Sacramento Politics and Philosophy Group

New surveillance technology, such as automated license plate readers (ALPR), linked doorbell cameras, street cameras, etc., offers great benefits to society in identifying and tracking criminals – leading to a reduction in crime, helping locate missing persons, etc. This is an amazing use of technology to better society.

Except….

That tech can be used to track anyone, for any reason. If private businesses can place devices that identify people’s movements, that enables them, the government, or others to track our movements.

During the Super Bowl, Ring ran an ad about their linked cameras’ ability to locate lost pets. Initial thoughts were, how awesome? Which quickly gave way to dread of the enormous privacy implications. The backlash was so swift and so severe that Ring had to disable that feature.

There are many costs and benefits to this tech. Simply striking an extreme position on one side, while blinding ourselves to the other side, is folly – demanding nuance in implementing this tech. How can we, as a society, strike a reasonable balance between safety and privacy?

Simulacra and Simulation: Reviewing Baudrillard's treatise on narrative fragmentation in the era of social media and AI

Jean Baudrillard published Simulacra and Simulation in 1981, but his central provocation — that representation has consumed reality, leaving us in a world of signs pointing only to other signs — reads less like philosophy and more like prophecy when scrolling through an algorithmic feed or conversing with a generative AI.
In this session, we'll work through Baudrillard's core framework: the four stages of the image, the hyperreal, and the precession of simulacra. From there, we'll interrogate how his ideas hold up (and where they strain) against the specific architectures of contemporary life: social media platforms that reward performed identity over authentic expression, AI systems that synthesize plausible-sounding text without referential grounding, and the blurring of news, satire, and synthetic media to the point where distinguishing the original from its copy becomes structurally impossible.
Some questions to orient our discussion:

• Is Baudrillard's "desert of the real" an apt diagnosis of our current media environment, or does it collapse distinctions that still matter?
• Does social media produce a new kind of simulacrum — one that is participatory, authored by millions of users rather than a centralized cultural industry?
• Large language models generate text by predicting plausible continuations of patterns. Is this the purest instantiation of simulation yet — a system with no referent at all? Or does that misread what Baudrillard actually meant?
• What are the political stakes of living inside a hyperreality? Does Baudrillard's framework offer any resources for resistance, or does it foreclose them?