ - Literature

>>11185791
Start with McLuhan’s thesis: The medium is the message. We have reached a historical stage where the proliferation of industrial-cultural products is so all-pervading that we have become unable to distinguish between communication and representation. If the medium is the message and the message is the media, then neither have any meaning. This proliferation of mechanically reproduced products without originals causes meaning to implode, similar to how Benjamin diagnoses the loss of ‘aura’ in the creation of mass produced goods or how the deconstructionists say that meaning is endlessly deferred through networks of language. These copies without originals are ‘simulacra’. In the sheltered techno-capitalist west we are so overwhelmed by these simulacra and our inability to distinguish ‘truth’ that we are effectively killing reality. The simulacra precede any idea of the real, we live in the age of the ‘model’. The big bang theory precedes any ideas we might have about universal physics. We have killed reality and entered a hyperreal mode of being. The Matrix is a rather flawed but helpful explanation. All of our actions within hyperreality are referred to as ‘simulations’, for example you and your friends may converse about films, music, series you have seen recently, the majority of your day may involve referencing or quoting memes, but of the basic knowledge you may have needed to know to survive in a previous historical era, you have no clue, the responsibility we have passed over to machines. The real only permeates hyperreality briefly in flashes of violence, terrorism and death.

Information overload also ties into all this. We have become a networked, globalised, American world. After Simulacra and Simulations read The Ecstasy of Communication. It predicts Twitter/insta culture in the most insane ways.

Other helpful works of fiction for Baudrillard are JG Ballard’s Crash, Borges (particularly Tlön) and the film Network.

I’m on my way to work so that’s not a great summary/intro but I hope it’s helpful and any questions I can definitely answer.

why does everyone shill evola? i cant believe anybody could take his extreme dribble seriously