
by A Lily Bit
July 28, 2025
from
ALilyBit Website
A Lily Bit
I’ve been part of what people call "the Deep State"
for years. Now I’m exposing it and the people that
created and run it. |

Jean Baudrillard wrote "Simulacra and
Simulation" in 1981, back when
MTV still played music videos and the internet was a Pentagon
experiment.
He died in 2007,
just as Facebook was going global.
He never lived to see Instagram stories or
TikTok dances, never witnessed a Twitter mob or a Zoom funeral.
But somehow, this French philosopher mapped our
current reality with surgical precision.
His most famous line cuts deep:
"We live in a world where there is more and
more information and less and less meaning."
Read that again...!
Your phone buzzes with breaking news, your
feeds overflow with hot takes, your brain marinates in an
endless stream of content.
Yet something's missing...
The noise drowns out the signal.
Facts pile up like garbage, but wisdom?
Understanding?
Those feel increasingly rare.
Baudrillard saw this coming decades ago.
Not the technology, but the condition:
a world where copies have replaced
originals, where simulations feel more real than reality
itself...
When Copies Have No Originals
Baudrillard's core idea sounds abstract until you look around.
We're surrounded by what he called "simulacra":
copies that point to nothing real.
Take your Instagram feed.
Those photos aren't documenting life; they're
manufacturing it.
Every image gets filtered, cropped,
captioned, and curated to match some ideal version of experience
that exists nowhere except in other Instagram photos.
A medieval painting of a king pointed to an actual monarch.
Today's crown emoji points to... what?
An idea of royalty that comes from Disney
movies, which themselves reference older Disney movies, in an
endless hall of mirrors.
The process happens in stages.
First, representations clearly copy something
real.
Then they start distorting the original, like
propaganda or advertising.
Next, they hide the fact that there's no real
original anymore.
Finally, in what Baudrillard called the
fourth order of simulacra, the copy becomes its own reality.
The map replaces the territory. The menu becomes
more important than the meal...
Baudrillard told a story about
the Ifugao people that
perfectly captures our predicament.
When anthropologists arrived to study their
"authentic" culture, something strange happened.
The tribe members, aware they were being
watched, began performing their traditions more elaborately.
They wore traditional clothes more often,
made their rituals more spectacular, acted out idealized
versions of themselves for the scientists.
The published studies went global. Eventually, new generations
of Ifugao started consulting these academic texts to understand
their own culture.
The representation had eaten the original.
The performance had become reality.
Sound familiar...?
We do this constantly now.
We live our lives as if we're being
photographed, because we are.
We perform ourselves on social media until
the performance becomes us.
We check other people's profiles to
understand how to be authentic.
The copy overwrites the original until there's no
difference left.
Walmart as Metaphysics
Walk into any big box store and you'll see Baudrillard's theory made
flesh.
Everything looks perfect - too perfect.
The apples gleam like they've been waxed
(they have).
The vegetables look more like the idea of
vegetables than anything you'd find in nature.
The produce section feels like a movie set of
a produce section.
But here's the twist: we prefer it this way.
Go to a farmer's market and the tomatoes look
weird - misshapen, different sizes, sometimes bug-eaten.
That's what real tomatoes look like.
But we've been trained by the simulation to
expect perfection.
The fake has become our standard for real.
Disney World operates on the same
principle, but Baudrillard argued it's actually more honest than the
outside world.
At least Disney admits it's fake. The rest of the
world pretends to be authentic while being just as constructed, just
as artificial, just as performed.
Ask someone to draw a princess and they'll draw Disney's version.
That image in their head - that's their definition of real. The
simulation took over when they were children and never let go.
The Politics of
Nowhere
Politics might be where Baudrillard's insights hit hardest.
Modern campaigns aren't about governing - they're
about brand management.
Politicians don't have policies; they have
positions.
Voters don't choose representatives; they
choose lifestyle attractors.
The whole system runs on what we could call
"technocratic simulacra."
Experts generate reports about problems that
exist mainly in other reports.
Think tanks churn out white papers that
reference other white papers.
The policy world becomes a closed loop of
simulation, increasingly detached from the ground it claims to
address.
Consider "evidence-based policy" - sounds
rational, right?
Except it usually means cherry-picking studies
that confirm what you already believed.
The simulation of scientific objectivity
becomes more important than actual rigor.
Dissent gets dismissed not through argument
but through appeals to simulated consensus:
"experts agree," end of discussion.
The left has its own simulation
problems.
Much of contemporary progressive politics
consists of academic theories about oppression that get imported
wholesale into activist discourse. The revolution becomes a
lifestyle brand, complete with merchandise and Instagram
aesthetics.
Identity categories that once described lived
realities become free-floating signifiers that can be claimed
and performed regardless of actual experience.
The right mirrors this perfectly.
Traditional conservatism becomes nostalgic
aesthetics and online culture war rather than the patient work
of building lasting institutions.
Both sides generate massive amounts of content
about their enemies while remaining unable to govern when they get
the chance.
The genius of the system is that it channels real frustration into
fake conflicts.
Citizens become consumers of political
entertainment, choosing their preferred brand of outrage while
staying powerless to change anything fundamental.
The theater of politics replaces actual
democracy.
You can see this in how much mental energy gets
consumed by staying current with political developments, cultural
controversies, social media debates.
The simulation of being "informed" becomes a
full-time job.
People can name every Supreme Court justice
but don't know their neighbors.
They have passionate opinions about events
they can't influence while ignoring problems they could actually
address.
Addicted to the Fake
Here's what Baudrillard couldn't have fully predicted:
how simulation would hijack our brain
chemistry...
The dopamine pathways that evolved to reward
survival behaviors - finding food, forming bonds, accomplishing
tasks - now get triggered by completely artificial experiences.
Instagram likes feel like
social approval but leave you lonelier.
Dating apps promise connection while
turning relationships into shopping.
Fitness trackers gamify health until
the score matters more than feeling good.
Everything gets optimized, quantified, turned
into content.
We prefer the simulation because it's often superior to reality -
more consistent, more dramatic, more manageable.
The McDonald's photo promises an experience
the actual burger can't deliver, but we keep buying the promise
because reality is messy and disappointing.
This goes beyond cultural conditioning.
Our brains literally can't tell the difference
between simulated and real rewards. We've become
neurologically dependent on fake experiences that feel authentic
while being obviously artificial.
The problem with analyzing simulation is that you have to use the
tools of simulation to do it. Baudrillard himself was trapped in
this paradox - critiquing the system from within the system, using
academic language to describe the death of authentic experience.
If we're completely embedded in simulation, where do we stand
to criticize it? The god's-eye view that critique seems to require
might itself be a simulation - another academic fantasy with no
basis in reality.
Digital technology has accelerated everything Baudrillard
identified.
Virtual reality promises to complete the process,
creating "mixed reality" environments where the question of what's
real becomes not just unanswerable but irrelevant.
The metaverse, whatever form it
takes, represents the logical endpoint: pure simulation where
reality becomes a quaint concept from the past.
Finding Exit
Routes
Despite the totalizing nature of his analysis, Baudrillard left some
room for hope.
He wrote about "pockets of the real" -
moments where authentic experience breaks through the
simulation.
Not by rejecting technology or retreating to
some imaginary pre-modern state, but by paying attention to what
exceeds representation.
The genuine smile from a stranger that
isn't performed for social media.
Art made for its own sake rather than for
likes and shares.
Direct contact with natural processes
that resist simulation - weather, seasons, birth, death, the
basic facts of embodied existence.
But even this prescription needs skepticism.
The idea of "authentic nature" might itself be a
romantic simulation. There's no pure outside to the system,
no untouched realm where real experience waits.
What's possible is more like conscious participation in
simulation.
Knowing you're in the game while playing it
anyway.
Using social media without being used by it.
Engaging with politics without getting
consumed by political theater.
This requires what we might call "simulation
literacy":
the ability to recognize how artificial
environments work on you and to resist their most manipulative
aspects.
Not total withdrawal, but conscious
engagement...
The most radical move might be simple:
slow down...
Stop having opinions about everything.
Focus on immediate, tangible realities rather
than abstract causes.
Choose your local community over distant
solidarity, practical skills over theoretical sophistication,
local problems over global narratives.
The Courage to Be Bored
True resistance to hyper-reality demands accepting,
a kind of intellectual humility that
contemporary culture finds almost unbearable.
It means admitting that most issues
dominating our attention are beyond our control, while problems
we could actually solve go unnoticed because they lack
theoretical glamour.
This points toward a different kind of civic
engagement.
Not the spectacular theater of national
politics, but what Hannah Arendt called "the space of
appearance" - places where actual citizens gather to discuss
common concerns.
Town halls instead of X threads.
Local volunteer work instead of viral
petitions.
The hyper-real political landscape offers
simulation experiences that,
feel more meaningful than real civic
participation because they provide immediate dopamine reward
without requiring the unglamorous work of actual democracy.
The tweet feels more impactful than the
community meeting.
The online argument seems more important than
the neighborhood cleanup.
Breaking this pattern requires "democratic
asceticism" - choosing to engage with political reality at human
scale even when media narratives pull you toward grander, more
abstract concerns.
It means being less informed about distant
controversies and more engaged with immediate realities.
We can't return to some original reality that probably never existed
anyway. The question isn't whether we can escape simulation but
whether we can inhabit it more consciously...
The hyper-real is our condition.
It doesn't have to be our fate, but only if
we develop the discipline to distinguish between what demands
our attention and what merely competes for it.
Only if we can resist the constant
pressure to have takes, to stay current, to perform our identities
through consumption and sharing.
The most subversive thing you can do in a world of endless
simulation might be the simplest:
pay attention to what's actually in front of
you.
Not what represents something else, not what
means something larger, just what's there.
The texture of your coffee cup.
The expression on your friend's face.
The way light moves across a wall.
Baudrillard's great insight wasn't that
simulation is bad - it's that it's total.
We live inside it completely.
But totality isn't the same as
totalitarianism.
There are still choices to make, attention to
direct, ways of being that feel more or less authentic even
within the hyper-real.
The challenge is maintaining humanity inside the machine.
Staying capable of wonder, connection, and
meaning while recognizing their increasingly mediated character.
This requires courage - not the
'dramatic courage of heroes', but the quiet courage of
people who choose to be present in a world that profits from their
distraction.
That might be enough...
In a landscape of infinite simulation, presence
becomes revolutionary...!
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