[Vision2020] Simulation, Hypermarkets, Hypercommodity

[Ted Moffett]

All-

The first Matric film features Neo before his awakening from the Matrix
being greeted at his front door by a band of revelers (follow the White
Rabbit), one of whom is buying illegal software.  Neo opens a hollowed out
book to facilitate the transaction: a copy of Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra
and Simulation."

Later in the same film Morpheus announces to Neo when revealing the "real"
appearance of Earth, "Welcome to the desert of the real." a reference to a
statement in "Simulacra and Simulation:"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/trivia

Passage from link above:

When Morpheus is explaining "What the Matrix is" to Neo, he uses the phrase,
"Welcome, to the desert of the real." This is a paraphrase from Jean
Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation", the hollowed-out book where Neo
keeps his illegal software. The quote can be found in Chapter One - The
Precession of Simulacra, Page one, Paragraph 2, "It is the real, and not the
map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer
those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself."
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Given the recent discussion of the worth of studying Philosophy, I thought
my recent explorations of Jean Baudrillard's work relevant.  I find him at
once baffling, obscure and absurd, then suddenly full of genius when he
describes and illuminates modern forms of economic/cultural process in media
and virtual worlds, in advertising and marketing of products, development of
shopping centers as cultural centers, the Internet, video games, the
emerging global culture sold world wide, etc.

I do not have a firm grasp on Baudrillard's thinking.  He writes almost in a
foreign language (and I do not mean because I read translations from the
original French), designed to reveal developments in culture that require
unusual uses of words and concepts, sometimes appearing closer to poetry
than Philosophy.

Many in Moscow want aggressive economic growth and development.  Do we
understand what this means for the future as we walk backwards into a world
becoming more and more global by the moment, where marketing and
commodity are becoming a kind of globalized simulated cultural invasion,
where the copy is the real, the "hyperreal?"  This places the immigration
issue into a whole new realm!

This will be old news to those well versed in post modernist thinking, but I
still find these concepts endlessly thought provoking:

http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/baudrillardone.html

http://web3.woodbury.edu/faculty/dcremer/courses/pomo/BaudrillardSS2.htm

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberspace_internet_virtuality_postmodernity.html

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Ted Moffett
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