Recursion
Life imitates art. Art imitates life. Tech imitates life. Life imitates tech.
As someone who readily consumes television and movies, I’ve noticed there’s been a recent uptick in story plots that involve simulations. Black Mirror has made this theme its bread and butter. Hang the DJ and Striking Vipers are particularly memorable episodes in the series – both explore romance and vulnerability when interpersonal exchanges take place outside of one’s physical body and inside virtual reality.
While these particular shows are unnerving because they feel like a snapshot from the near future, I’ve felt even more discomfort in the idea that our current lives are just as removed from reality. I don’t think we’re actually Sims characters, but it feels as if we’re always online, constantly living a technologically mediated life. This existential anxiety is nothing new and has also clearly permeated into public consciousness. The villain in Incredibles 2, Screenslaver, is on a mission to eradicate consumers’ reliance on television screens that she believes has eroded individual agency. Whether its Screenslaver or Chris Gilhaney in Smithereens, the message is the same – can we really feel, love, or live in a world so heavily mediated by technology? Has the world become inundated by so many signs and symbols it’s functionally a simulation?
Of course, it would be downright disrespectful to talk about these critiques without mentioning the OG, The Matrix. The 1999 masterpiece was one of the first films that popularized this line of questioning, and its creation was heavily influenced by the work of Jean Baudrillard. I’m not going to delve too deeply into what Baudrillard writes about because honestly, I’d butcher it and I really doubt you want to learn about post-modern French philosophy if you don’t have to. (If you’re really into sort of thing I’ll drop this recommendation as a great starting point).
Baudrillard was, among other things, interested in what the world would look like in a post post-modern world. What does that mean? Well partially, Baudrillard anticipated wide-sweeping terms would be replaced by ever-proliferating identity labels that could partially describe an individual. For instance, the binary of “crazy” versus “healthy” would eventually become replaced with dozens of categories, creating a spectrum of mental health states an individual could embody. In some instances, “suffering from mild anxiety” replaced the use of the term “crazy” to more accurately describe someone, and as a result, the term “crazy” lost some of its power as an all-encompassing identity archetype.
Additionally, in a post post-modern world, no one label or set of labels can sufficiently describe one’s entire identity. For example, knowing someone is both “American” and a “democrat” can really mean so many different things that these labels really don’t tell you all that much. No matter which labels you choose or how many labels you choose, portions of the intersectional interests and identities an individual holds will be missing.
At this point, I bet you’re wondering why is this even relevant? Well, if you can’t holistically define yourself or be defined by a set of identity labels, how might you express who you are? To Baudrillard, the answer is hyper-consumerism.
We buy things to express who we are and who we aspire to be. Buying a Supreme box logo shirt in 2012 was by no means practical from a utility standpoint. It was hard to hunt one down and they were really only available in two locations in the U.S. Nevertheless, teenagers around the country saved money from weeks of work, lined up on Wednesday nights until Thursday mornings, and hoped to land their biggest dub of the year. Why? Because at the time buying Supreme represented being a part of something special, an underground group of likeminded individuals who lived and breathed skating culture.
Fast forward to today, and celebrities from Kendall Jenner to Justin Bieber are flexing the brand, increasing the clout for people lucky enough to own some pieces. As a result, the brand has become popular to hypebeasts who have never stepped in skate parks in their life (see Exhibit A, you won’t miss him). Reselling marketplaces opened up left and right, Supreme was partially bought out by the Carlyle Group at a $1 billion valuation, and skating culture became appropriated by suburbanites everywhere. This exemplifies another part of Baudrillard’s consumerism argument – media directly influences what buying certain brands means for a person.
Now, all of this shouldn’t seem too hot a take. Most people would agree various forms of media inform our value systems and that this oftentimes drives us towards consumerism in an effort to express our identities. What is more interesting, and also more concerning, is Baudrillard’s addendum to this idea. Various forms of media function as simulations of the world that we live in. When I say simulations here, I don’t mean things like The Sims. As Stephen West puts it, “a simulation can be thought of any imitation of how a real world system or process works over time.” Tom and Summer, Dre and Bow, Ross and Rachel (overrated), Joel and Clementine, etc. all seem so relatable because they are simulations of what we sometimes experience in our real, romantic lives. There’s another level to this though – it’s not uncommon to hear individuals compare their real life relationships to the simulations that they’ve seen in media (I myself have unfortunately made Hang the DJ jokes with girls I’ve met on Tinder).
Baudrillard was concerned with this level of recursion – when simulations imitate reality, reality imitates these simulations, and the process goes on indefinitely. We lose track of exactly what loop we’re stuck in, and as a result, we don’t consciously realize the comparisons we are making. We lose focus of what was originally important to us. We consume romcoms and subconsciously compare them to our real-world relationships and never feel fulfilled. Even when we have the self-awareness to realize we’re participating in media-driven simulations of reality, it becomes difficult to escape. Prioritizing experiences for pictures that yield Instagram likes, getting angry your significant other doesn’t feature you on their feed, and becoming desensitized to violence both in real life and the news are all examples of this.
That’s the inspiration behind this newsletter. I’ve compared parts of my life to the media I consume and as a result, I’ve felt lost and at times have expressed unhealthy shiny-object syndrome. While Baudrillard identified buying things as a method in how individuals find meaning in a world saturated with consumerism, I think alternative mediums like this one demonstrate there’s other ways to express oneself.
Write for the simple sake of creating, create as a means of showing love, and love without drawing comparisons.