The Hyperreal | Hacker News Reader

The Hyperreal

amasad.me

29 pointswallflower14 comments

Anyone interested in this should read Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation is more relevant than ever. A warning, he has great ideas but he is a terrible writer. So bad that I wonder if it's intentional to make the reader think more about it.

Are you reading his works in French? If not, the criticism of the language doesn't hold up. I do agree with the recommendation though - enjoy his work.

I thought so too at first, but I've seen more than a few French speakers say the situation is just about the same in French.

Certainly not unique to Baudrilliard. Judith Butler I think has been voted one of the worst academic writers several times to my knowledge (she was president of MLA for a term, too, if I'm not mistaken). Deleuze and Guatarri are famously incoherent, Derrida as well (Of Grammatology being famously translated by the famously vague Spivak), and personally I find Arendt incredibly difficult to follow. FWIW, a lot of these postmodern authors come from the Continental tradition's linguistic turn, and as a result if you're writing coming from a skepticism towards language's ability to convey meaning in the first place, you're probably going to end up with a pretty complicated but vague articulation. It probably also comes quite a bit from a bit the Hegelian influences.

Yeah I think it was the French specifically around that time with the post structuralist influence, and the humanities in America that imported a lot of that thought and language. I'm not well versed in the school of thought by any means though.

Amongst the continentalists he's not especially poorly written

>To make a hyperreal object from a real one, take only the details that excite the mind — like getting praise — intensify them, and drop everything else. When you reduce food to its most intense elements — sweet & salt — you get hyperreal (junk) food. That is the formula for hyperreality.

>You might blame "capitalism" for working against our better angels. It is, after all, very efficient at producing hyperreality. But you'd be wrong because humans have been making hyperreality since cave drawings.

This is a pretty shallow understanding of hyperreality. Hyperreality is not merely the representation of reality, nor the essentialization of the so-called real, nor the realization of the imaginary into the real. I'm not sure if the author is actually working from critical texts or their understanding of Baudrilliard or whomever they're trying to reference is based on a half-stoned viewing of the Matrix.

Honestly, I don't want to be too harsh, there's certainly value to using the concept of hyperreality to understand the absurdity around us, but this post would be amateurish by undergraduate standards.

Not to be confused with hyperreal numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number

Thank you! Didn’t read the article, was super confused in the comments!

> Communism produces hyperreality too. It is hyperreality. It takes a naturally occurring thing — family and community — and intensifies its most attractive elements. It's an intoxicating hyperreal vision.

It's interesting how people try to make sense of the world and it's history and fit it into the mold of the concepts and models they use to navigate it. The author is the founder of repl.it, so he's definitely developed his own unique way to understand reality.

He actually (to my knowledge) doesn't build an explicit connection, but Adam Curtis's HyperNormalization (2016) is one of his many great historical documentaries on contemporary times, and the one which most closely abuts/relates to the hyperreal, is about letting symbols predominate & take on more meaning than the underlying reality. And the impacts thereof: how that's been used to shift how everyone conceive the world, and to specific ends. (Adam Curtis is amazing.)

HyperNormalization is a strong contrast to what I find to be the most objectionable & gross part of this post, in the middle:

> You might blame "capitalism" for working against our better angels. It is, after all, very efficient at producing hyperreality. But you'd be wrong because humans have been making hyperreality since cave drawings.

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 & intensity far surpassing where the production of dis-reality has ever been before; this should be clear, but the author just says, nah, there's always been hyperreality, so, don't worry about it. Please, no, not like this.

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This post keeps vacillating to me between versions of hyperreal that I agree with & it's own take. The first intro almost makes the hyperreal not just symbol & decoupled, but real & concrete & truthful, almost a Plato Atomic theory idea where the reality they'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:

> But to the receiver of the like, they feel appreciated and heard, and to them, that's real. It's perhaps more real than going out into the world and saying interesting things and receiving real-world "likes" and praise. The activity is reduced to its essence and delivers intense satisfaction. Likes are hyperreal.

I don'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 & unexact, a general spirit thing, rather than something specific. Albeit, yes, it might have a face on it. But especially if you're having 20+ people after your talk telling you you did great, it'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 not hyperreality. Very weak start, to me.

But to be fair, there is some idea that there is a manufactured reality surrounding their activity doesn't seem entirely off-base. But I think it requires much much better exploration & explanation than what's given where. The whole article stems from this quote, which is a very heavy first paragraph, & entirely unsupported, and at face value seemingly absurd.

The classic idea of the hyperreal, to me, is a tradeoff where the power & meaning of symbols rises beyond that of reality/truth. Where the symbol takes on it'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's an incredibly callous & shortsighted take on a very deep modern situation. They're not always wrong, but they're absolutely positively not always right, right from the start (and the rest of what we read from there is thus in danger).

I think the most charitable take we can make is to ignore all historical context & just allow this post to exist on it's own. To them, hyperreality is an intensification, 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:

If we say that a state is a hyper-intensified family/community? Maybe? But I don't think that's the idea. I think there's a desire to advance beyond the family sense, to see a humanhood (brotherhood) of people. To recognize each other & work together. Which... families famously don't, in many ways: they have very different people, but communism (especially more democratic communism forms) is more about reinforcing & supporting, ideally.

I dunno. This is kind of it's own post, and even by it's own definitions, it still feels wicked off.

Search for the "Wokal Strawberry" for a really good primer on hyperreality...

So, pornography is hyperreal sex?

Pornography is not hyperreal sex but it is part of the hyperreality of human sexuality. Pornography presents itself as a depiction of real sex that's more authentic than, say, a sex scene in the movies, by showing the whole picture so to speak. But by attempting to be more real than real, and often working to remove the distance between the audience and the male actor (the interest in VR for instance, and gonzo before that if I'm not mistaken), porn subsumes other depictions and understandings of sex, and becomes the cause for its own imitation and exaggeration outside its depiction.

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