Simulacra and Simulation

Baudrillard says that within hyperrealities, there are hypermarkets and hypercommodities. In this space, consumerism overtakes everything, but commodities have no connection to reality. People who are affected by living in a meaningless hyperreality desperately seek meaning through hyperconsumerism. Reality is replaced by marketing—billboards, displays, and signs. People do not need any more surveillance than the store itself. The desensitization and distraction of hyperconsumerism manipulates and controls the population.

Baudrillard argues that there is no distinction between the hypermarket and the external world. Cities have lost their character, and they have been replaced by giant stores. Everything is abstracted and monetized. Human life revolves around hyperconsumerism. Hyperrealities and hypermarkets reach a level of abstraction that entirely severs them from original reality. Signs cease to be copies of profound reality; instead, they are merely symbols, lost in a never-ending circle of refraction.

Baudrillard blames the media for contributing to the implosion of meaning. Society erroneously believes that greater access to information increases access to meaning. However, he argues that the saturation of information through the media is a destructive force that annihilates any connection to reality. People participate in the construction and dissemination of information, which makes them complicit in the mythologization of reality. Baudrillard views the concentrated weight of the information age as a force that is actively imploding and collapsing culture.

Rather than increasing communication and social interaction, information destroys communication by oversaturating and exhausting it. The saturation continues to grow until it becomes a circular process in which communication says nothing new. It just reproduces the simulation of the hyperreal. The pressure to continue communication and to produce information through mass media further contributes to the dissolution of meaning. Baudrillard argues that media does not seek to unite society; instead, the function of information in media is to further divide and isolate people.

In hyperreality, media no longer reflects its original use, which is to serve as a mediating force between the individual and larger reality. Instead, media becomes communication and information itself—an abstraction with no connection to the truth. Baudrillard questions the motivation of media, asking whether it serves power through manipulation or itself. He determines that the widespread impact of simulacra means that media serves neither: “The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process” (84). The nature of hyperreality is continuous and unfettered growth without meaning.

All art and culture are absorbed into the trivial art form of advertising. Baudrillard criticizes its superficiality. Advertising is meant to be looked at and then immediately forgotten. Baudrillard claims that modern advertising emerged after the Bolshevik Revolution and the Great Depression. Propaganda opened the door for a new wave of marketing; but rather than merely responding to the wants and needs of consumers, it created desire. This shift in advertising further galvanized hyperreality, showing that “there is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in both” (88). Technology helped to make advertising more universal while simultaneously destroying language. Baudrillard sees the language of computer science as a destructive force that contributes to abstraction and loss of meaning.

This abstraction is seen in how advertising has developed over time; it has moved away from the distribution of information about commodities into the hyperreal. Like all overdeveloped and oversaturated systems, advertising has devolved into a self-referential circle and “publicity has become its own commodity” (90). Baudrillard points to Las Vegas as a glimmering example of the pervasiveness of advertising and its position as a destructive force. At night, the city is alight with glowing advertisements; the culture and hyperreality of the city are synonymous with its advertising. By the light of day, the city looks as though it has been effaced and vandalized with it.

Baudrillard also shows how advertising adheres to another principle of hyperreality: Acceleration. As advertising becomes more self-referential and lost in a sea of simulacra, the greater the demand. Advertising ceases to become about the commodity; instead, it is about socialization. As it replaces communication and socialization, humans increasingly seek to fill this void.