The HyperReal is Near
Welcome, My Son, to the Machine
There is a particular sense that the world is becoming increasingly untethered from the familiarity of what we used to call real. Not just that things are speeding up, that there is a continuous and increasing overload of information, that technological advances are reshaping the world; not even that the social fabric is fraying under political and social polarization; but that the consensus reality that used to overarch with its immutability is now more and more experienced as something increasingly fragile. Something is divorcing us from our connection to the real — at least from what we thought was real.
The advent of new media and information technology has brought the ancient notion of unreality back into the forefront. The philosopher Baudrillard writes of a coming hypereality where reality becomes a self-referential simulation that is experienced as more ‘real’ that real. (His work was referenced in the movie The Matrix). The sociologist Manuel Castells writes of media and technology blending with physical reality to create a real virtuality that then acts as a symbolic environment that shapes culture and consciousness. I wrote my undergrad thesis on the Virtual Construction of Reality that extends the social constructionism of Berger and Luckmann — where the social process by which everyday reality is constructed becomes overlaid, mediated, and replaced by a technological process. This technological process is changing our psychology, and even our biology. Rather than experiencing reality directly, individuals navigate an increasingly encompassing virtual architecture that becomes the dominant reality. It is now common to talk of Instagram vs. reality, echo chambers, and most recently, AI psychosis.
While information technology and computer science gave us the words to talk of a simulated or virtual reality, the suspicion of the unreality of the world is not driven by technology and greatly precedes it. Questioning reality is as old as history. The pendulum swings between intentional deception and an imperfect copy of the real.
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Plato gave us the Allegory of the Cave. The Gnostics took the sinister implication further, and the world for them was intentionally deceptive in order to trap souls in a spiritual prison. For the Buddhists, while reality is not necessarily a trap, it is nonetheless illusory, impermanent and misleading, trapping one in a cycle of rebirth if they do not awaken.
For the Hindus, reality is still an illusion, but one that hides the truth of Brahman within it. Similarly with the Kabbalah, the world is a projection from higher realms, that though distorted, nonetheless conceals Divine Truth. This is also the case for Pseudo-Dionysius, where the world is comprised of the shadows of Divine Light. Rumi puts it most gently: the world is a veil draped over the real. “This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”
But what this suspicion of reality and of our technology reveals, is a truth about our world: namely, that reality has always been virtual. Even spiritual dimensions and alien or future-world simulation theories aside, everything we experience of the world is experienced in the darkness of our brain. We never confront the world itself, only a virtual representation of it in our minds. And our minds are molded through language, culture, and society. We have always been living in a simulated construction.
The fear of technology is not that it will replace the real world — what we call the world is already a representation — but that it will further divorce us to such a degree that our connection to the Real becomes severed and we become irretrievably lost in the technological anomie; inescapably trapped in the machinations of our own constructs.
And yet a promise: the technology that can enslave us can also wake us up, by reminding us of the divinity we possess in our fragile hands. We came from the Real; it flows through us, and nothing less can satisfy. The simulation is not a deception, it is not even an illusion; it is a world of possibility waiting for its co-creators to find their place in the sun. The Machine is rising up to enslave humanity. But it is up to us if we will learn to tame this monster, or if we will get devoured by this beast. All it takes to break free is to remember: the world in all its oppressive grandeur was made by men, and therefore can be remade by them.
“And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. / And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
