The Hyperreal
He actually (to my knowledge) doesn&#x27;t build an explicit connection, but Adam Curtis&#x27;s <i>HyperNormalization</i> (2016) is one of his many great historical documentaries on contemporary times, and the one which most closely abuts&#x2F;relates to the hyperreal, is about letting symbols predominate &amp; take on more meaning than the underlying reality. And the impacts thereof: how that&#x27;s been used to shift how everyone conceive the world, and to specific ends. (Adam Curtis is amazing.)<p><i>HyperNormalization</i> is a strong contrast to what I find to be the most objectionable &amp; gross part of this post, in the middle:<p>&gt; <i>You might blame &quot;capitalism&quot; for working against our better angels. It is, after all, very efficient at producing hyperreality. But you&#x27;d be wrong because humans have been making hyperreality since cave drawings.</i><p>That the hyperreal has distorted us, that symbols have lead us astray from reality: yes. The hyperreal is not a new thing: true. Is that an argument for disbelieving the distortions of capital?! Fuck no! Go watch HyperNormalization. The hyperreal is manufactured, deliberately, to erode reality, at a level &amp; intensity far surpassing where the production of dis-reality has ever been before; this should be clear, but the author just says, nah, there&#x27;s always been hyperreality, so, don&#x27;t worry about it. Please, no, <i>not like this.</i><p>----<p>This post keeps vacillating to me between versions of hyperreal that I agree with &amp; it&#x27;s own take. The first intro almost makes the hyperreal not just symbol &amp; decoupled, but real &amp; concrete &amp; truthful, almost a Plato Atomic theory idea where the reality they&#x27;ve presented becomes over-real, which is a polar opposite of the basic core idea of hyperreal (as everyone else knows it)! Of being where the meaning of symbols overtake the meaning of reality to form a new thinking mentality decoupled from reality:<p>&gt; <i>But to the receiver of the like, they feel appreciated and heard, and to them, that&#x27;s real. It&#x27;s perhaps more real than going out into the world and saying interesting things and receiving real-world &quot;likes&quot; and praise. The activity is reduced to its essence and delivers intense satisfaction. Likes are hyperreal.</i><p>I don&#x27;t think this affirmation here (by Likes) is particularly more decoupled from reality than the affirmation someone might give us in person. It has less context, less specificity, but often the praise we receive in the world is well intended but basically a symbol, a clear desire of someone to recognize us, but unspecific &amp; unexact, a general spirit thing, rather than something specific. Albeit, yes, it might have a face on it. But especially if you&#x27;re having 20+ people after your talk telling you you did great, it&#x27;s probably no more or less hyper-real, even if there are faces versus not having faces. Ultimately the poster presented what they felt was a reality, probably (unless they promoted a decoupled symbol): seeing that affirmed is <i>not</i> hyperreality. Very weak start, to me.<p>But to be fair, there is some idea that there is a manufactured reality surrounding their activity doesn&#x27;t seem entirely off-base. But I think it requires much much better exploration &amp; explanation than what&#x27;s given where. The whole article stems from this quote, which is a very heavy first paragraph, &amp; entirely unsupported, and at face value seemingly absurd.<p>The classic idea of the hyperreal, to me, is a tradeoff where the power &amp; meaning of symbols rises beyond that of reality&#x2F;truth. Where the symbol takes on it&#x27;s own life, apart. But the author right out of the gate, their first contention, is that likes are always fake, are always meaningless symbols, that they debase reality. And I think that&#x27;s an incredibly callous &amp; shortsighted take on a very deep modern situation. They&#x27;re not always wrong, but they&#x27;re absolutely positively not always right, right from the start (and the rest of what we read from there is thus in danger).<p>I think the most charitable take we can make is to ignore all historical context &amp; just allow this post to exist on it&#x27;s own. To them, hyperreality is an <i>intensification,</i> any situation where something is amplified. But even then, it seems deeply misleading. The values they identify as communistic seem deeply off-base from what I feel like where communistic values:<p>&gt; <i>Communism produces hyperreality too. It is hyperreality. It takes a naturally occurring thing — family and community — and intensifies its most attractive elements. It&#x27;s an intoxicating hyperreal vision.</i><p>If we say that a state is a hyper-intensified family&#x2F;community? Maybe? But I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the idea. I think there&#x27;s a desire to advance beyond the family sense, to see a humanhood (brotherhood) of people. To recognize each other &amp; work together. Which... families famously don&#x27;t, in many ways: they have very different people, but communism (especially more democratic communism forms) is more about reinforcing &amp; supporting, ideally.<p>I dunno. This is kind of it&#x27;s own post, and even by it&#x27;s own definitions, it still feels wicked off.