Hyperreality, Synchromysticism And Simulation

Submitted by Jacob Weiskopfh Ph.D on Thu, 2024-08-08 10:45

Member Content Rating:

Your rating: None Average: 5 (91 votes)

We are the first digital inhabitants of a universe of pure symbolic media exchange, living in an empty space of virtuality, where subjectivity and objective truth have intertwined together.

At the core of this collective experience, we find a fabricated system of meaning that limits human participation to that of mindless spectator, while a digital hyperreality is slowly born.

Follow The Signs

Images serve as a symbolic system through which people communicate and culture is transmitted. Some images contain a system of symbols and are used for various types of communication.

Societies often share common symbols, and many symbols contain the same basic elements. Taken together, these symbols convey specific meanings.

For example, we are all born into a society with a written system of some kind, made of symbolic shapes called language which refer to spoken sound. None of us were the engineers of this system to begin with.

A study of synchromysticism and numerological exploration can help uncover secret languages encoded inside the realm of reality, and which can be used to decipher meaning in unique ways.

A feature that makes synchromysticism unique to other forms of synchronicity is its focus on esoteric mystical symbolism and the use of communications technology to document, share and compare synchronicities related to such symbols – from ancient traditions to mass media.

By utilising cryptic understandings of symbols, we can decode, map, and predict future world events. How? Symbols channel a form of collective mass unconscious in the human species in which the subconscious realm can be influenced and dictated, hence altering the conscious sphere.

Not only are symbols used to pre-program major world events on our television screens, but they are in fact a present reality in every single element of everyday life. We are living a fairy-tale dream.

We have become so overwhelmed with symbols (translated as ‘information’) in the modern world that objective truth has been blanketed to the point it cannot be identified authentically.

Analyses of objectivation, institutionalisation and legitimation are directly applicable to the problems of the sociology of language, the theory of social action and institutions, and of religion.

A vast, simulated experience has taken over the world, and reality itself is being sucked in with it.

Simulated Reality

We live in a world of signs where almost everything around us has become a matter of signification, connected with explosive growth in media and related to changes in the conduct of everyday life.

Our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and human experience has become akin to a simulation of reality.

You may be familiar with the term simulation – no doubt it has been said many times right here in New Dawn. But just exactly what does it mean?

The Baudrillardian concept of‘simulation’ refers to the idea of creating a reality; reproduced and based on a foundation of widely interpreted symbols.¹

Simulated reality appears so real that one cannot separate the ‘real’ from simulation.

In fact, simulation dominates the real, and never again will the real have the chance to produce itself because simulation is all there is, according to the French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007).

Simulated reality is not a singular concept. The simulation itself is made up of infinite imitations of the operations of real-world processes or systems over time. These are known as simulacra.

Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original. Representations stand in place of a perceived real or are simply the ‘real’ itself.²

Inside the control structure, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality nor even deceptive mediations – they are not based in a reality at all. No attempt to hide a ‘reality’ is made.

Instead, all we see is a process of how symbolism in culture and media constructs perceived reality, programming false understandings and making lives and shared existences illegible.

Society has become so saturated with simulacra, and lives so saturated with the constructs of society, that all meaning has long been rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable.

The onslaught of television, media growth and the constant bombardment of images, are now intended to represent reality. From birth, humanity communicates and understands this way.

Importantly, the simulacra are never that which conceals the truth. The truth which is concealed is that there is no truth. The simulacra, or untrue, is the truth.

To better understand what this means, let’s look at key concepts found in studies describing the nature of symbols, simulacra, and interactions with collective perceptions of reality.

Psychology of Illusion

Not only does simulacra refer to ‘copies without an original’ but it can also be used to explain the lack of depth, meaning or ‘realness’ behind signs that penetrate our technological lives.

Philosopher Walter Benjamin, as early as 1936, argued that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” and that this was missing from a world of mass-produced commodities.³

However, in a modern, technology-driven digital age, this has developed even further to the point that no original even exists from which to draw the authentic from.

Prof. Frank Webster, author of Theories of the Information Society, once gave the example of when a user downloads a song to their phone. The notion of an original is meaningless as the downloaded song has no physical original – it is a copy of a song downloaded from a digital platform.

In his essay The Ecstasy of Communication, Baudrillard explains that Western technological society revels in its over-exposure to images. He defines this visual overstimulation as “obscene,” when “everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication.”

Researcher Steven Connor summarises Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra by stating: “All of contemporary life has been dismantled and reproduced in scrupulous facsimile.”⁴

This refers to simulacra; the reproduction of signs of reality that are, in fact, created.

Connor also discusses how simulation of “the real and referential” then “takes the form of manufactured objects and experiences which attempt to be more real than reality itself.”

For example, violence is disconnected from ‘real’ world destruction and recorded in cyberspace as signs and images to be consumed through mass media, gaming, and digital outlets.

Death as a tragic event has also been eliminated, and any event surrounding this theme is surrendered to media representations of it.

Whatever the event may be, it is experienced as an ‘image event’ and consumed through symbolic exchange. Put simply, the image precedes the real, is consumed, and forms the reality itself.

War images on TV form the actual perception of warfare, while real events on-the-ground – whatever they may be – are masked in a sea of digital simulations.

Simulacra is the psychological concept that drives many other vast deceptions. From 9/11 to shooting events, the COVID scamdemic – symbolic images are programmed daily.

Let’s take a deeper dive into how these messages are transmitted and what is responsible.

Symbolic Exchange

We are now more wired to our interfaces. We react to the television news rather than the world, to a computer program rather than social interaction, to email rather than vocal communication.

In all these, we react to simulations rather than the immediate environment. Simulation supersedes ‘real’ interactions and has done so now for generations.

Andrew Murphie and John Potts argue in their book Culture and Technology that the media can never convey the ‘real’, and with the ever-increasing reliance on the internet, simulations are only becoming more prevalent, thus reiterating how simulacra erase and dominate the ‘real’.⁵

The internet is a simulacra creator, highlighting the importance of symbolic exchange in cyberspace. It is a copy-making machine, a tool that effortlessly replicates things and passes them along. A digital realm in which nothing is authentic and everything is vastly produced.

This ‘creation’ allows for artificial place-markers for real items or events. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducible real, and signification gropes towards this reality.

This process is known as ‘symbolic exchange’ – a form of value exchange that maintains and organises social relations and hierarchies. The difference with other forms of exchange is that the value of an exchanged object does not value the act of exchanging it.⁶

Let’s think about a designer brand t-shirt vs a regular t-shirt. Is there really any difference between the two? Is the designer brand actually worth $200 of raw materials, or is it simply the marketplace of value symbols (brands) that drives the worth of this shirt?

Symbolic exchanges are not aimed at establishing equivalence (equal value) between two exchanged tokens, as with other forms of exchange. The opposite of a resource-based system.

This psychological game allows for creators of said object to influence and dictate (false) worth, and it is this framework that powers why humans value grand deceptions over critical analysis.

How on earth did humanity get to this point?

It all began with the beginning of ‘modernity’ following the Industrial Revolution.

Here, distinctions between representation and reality began to break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities.

The commodity’s ability to imitate reality immediately threatened to replace the authority of the original version because the copy is just as ‘real’ as its prototype.

This continued until the birth of postmodernity in which this process expanded with newer technology to the point the simulacrum now precedes the original, and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulacrum; originality has been buried.

Baudrillard theorises that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra produces several outcomes including (but not limited to) the following:

Contemporary media, including television, film, print, and the internet, blur the line between products needed (to live a life) and products for which commercial images create a need.

Exchange value in which the value of goods is based on money (denominated fiat currency) rather than usefulness. Moreover, usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms to assist exchange.

Multinational capitalism which 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. Think of medicine and plants as an example of this.

Urbanisation which separates humans from the non-human world, and re-centres culture around productive throughput 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.

Through these primary methods, collective values of a society, object, event, or story are directed and engineered. Disconnection from reality to simulacra until the ‘real’ is forgotten.

Next, let us examine the long-lasting inter-generational effects of this level of mass illusion.

Here we go beyond many authors’ work and adapt this information to the digital age.

The Birth of the Hyperreal

In the modern world, we have moved from the ability to reflect our reality truthfully to the ability to mask and distort this reality, and to masking the simulated reality altogether.

Finally, with the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, humanity has already begun the transitional stage to an era in which simulation asserts precedence over reality.

Hyperreality refers to a simulation of reality that acts as more real than the real or a created heightened reality. In this hyperreal cyberspace, signs for consumption are constantly in production, and this creates a new reality, as virtual reality cannot be completely known.⁷

We are already witnessing the building blocks of this era. There is a sharp connection between nature and technology in terms of what becomes an icon for the ‘lost real’ in hyperreality. Almost all forms of online media act as a hyperreal experience.

As an example of social media, Facebook markets itself as a connecting tool; a user posts updates of their life to their friends who can react and comment as they wish.

This platform acts as a digital reproduction of real life – a heightened version of real communication between friends, but it does not reflect real-life interaction.

This is the hyperreal, a digital simulation of reality, where a person ultimately uses Facebook to form an online identity and persona more vivid than the ‘real self’.

Twitter is hyperreality as well, as it bears no reflection to real life and creates a sublime cyberspace where a user, once a rational subject, becomes decentred in online communication.

As subjectivity becomes detached from materially fixed, embodied contexts, it is dispersed and multiplied continuously through digitisation.

In this hyperreal setting, traditional social settings are erased as a real human being is re-signified as a digital representation for Twitter users to consume.

The pure symbolic media exchange of cyber interactivity is understood as the opposite of social.

The subject does not experience ‘increased interactivity’ but instead experiences ‘subtle death’. Interaction dies in this hyperreal cyberspace and becomes merely a simulation of communication.

Chat rooms, for example, allow users to function as floating signifiers capable of becoming anything that is describable. Thus, online, communication is replaced by sign consumption, and subjects become merely ‘floating signifiers’.

If we replace ‘chat rooms’ with Twitter, we may conclude that power becomes a signifier of hatred.

Going beyond this space, the phone itself is a hyperreal product – a product of pure simulated society which acts almost as an extension of ourselves.

Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, has explained the ways that “big media,” through search engine algorithms and data collecting, can “absorb who we are” by gathering detailed demographic information, geographic information, behavioural information, and social information.⁸

Absorbed from the real to a digital representation.

In the future, with the introduction of AR and VR systems such as the Metaverse, enhanced by AI and 5G underliers, almost all observable reality will soon fall under the spell of the hyperreal.

The gamification of society and the introduction of controlling technologies as a trojan horse of mind-numbing pleasure means that humans are wilfully creating the end of their realities.

There is no original that created the rest, no seed planted. Everything will soon be automated, and this automation produces a series of new symbols for humanity to absorb.

Baudrillard stated that representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real, but “simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.” Therefore, the concept of a ‘real’ underneath the simulation relies on the principle of the real.

Hyperreality is the absorption of the real – whatever it may have been – into an ocean of simulated, digital representations. Infinitely created and replicated until the real is long forgotten.

Science Fiction Comes to Life

The postmodern world in which we live and the approaching post-postmodern hyperreal timeframe are argued to go hand-in-hand with famous science fiction works of our time.

In his book Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction, Gerald Alva Miller suggests that “science fiction increasingly proves the genre that is necessary to grasp the postmodern world around us.”⁹

Baudrillard notes that science fiction “is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere, in the here and now, in the very principle of the surrounding simulation.” In other words, he argues science fiction is hardly fictional at all, it is merely waiting “in its crude state” to emerge.

Are we really ‘waiting’ for this change to come? Or is it already here?

Miller believes this wait is over and the technology of contemporary science fiction now “occurs in realistically depicted versions of the present or even the past.” He calls television “a viral, endemic.”

Baudrillard sees radical action such as destroying the system as no longer a real possibility.

This is because there is no system. It is a simulated, collective experience driven by symbols and images and programmed by those who are controlling those very mechanisms.

We are slowly welcoming the immorality of consuming death as a media spectacle.

Marleen S. Barr discusses the concept of post-postmodernism, which she says exposes “the hitherto science fictional impact of technology on society and culture… when what was once science fictional comprises the very definition of reality.”¹⁰

Cyberspace becomes a space of pure symbolic exchange where humanity disappears and subjects become nothing more than a sign or image to be consumed.

Technology has been engineered as a weapon in which the human subject is reduced to a mere sign for consumption. This consumption of a person is represented by reducing a subject to a mere symbol for exchange, and even the event of death is consumed by hyperreal media.

Dehumanisation in the media, or reducing the subject to the object, happens in hyperreality. This is currently perpetuated by online users who are still human beings themselves.

This important analysis of simulacra and hyperreality draws attention to the need to see the human behind the image, to see the subject behind the object, and re-humanise the subject in cyberspace.

We must do everything we can to disconnect ourselves as much as possible from the hyperreal that is currently birthing a world of endless simulated experiences (the Metaverse is an emerging example).

By doing so and looking beneath the surface, we can resist. How? Because we recognise the ‘system’ that controls us does not physically exist at all – it is an illusion.

Almost everything is an unauthentic copy of a copy, masking the fact there is no original base.

Everything we have been told is a lie. Therefore, I recommend you throw away anything you have ever been told about the world and begin to form an independent perspective from scratch.

When you do, and you also take this information into consideration, you will uncover startling truths.

Ethan Nash - https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/hyperreality-synchromysticism-simulation

The above is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on the website of TOTT News: tottnews.com.

Footnotes

1. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

2. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum

3. www.ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity/

4. www.amazon.com.au/Postmodernist-Culture-Introduction-Theories-Contemporary/dp/0631200525

5. www.books.google.com.au/books/about/Culture_and_Technology.html

Jacob Weiskopfh Ph.D's blog

1461 reads

Society for Enlightenment