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ephemera  never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake  1yr ago (ryandv.substack.com)   Edited 28d ago   2353 thread views

Explorations in Identity and Media

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Most of his references are to landmark philosophers on media, i.e. Baudrillard and MacLuhan (they were both way ahead of their time, they lived in the era of TV but saw trends that would persist into the age of the net), which he does explicitly call out. Also, the title is a reference to one of Baudrillard's keystone works.

I will note aside that Simulacra and Simulation, of Matrix fame, is an absolute must-read if you're interested in social media/advertising/market of "signs".

The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

Sound familiar?

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