Recently, I had the pleasant experience of sensing a convergence between two sets of ideas from different walks of my life.
In conversation, I heard about an idea of Jean Baudrillard, which, instantly, I felt, explained a great deal of the world we’re in at the moment. Baudrillard describes three different ‘operating mechanisms’ for society. One is pre-modern and focuses on imitation, symbolism, “reconstituting nature in God’s image.” Another is modern and is based on productivity, the commodity, “the worldwide application of indeterminate energy.” The third, just coming into focus, is simulation — “aiming at maximum operationally, hyperreality, total control.”
This third system is so new and so strange that Baudrillard, although sort of philosophically deducing its existence, is able to come up with very few examples of what it actually looks like. He discusses J.G. Ballard’s Crash. He imagines his two-room apartment launched into orbit with a moon capsule — “the perceived ordinariness of a terrestrial habitat then assumes the values of the cosmic and its hypostasis in Space, the satellization of the real in the transcendence of Space.” He could easily have mentioned Guy Debord or Andy Warhol or any of the postmodern stalwarts — the sense of signs losing all connection to their referents, of signs only ever referring to themselves, a wilderness of mirrors, of copies begetting copies.
Baudrillard knew that the modern era, with its commodities, its highly-precise system of exchange, its emphasis on propulsion, was in some critical way coming to an end. As he writes, “The two phenomena [modern and post-modern] are closely linked, and they are two aspects of the same general evolutionary process: a period of implosion, after centuries of explosion and expansion. When a system reaches its limits, its own saturation point, a reversal begins to takes place.” But Baudrillard, writing in 1991, couldn’t quite envision the actual shape that the phenomenon he predicted would so quickly evolve in: the Internet, AI, the Metaverse.
Reading a New York Times Magazine piece on the YouTuber MrBeast, I felt like I was coming across a puzzle piece of what Baudrillard had in mind — not as dramatic as AI but demonstrating the ways that the signs switch around, the ways that, in MrBeast’s videos, there seems, critically, to be no referent at all.
Many of MrBeast’s videos are Survivor-style competitions, but others are nice things to do for people — walking up to a homeless man by the side of a road and handing him $10,000, paying for surgeries for 1,000 blind people. Which — surprise, surprise — generated a massive outcry online. “There is something so demonic about this and I can’t even articulate what it is,” tweeted Alex Clavering.
An absurd response in a way, for which Clavering was duly raked over the Twitter coals — does he think that 1,000 people shouldn’t have gotten the cataract surgery? — but does speak to the sheer strangeness of the MrBeast phenomenon. The charity is inextricable from the spectacle of it — “an unstoppable flywheel….of lottery, raffle, game show and telethon, administered by the Willy Wonka of Greenville, N.C.,” as Max Read writes in The New York Times Magazine.
And what is in a sense demonic is that MrBeast does not participate in the pre-modern utopic vision of “reconstituting nature in God’s image” and does not participate in the modern conception of commodity exchange. Instead, the spectacle comes from a very different dispensation — in which fiction, ‘hypereality,’ is basically primary, creates its own simulacrum through the currency of ‘views’ and then that fiction is applied to ‘reality,’ much to the bewilderment of everyone affected. As Baudrillard puts it:
The stage is now set for simulation, in the cybernetic sense of the word — that is to say, for all kinds of manipulation of these models (hypothetical scenarios, the creation of simulated situations, etc.), but now nothing distinguishes this management-manipulation from the real itself: there is no more fiction.
Or:
It is no longer possible to manufacture the unreal from the real, to create the imaginary from the data of reality. The process will be rather the reverse: to put in place "decentered" situations, models of simulation, and then to strive to give them the colors of the real, the banal, the lived; to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because the real has disappeared from our lives.
That’s the basic aesthetic of a MrBeast video. On the one hand, there’s a very banal action occurring in the very real world: a backyard being filled up with pennies; a house filled with slime. But, on the other hand, in the simulacra space where the ‘magic’ is happening, the scale is multiplied into the domain of hyperreality. “At their core, the premise of most MrBeast videos is that numbers with lots of zeros are impressive,” writes Read. “One blind person seeing for the first time isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? One thousand blind people seeing for the first time.”
That scale becomes possible through the tools of capitalism and the commodity — millions of views translated into real money through advertising sponsorships. And then the magical packet of cash for the homeless man, the magical eye surgeries, are transmuted back into the banal, ‘real’ world as if through the pre-modern dispensation, the ‘gift’ from the utopic realm. But, for everyone watching, what’s left with you is the simulation, the understanding that you’re not really seeing reality; you’re seeing reality “manage-manipulated,” reality that lives, primarily, to subsidize the far-more-real universe of the MrBeast videos.
Baudrillard, in the absolutist style of a French theorist, writes that this transition of systems is utterly inevitable, that only artwork about and discussion of simulation “should be of any genuine interest to us.” He writes: “the universe of simulation is the world that we will be dealing with from now on.”
I have my doubts about this. I believe that it is possible to organize own’s own life, one’s own frames of reference, in ways that do not participate in the values of the dominant culture. It is possible for people with “pre-modern” sensibilities to live contemporaneously with modern commercial culture — and, maybe even more trenchantly, possible for people to inhabit different modes of being at the same time, so that it’s very normal for contemporary people to be part of the “commercial market” for the work day and then to “switch off” and to suddenly, in the evening or weekend, give away their labor without thought of exchange, to abruptly participate in a gift economy. I suspect that there will be a degree of choice in deciding whether or not to enter into the domain of “the simulation” — it may be difficult to choose to keep one’s feet in reality but not, I would imagine, impossible.
Leaving that aside, though, Baudrillard appears to be right that “the simulation” is coming and is sweeping everything before it. AI consciousness seems to mean the instant peopling of fictive worlds — the way that an entire painting and, soon, book or film can be constructed with a keyboard command. The world of “intelligence” comes to be understood as the aggregation of “data” and has its self-contained but very real existence, with the physical, “real” world adjunct to it and mostly of interest when subject to strange visitations like the gifts and pranks in the MrBeast videos.
Read points out that, the novelty of YouTube aside, MrBeast’s show seems not really that different from TV, but the point is that these trends have been developing for a long time — in the phenomenon of reality television, for instance. What was a bit different about TV was that it was consolidated, that the power structure was obvious, whereas YouTube is diffuse and represents a two-way street. “What makes [MrBeast] remarkable is that he essentially asks his audience to see themselves as a commodity,” says an academic quoted in Read’s piece. At the point when people themselves become the commodity, the modern system of exchange turns into something else. We become more seen-than-seeing, more acted-upon-than-acting. Our “real world” becomes secondary.
I’m not, for a second, looking forward to any part of this.
Sam Kahn writes the Substack Castalia.
Appreciate that! I’d like to reply at more length (will do so later tonight or tomorrow). You seem to know Baudrillard very well so I’d like to really think through my response. Nice to have an exchange on this!
I hate to be a downer ... but ...
This is not at all an accurate representation of Baudrillard and especially the concept of simulation.
What appears to be missing, other than general background, is an understanding of semiotics and what, precisely, simulation is. Moreover, he had TONS of examples that had nothing to do with AI, computers, etc. because it doesn't have anything to do with that. The basic insight in that modern mass communications technology has lead to a point where the populace cannot tell the real from the virtual, or to use one of his examples, the territory from the map. In true simulation, there is no difference between the real and virtual, which we got a taste of in Matrix 3 with Neo's transcendence of the Matrix. Regardless, this is all a commentary on the nature of contemporary culture, the construction of meaning, and semiotic/sign structures.
I think the internet meme about the reality of pumpkin spice lattes is a great example.