Social to Simulation
A brief application of Baudrillard's "simulacra theory" to human relationships
Do we live in a simulation? Amid the strains of contemporary life, a loneliness epidemic, and an enforced push for Artificial Intelligence, the question is surprisingly resonant, to the point where the Matrix isn’t necessary to filter ourselves, our surroundings, other people, and the world at large through the bright lens of blue light. Leaving aside many difficult wires to chew, I would like to provide a framework for the radical mediation digital technology interposes onto human relationships. For this brief survey, I will lean on an old friend of mine: the “simulacra theory” of Jean Baudrillard.
A Map of Decline
Baudrillard’s essay Simulacres et Simulation, published in 1981, prophesies about the dangerous substitution of reality for what he terms “images.”1 Media and culture progressively escalate this substitution via four ‘simulacra levels,’ as images progress from representations of reality all the way to an isolated existence unto themselves and themselves alone.2 In brief, I will map the progress of digital technology’s interposition into human relationships using these four levels of “the image:”
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Reflection
Here, we find the original pitch for social media and all sorts of digital communication: empower your social life! Facebook is a way to keep track of your friends, including their number and what goes on in their lives. Skype, FaceTime, or even the venerable landlines facilitate long-distance communication the letter or telegraph could never imagine. Where time and distance used to pose structural and consequently insurmountable obstacles to human sociability, the rise of digital technologies gradually, then rapidly reduced them to utter non-factors as practically everyone became accessible all the time. Through these technologies, we utilize new mediums for pre-existing relationships. Perhaps new relationships burgeon as well. However, this medium does not quite capture a real relationship, let alone embody it. As David Brooks writes in How to Know a Person, “On social media you have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy.”3
Distortion
All of a sudden, face-to-face conversations need new material. You already saw your friend’s new car online. You saw the pictures from their vacation. You followed the thread on The App Formerly Known As Twitter where their bad day spiraled into a concerning revelation of their psychology (not to mention their political beliefs).
The basic reality of relationships conducted face-to-face, or even by letter or phone, becomes perverted in comment sections, online forums, and on-stream breakdowns. People start to split into “online” and “offline” personas, without really noticing. The overwhelming neural stimulation from a friendship conducted over text begins to mask the fact that the relationship has been distorted from a personal to a digital one.
Absence
Digital forms of relationship morph. No longer are your relationships with classmates, colleagues, or kin, but with handles and avatars. I hesitate to even name them strangers, because “knowing” has changed.
The dissonance between escalating interconnectivity and the loneliness epidemic is well-established. Rather, the material point is that our rabid pursuit of stimulation and our use of digital technology have masked an absence of meaningful community, a trap in which our brains (particularly developing ones) are almost helplessly caught. Servers, comment sections, and Reddit, to mention only one platform, long replaced physical forums as the locii of the new kind of “relationship.” Social lives are transformed into “parasocial” ones where people feel close to others despite a lack of any significant interaction between them. Many of them are faceless.
Purity
Digital technology mediates our relationships to the extent that AI chatbots become not only sources of “knowledge,” but socialization. Our minds are reflected in outputs from Large Language Models that convince us we have the world at our neural tips, even when they mindlessly lead us into psychosis. Departing from even the shallow parasocial imitation of real, material relationships, people look to the machine. Human interaction is indeed no longer necessary: AI models are fully capable of conversing and praying among themselves. We have reached not the singularity, but the simulacrum.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.
Key to Baudrillard’s essay is the common (at least among rationalist circles) metaphor of map and territory. Maps can serve practical, instrumental, social, or abstract purposes. Permit an example: the dragons at the edge of the map are an artistic representation of the surveyor’s limits. Over time, the belief grows that it is impossible to reach beyond the map’s edges, and eventually the dragons are conceived as real (regardless of original intent). At the fourth simulacra level, the image of the dragon grows to an abstract reality disconnected from the territory on the map, or the culture who uses it.
David Brooks, How to Know a Person, (New York; Random House, 2023), p. 9.