Simulacra of the Modern World
What do AI, brand fictions, obsession with corporate growth, Trump and Hitler have in common?
In the midst of the looming Great Depression, on July 27, 1929 in Reime, northeastern France a boy was born into a family of farmers. His father was a gendarme, a French military officer. Since the early age in school, the boy seemed to have expressed some interest in the philosophy of science. Later, he was the first of his family to attend Sorbonne university in Paris to study German language and literature. The boy’s name was Jean Baudrillard and later he would become one of the leading voices in 20th century cultural philosophy.
Braudillard’s work best encapsulates analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, although he wrote on diverse subjects including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics and popular culture. Baudrillard did all writing using his old typewriter, preferring not to work at the computer. He believed that a computer was simply a more complex form of a typewriter, but without the more authentic “physical” connection to writing.
In 1981, Baudrillard formulated the concepts of simulation and simulacra in his philosophical treatise by the same name. In the treatise, he argued that modern life is full of simulacra — illusive copies of things that either never had an original or have lost connection to it.
Think about generative AI for example — computer-generated images stand for “art”, while at the same time retaining no connection to actual artistic process, yet are considered enough of an art to endanger the livelihoods of real artists. Think about the corporate obsession with the rhetoric of growth that commonly masks unwarranted layoffs and productivity squeeze implemented to make the business numbers look good — the ephemeral concept has been long divorced from its original meaning. Think about GDP in economics — many economists are critical of judging the country’s health by GDP alone.
Simulacra, or symbols, are created in the process of simulation, or imitation that replaces genuine experiences, whether it is virtual worlds or interface abstractions.
Scholars outside of the domain of cultural philosophy likewise raised concern with the danger of abstractions. In “Simulation and Its Discontents” (2009), Sherry Turkle examines how digital simulation tools — like CAD (Computer-Aided Design), modeling software, and virtual environments — reshape professional practices, creativity, and human understanding in fields such as engineering, architecture, and science. Through ethnographic research, Turkle critiques the unintended consequences of relying on simulations, arguing that they can erode critical thinking, intuition, and engagement with physical reality.
Turkle writes that through loss of tangible engagement, professionals become detached from hands-on, material understanding. Architects using CAD may lose tactile intuition for materials or structural forces, while scientists might prioritize elegant digital models over messy real-world experimentation. Turkle also observed that reliance on simulation leads to erosion of expertise as students often prioritized software mastery over foundational principles of their profession.
For Turkle, the over-abundance of simulations comes down to ethical and existential concerns, as she questions whether they distance us from moral responsibility (e.g., in designing weapons, or unstable / risky systems) and existential connection to the physical world.
The dangers of pervasive simulations were explored in science fiction titles like Ender’s Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card. In Ender’s Game, gifted child Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is recruited to train at the Battle School, an academy preparing children to command fleets against an alien species. Through intense psychological manipulation and brutal war games, Ender masters military tactics, leadership skills, and ruthlessness. At the end, he is presented with the final simulation test, where Andrew sacrifices his entire fleet and his home planet to achieve the mission objective. Shortly after, it is revealed that Andrew was participating in a real war, where all murders and sacrifices were real. Andrew realises that under military command, he committed genocide.
Under the spell of simulation, believing it’s all part of the training, Andrew commits atrocities without informed consent or full understanding of what he is doing. Through isolation, pressure, and gaslighting the simulations exploit Andrew’s empathy and trauma: Andrew starts to doubt the reality of his own experiences.
War is normalized as a bloodless, strategic puzzle. Ender’s tactical brilliance is honed by treating life-and-death decisions as abstract challenges, and in a process of solving them, Andrew is robbed of his childhood, innocence, and humanity. Later, Andrew discovers that despite sacrifices, simulated conditions that he was given mislead him into acting on incomplete information. Andrew helps to ensure the survival of the annihilated species by securing the last remaining egg of the alien queen. With the information learned from the queen, Andrew writes a book.
Isn’t our world full of similarly disastrous simulations that are either based on misleading or incomplete information? Some of these simulations may be small, others — massive, and they all have mounting hidden costs. Think about how datacenters hosting operations of global monopolistic marketplaces continuously under-report their pollution footprint, perpetuating the illusion of immaterial, no-cost digital commerce? How AI companies do not disclose their training data or processes, creating the illusion of magical, autonomous intelligence. How social media platforms masquerade as a safe, social spaces while pushing rage-bate to the top of our feeds, thus promoting division and misinformation.
Jean Baudrillard claims that society now prioritizes these simulated symbols over reality. For example, social media personas or brands often feel more meaningful than the actual people or products they represent. These symbols don’t hide reality — they become reality, making it hard to distinguish what’s truly authentic and real.
Baudrillard identifies that the society’s understanding of simulacra and reality is a historically evolving process. In the pre-modern period, representation served as a clearly artificial stand-in for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marked them as irreproducibly authentic and real.
With Modernity and the Industrial Revolution, the distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as “real” as its prototype.
With the postmodernity of Late Capitalism, simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes a meaningless concept.
In the Late Stage Capitalism, the inability to see distinctions between reality and simulacra is configured through several phenomena:
Contemporary media (television, film, print, the Internet).
Exchange value (in which the value of goods is based on the flat system of money as opposed to usefulness).
Multinational capitalism that works through alienation and separates produced goods from the plants, minerals and other original materials and the processes (including the people and their cultural context) used to create them.
Urbanization, which separates humans from the nonhuman world, and re-centres culture around productivity through systems so large — they cause alienation.
Language and ideology, in which language increasingly becomes caught up in the production of power relations between social groups, especially when powerful groups institute themselves at least partly in monetary terms.
The four Stages of Simulation
The society’s relationship with reality and simulation evolves through four stages of signs and images. Each stage marks a deeper disconnect: from trust in images, to suspicion, to fabrication, and finally to a world where simulation replaces reality altogether.
First Stage: Faithful Reflection (Sacramental Order)
Signs are seen as honest reflections of reality. People trust them as accurate representations, like a mirror image of the world.
A good example of this stage is a historical photograph. A black-and-white photo from the 1969 moon landing is treated as direct evidence of the event. People trust it as a truthful record of reality, reflecting an actual moment in time. It’s seen as a “mirror” to a real place and time in history.
Second Stage: Distorted Reality (Maleficence)
Signs become twisted versions of reality, hiding or warping the truth. People sense the distortion but still believe a deeper reality exists behind the image — even if the sign itself can’t capture it.
For example, a model’s photo in a fashion magazine is heavily edited and airbrushed to erase flaws, distorting their true appearance. Viewers know the image is manipulated, but they still assume a “real person” exists beneath the edits — even though the image itself can’t show that reality. The sign (the photo) warps the perception of the model’s realistic appearance, but hints at an obscured original.
Third Stage: Copy Without an Original (Sorcery)
Signs now pretend to represent reality but have no true source. They invent artificial meanings, creating a self-referential system that implies a hidden truth, even though none exists. This stage thrives on manufactured symbols and empty references.
Disney’s idealized “Main Street, U.S.A.” mimics a nostalgic 1920s American small town — but no such town ever existed. It’s a collage of clichés (ice cream parlors, barbershop quartets) that invent a “history” with no real origin. The design feels authentic, but it’s a fabrication referencing fictionalized ideals, not reality.
Fourth Stage: Pure Simulation (Hyperreality)
Signs detach entirely from reality, reflecting only other signs. Culture embraces this “hyperreality”— a world where artificiality feels more authentic than reality itself. Claims to truth are expected to be exaggerated or stylized, as genuine references to reality seem naive or sentimental. Here, everything is a copy of a copy, endlessly recycled.
For example, an influencer’s meticulously curated feed — golden-hour selfies, “casual” coffee shots — creates a persona detached from their actual life. Followers engage with this hyper-stylized version of reality, where every post is an “aesthetic” and not an “authentic” experience. The simulation (the feed) becomes more relatable than real life.
Simulation: The Second Order
The late wife of president Donald Trump, Ivana, wrote that her husband studied Hitler’s essays and speeches, keeping a copy of “My New Order” by his bedside.
In “Mein Kompf”, Hitler wrote that politicians got into trouble when they told small lies. The public was always on the lookout for inconsistencies. When the small lie gets discovered - it contributes to public cynicism. Instead of telling small lies, Hitler promoted the “Big Lie” (große Lüge). He explained that “In the greatness of the lie, there is always a certain amount of credibility…[and] the broad masses of people can be more easily corrupted in the deeper reaches of their heart.” (1925)
In the murky waters of the Big Lie, facts cease to matter.
“Even when presented with the true facts, [the average voter] will still doubt and waver and will continue to take at least some of the lie to be true. For the most impudent lie always leaves something lingering behind it, a fact which is known only too well to all great expert liars in this world.”
The Big Lie is Baudrillard’s second-order simulacra. Here, signs and images do not faithfully show reality, but might hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
While the first-order simulacra is a faithful copy to the original (a photograph of the moon landing) and the third-order is a symbol that pretends to be real but without the original underneath (AI as intelligence), the second-order simulacra is much more sinister.
The consequence of the propagation of second-order simulacra is that, within the affected context, nothing is “real”, though those engaged in the illusion are incapable of seeing it. Instead of having experiences, people observe spectacles, via real or metaphorical control screens. Instead of the real, there is the hyperreal.
The End of History
In the essay The Precession of the Simulacra, Baudrillard references a short story by Jorge Borges. The tale describes a king who demands a map so detailed that it eventually blankets the entire kingdom it’s meant to represent. This fable illustrates the philosophical idea of the map-territory relationship, where a symbol (the map) risks overshadowing the reality it depicts. But Baudrillard takes this further: he argues that in today’s postmodern world, the “territory” — the actual world — has vanished. What remains is only the map, or rather, the two have become indistinguishable. The line between reality and representation has dissolved entirely.
This is exactly why unchecked over-investment in ubiquitous simulations warrants a reason to worry. When simulacra overshadows reality and replaces what’s real with the stand-in symbol, over time, the reality becomes a matter of interpretation. When AI wins the status of “intelligence” despite the gross mislabeling, human intelligence becomes a contested ground. When the illusion of “infinite growth” is allowed to flourish, competition eventually turns into exploitation, for nothing is truly infinite.
This collapse of meaning eventually leads to what Baudrillard calls the end of history. As society shifts into the third-order simulacra — a state where copies of reality replace reality itself — meaningful opposition and social conflict fade. When the public becomes a passive “silent majority,” absorbing media images without protest, and governments and corporations claim to speak for them through statistics and symbols — people are reduced to data points, their voices drowned out by those who claim to represent them.
For Baudrillard, this outcome is attributed to a misguided pursuit of unity. Society, he argues, now treats opposing forces — like differing ideologies — as interchangeable, smoothing over conflict in favor of superficial, short-lived harmony.
Baudrillard critiques the flattening of moral ideals like human rights and equality into terms like globalization. While these values sound universal, globalization often prioritizes systems of exchange, like global markets and mass media, over genuine ethical progress. The result is a world where symbols of justice replace actual justice, and the map is all we have left.
What a remarkable piece of writing, unfortunately, I agree with all of it.