![]() ![]() It’s a bleak scenario, but perhaps he was right after all, though it may not yet be time to despair-to give up on reality or the role of imagination. After all, it will soon be possible, if it is not so already, to convincingly simulate events that never occurred, and to make millions of people believe they had, not only through fake tweets, “fake news,” and age-old propaganda, but through sophisticated manipulation of video and audio, through augmented reality and the onset of “ reality apathy,” a psychological fatigue that overwhelms our abilities to distinguish true and false when everything appears as a cartoonish parody of itself. What seemed a far-fetched claim about the totality of “cybernetics and hyperreality” in the age of AOL and Netscape now sounds far more plausible. Even so, in his 1991 essay “ Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Baudrillard contended that the real and the imaginary were no longer distinguishable, and that the collapse of the distance between them meant that “ there is no more fiction.” Or, conversely, he suggested, that there is no more reality. ![]() We hoped for the cyberpunk spaces of William Gibson, and got the beep-boop tedium of dial-up. The pronouncements of French theorist Jean Baudrillard could sound a bit silly in the early 1990s, when the internet was still in its infancy, a slow, clunky technology whose promises far exceeded what it could deliver. ![]()
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