Simulacra and Simulation: Narrative fragmentation in the era of SM and AI
Details
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?
Due to the density of the material, the discussion will begin with a 30 minute presentation on the material by the discussion leader. This will include a powerpoint show as seen here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CYlncGb5lMYkRhmaX_eDuo-38YbKpvPLLBiEKwBAMYA/edit?usp=sharing