SCI-fi musings
Baudrillard’s hyperreality: the inability of human consciousness to distinguish reality from its simulation; a state of being in which the real and the fictitious blend so well that the line between physical and virtual reality, human intelligence and artificial intelligence, is difficult to differentiate.
Given modern media consciousness via hyperreal mediums, platforms, and technologies, we are more engaged within the hyperreal than the physical, the “real” itself continually simulated within the hyperreal. The hyperreal puts a whole new spin on the classical philosophical question of what is real. It even challenges the idea of truth itself, of how truth is constructed, how we can know it, and whether we trust it to be true. These questions are at the heart of our contemporary political world, populated by such ideas as fake narratives and alternative realities. On a personal level, the dominance of the hyperreal makes us wonder whether we can know what we’re feeling is really about us. What does it mean to feel something that may not be true, desires, feelings and beliefs invented for us? Moreover postmodern capitalism’s information gluttony makes it difficult to know what is true. Information anxiety often shipwrecks us in a sea of competing and contradictive information, we screeners unable to either decipher the truth or keep up with what we are told is important.
Most of my fiction, non-fiction, and research focuses on this predicament, of humans being motivated to desire or act in ways they ways we think we control but don’t, of having feelings not truly our own and acting upon them often violently. Postmodern violence is unique in the history of violence. Violence once had a purpose; it now is often purposeless. The violence that once tried to accomplish or suppress something must now compete for senseless mass violence
Living within the hyperreal mimics social engagement. It should but doesn’t produce the social good it could. Charity is now efficiently virtual. Messaging from hyperreal mediums creates a steady focus on the individual, our efforts at creating virtual identities free from having to deal with a social world that complicates who we want to be. Entering the hyperreal leaves little time for near continuous self-construction to desire or construct physical community.