Media necessarily presents an abstraction of reality to the viewer. However, the pervasive and distributed nature of information gathering and dissemination in the Internet age opens that abstraction up to people in a way that simply wasn&#x27;t possible when all media was &quot;black boxes&quot; (television, radio, newspaper, etc.) Media now encompasses people uploading footage to Youtube from their phones in the middle of a war zone.<p>The premise of Baudrillard&#x27;s argument as I understand it - that the model of reality created by media is useless fiction and propaganda, which must, one assumes, be rejected out of hand as postmodernists seem to want to do - has possibly become more tenuous over time. Although some would (and do) assert that the fabrication of reality by corporate and government interests has only exploded exponentially and become even more pervasive, and that the appearance of fine-grained truth presented by social media is, itself, only a more elaborate set of lies.<p>This phenomenon, by which reality is described through abstractions and attempts at narrative, is everywhere - and it&#x27;s arguably unavoidable, given that the very nature of human consciousness is a post-hoc hallucination generated by the unreliable narrator that is the brain. Should science dismiss all of its theories as incredulous nonsense because its models are falsifiable? Of course not, because even imperfect models can be useful. What exactly are we to be left with, if we must reject abstraction? We cannot reject it, we are it.<p>It is likely true, however, that for many people the rest of the world exists primarily in the form of a set of packaged narratives or curated experiences presented on an electronic screen or a device. There is also possibly a discussion worth having on the ever-shifting definitions of &quot;war&quot; and &quot;terrorism&quot; and just and unjust conflict in the modern age, because to an extent, the arbiters of these definitions exist as ghosts in the machine.<p>Unfortunately, I had to wade through the cesspool of comments in the linked article and the Wikipedia page on Jean Beaudrillard to even get a superficial idea of what it was even talking about. The degree of contempt this article appears to have for the lay reader only makes it likely most of the discussion around it is going to be complaints about how difficult it is to understand.