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VI. Asymmetric Warfare: Globalization & The Staging Of Military Action Today’s terrorism attempts to work in opposition to the abstracted warfare which makes structural decisions that affect ‘the painful reality of millions’. The rise of paranoia has created the ‘terrorist’, and 28 inscribed within it is ‘an irrational abstract agency’; serving as the rationale for indiscriminate killings and justification for the ‘war on terror’. As the ultimate tool for legitimating death, racism is not an external 29 phenomenon, but one endemic in the sovereign state and the global neocolonialist regime. As Foucault argues, its discourse is ‘always available for recuperation, and integral to the workings of the biopolitical state’. After all, it is the ‘fierce colonial desire’ which strives to classify and categorize peoples, and 30 “blackness or race have never been fixed, they have always belonged to a chain of open-ended signifiers” We are therefore not in a post-racial moment, since not only is racial discourse revived and 31 instrumentalized for the benefits of the sovereign state’s foreign affairs, but it is used to institutionalize a new regime of existence in which people become abstractions and signifiers, agents in a staged and asymmetrical war that they never ascribed to. After all, the use of big data in order to classify ‘terrorist’ 32 activity has already been used against climate change activists in the United States, who were also accused of terrorist activity in their own country. The ‘state of exception’ created through the reign of terror on foreign and home soil creates a dangerous volatile environment. The asymmetric warfare occurring in today’s Fourth World War is not only played on the geopolitical field, it is also played on the ideological one through spectacles and extreme performances, video testimonials and leaked government files. Contemporary war zones have become more blurred and ubiquitous—taking place outside of designated war zones; as cyber warfare, terrorism, and its complementary ‘war on terror’. The military is not only deployed, it is also orchestrated; war becomes an installation; and its warfare is curated by edited drone footage, press releases, cinematic documentaries, and activist phone videos. War has become staged, curated, and installed, and as Kelleher states: “the scene does not just happen of its own accord but is put together in a particular way for our benefit, which means also put together to ‘work’ on us in particular ways.” The term theatre of war, for example, refers 33 to the way in which military action is deployed and staged. Photography, dramaturgy, and visual art are 34 also instrumentalized in order to persuade, manipulate, and create political illusions that displace subjectivities, geographical borders, public morals, and legislation. They are increasingly used within the context of warfare in order to create proxy’s and confusion. This performative analysis has vast implications, because if terrorism is performance art, it cannot be militarily defeated. Furthermore, the response to terrorism with military action has the tendency to feed the ‘event’ by meeting it on the same stage. It is a well known fact that videos and testimonies of the United States’ atrocities abroad have been used to recruit more terrorists. As Zizek states: ‘we tend to forget we all are not just abstract individuals of a world’; rather than feed the abstraction of the ‘war on terror’, perhaps it is time to lift the veil in order to see the real war: that of the economic neocolonialist regime. Rather than let American patriotism render September 11 a device for state ideology, we should note the way in which the economy increasingly takes more primacy over democracy. Despite the United States’ denouncements of the state of a 35 ‘backwards Middle East’, their simulational values mask their interests, which is precisely to keep these states undemocratic to protect the unfettered power they have over the regional oil reserves. 36 Terrorism can be seen as a decolonizing practice through which the neocolonialist reign of terror and impunity is hijacked through an embrace of death as sacrifice. Terrorism succeeds as a decolonizing practice by 1) using martyrdom in order to hijack to logic of necropolitics, signifying death as sacrifice, 2) using extreme performances in order to inspire the similar fear and impunity as the neocolonialist regime, challenging the moral legitimacy of the West, 3) using global spectacles in order to create symbolic events, and 4) instrumentalizing media in order to take part in the global ‘shock politics’ and ‘politics of illusion’. The ‘Fourth World War’ functions through abstraction, and through the dehumanization of a peoples in order to legitimize their deaths. To this end, racial discourse is ‘revived’ and instrumentalized by the global neocolonialist regime in favor of their economic interests abroad. The dramaturgical and semiotic analysis of the ‘war on terror’ showcases how, through engaging on the global media stage, both parties are feeding the ‘theatre of war’. It also showcases that terrorism cannot be defeated through military action, since its impact is geared towards the symbolic event.

Baudrillard’s account of a functionally-obsessed code does not conclude with a smoothly functioning totality. The system which results depends on the constant maintenance of a regime of control. Such a system is very unstable, open to collapsing at the slightest rupture. For instance, systems of power depend on a master-signifier, which is ultimately arbitrary and contingent. (There is no longer a master-signifier of the entire system, but agencies such as states and companies still have leaders for example). When it is obvious that it is arbitrary and contingent, power is unpinned from its apparent obviousness. It comes to seem purely arbitrary, and this interferes with its functioning. When power occupies the empty place of power, it comes to seem obscene, impure and ridiculous, and eventually collapses. Baudrillard refers to this instability as implosion. This means that he sees the system collapsing from within. The system is no longer expanding – hence the turn to deterrence instead of war. It is in ‘involution’ – collapsing in upon itself. For Baudrillard, the system has reached its culmination. It is accelerating towards its limit, which today is expressed as implosion (rather than explosion or revolution). The growing density of simulations is destroying it. Implosion is swallowing all the energy of the real. Implosion is similar to the idea of ‘internal contradictions’ in Marxism. It refers to a tendency to collapse arising from the system’s own dynamics. Implosion arises from the destruction of meaning and the reality-effect due to the precession of simulacra. The problem for the system is that signs need a separate reality in order to refer to something, and hence to function as signs. In the current regime of simulation, social realities are generated from signs and models which precede them. The model produces the “real”, the medium, and the message all at once. Reality separate from the regime is either destroyed, denied, or incorporated. As a result, the signs stop referring to anything. At the same time, therefore, a total system of meaning is created, and its meaningfulness is destroyed. All signs or referentials are combined in a vicious circle or Moebius strip. Truth, equivalences, rational distinctions break down. Without a clear outside or referent, the reality-effect breaks down. Without a focus of intensity, meaning breaks down. Meaning can no longer be pinned-down in particular places. It circulates at increased speed, without any referent or guarantee. For instance, economic growth is increasingly unstable. Economic bubbles form and burst, commodities (such as Internet companies or real-estate) are immensely valued and then collapse, emerging “tigers” from Korea to Ireland to Mexico suffer sharp collapses. Baudrillard sees the same thing happening with everything from fashion to art to politics. The problem is structural. Once the system reaches saturation, it starts to fall in on itself, like a black hole. Saturation leads to inertia. For Baudrillard, global cities have already become black holes, eating up past social phenomena and meanings. They are entirely functional zones, arranged around sites such as hypermarkets (massive supermarkets), shopping centres and transport networks. The system is based on functionality. Yet in hypermarkets and modern universities, functions seem to become indeterminate – hence cities seem to disintegrate. This is because they have lost their distinct purposes or use-values. They become polyfunctional black-boxes with different input-output combinations. Usefulness is itself an ideology, which relies on the simulation of shortage or the creation of artificial scarcity. It is actually a moral convention, not a fact of nature. Today, supermarkets are also insurance companies, banks, pharmacists, government information dispensers, home-delivery services; today’s universities are also corporate research subcontractors, vocational trainers, immigration monitors, producers of brand-name merchandise, profiteers on debts, affiliates of regional development councils, housing providers, monitors of student dissent… This kind of hyper-functionalism renders them almost functionless – they can no longer be defined by a particular core function. They become a means without end. An operationalism without specific functions. All the different functions become simultaneous, without past, future or distinction. All mental, temporal, spatial and signalled coordinates become interchangeable in the simulated world. Hence, institutions cease to be related to specific functions, and cease to be believable as guarantors of meaning. This has social effects. Power has ceased to believe in the university. Degrees no longer have the value they once did. Like work, they persist on the basis of a dead referential, as a simulation. The real function of these functionless institutions is deterrence (see below). Their hyperreality, their simulation of functions, neutralises the surrounding territory. People won’t notice the absence of education when there’s a “world-class” university next-door. And if they do, they won’t feel they can compete with such a monolith. There are, of course, exceptions, but on the whole, such simulations shut down social life. For Baudrillard, the system is haunted by a constant sense of crisis. And this crisis is not simply a limit. It is ever-present. The system constantly presents its own crisis as spectacle. It juxtaposes its ideal (the advert) to its crisis (news, disaster movies, crime dramas, action films). But it is distributed in ‘homeopathic doses’ – in tiny amounts absorbed in other things. Hence, it doesn’t explode. It is constantly drip-fed to us instead. The world becomes non-representational through lack of signs. After meaning, we are left with manipulation, touch, circulation, ventilation. It becomes a world of panic. Explosions are foreseen and foreclosed. But implosion, the death of the cybernetic combinatory world, is a constant threat. Some social institutions collapse more quickly than others. Law is in crisis because it is a power of the second order. It is undermined by parody, which makes submission and transgression equivalent. Indeed, the social order prefers to opt for the real, taking simulations for reality. Power is disempowered by the slippage of significations and the lack of referentiality. It is turned into an empty simulation of power. It is at risk of collapse from being dissolved in the play of signs. At one point Baudrillard argues that power no longer produces anything but the signs of its resemblance, the appearance of power. (Real power, perhaps, requires a symbolic aspect). This crisis of law is the condition for a particular transition. Law is replaced by the norm. Rather than explosions which escape the law, the present period deals with deviance as anomalies which deviate from the average. People are now anonymous, subject to an anonymous terror. People can be exterminated, not to achieve their death, but because they are statistically indifferent. Power tries to defend itself against the collapse of meaning by reinjecting the real and the referential everywhere. It tries to convince people that the social world is still objectively real. It prefers to refer to crisis, or even to desire, than to admit its own collapse. Historically, it combated threats from the real by recuperating them in equivalent signs. Now, it combats the threat from simulation by playing at crisis. It embraces theories of ideology, and even radical critiques, as ways to maintain the appearance of truth. The responsible subject is in a similar situation of crisis. The system rests on responsibility. But in a system based on bureaucratic programming, irresponsible actors are required – figures like Eichmann who simply obey orders or perform functions. The system is left constantly trying to exhort people to be responsible subjects while producing them as simple conductors of social power. Subjects are put into drift, into something like a constant unconscious state. Without fixed relations, everything turns into flows of transference. The replacement of meaning with functions makes people expect everything to work all the time. A few seconds’ delay in a webpage loading becomes an inexplicable source of immense frustration. Causes have disappeared, but effects have become immense – as when a local disaster causes a global shutdown. And with the responsible subject no longer there (because it is an effect of the old subject-object split), people try desperately to impute responsibility. The excessive reservoir of ‘floating responsibility’ through finding scapegoats or guilty parties is just waiting to be invested in any particular incident. The Katrina or Christchurch disasters get projected onto looters; Chilean forest fires are targeted as ‘terrorism’; social insecurity is projected onto Muslims, immigrants, minorities. Social problems of increasing triviality are subjected to immense crackdowns and moral panics. In a wave of disproportion, mitigation and even innocence are cast aside in the search for someone to blame. Meanwhile, people are repeatedly subject to tirades to ‘take responsibility’ for problems (from unemployment to alcoholism to post-traumatic stress) which the experts know very well are not really self-caused. We are subject to a blackmail by identity, condemned for what we are labelled as in the code, not for what we are. For Baudrillard, this is a consequence of the disappearance of causes and the power of effects. It reflects something deeper: the world is held collectively responsible for the system. If the system is infringed, the world will have to be destroyed. Or rather, we are ‘psychologically programmed to destroy ourselves’ if the system collapses. We could think of this as the code blackmailing reality. Though the code is tautological and does not depend on reality, it holds reality responsible for itself, and punishes reality if it collapses or crashes. This generalisation of responsibility can be traced back to the loss of symbolic exchange. Generalised, unlimited responsibility occurs because nothing is exchanged anymore, the terms of exchange are simply exchanged among themselves. The system produces nothing but vertigo and fascination. Generalised responsibility becomes the same as generalised irresponsibility and the collapse of social relations. Values such as responsibility, justice and violence continue to circulate only as simulations imposed by the state. This in turn is fatal for the ‘scene’ of politics. On a similar note, there is an ideology of exhuming, documenting, rediscovering the real – from reality TV to the preservation of historical artefacts and indigenous groups – which according to Baudrillard, simply reinforces the process of killing and then simulating. What is preserved is never what it would have been without intervention. We constantly recreate and relive bits of the past and present which are now simulated. The real has become our utopia, that we dream of as if of a lost object. An entire culture now labours at counterfeiting itself. This only exacerbates the problems. Inertia gets worse and worse as simulations of past forms, frozen in time, proliferate and overgrow their uses. Production and meaning are replaced by simulation and fascination. The content – information, culture, commodities – is now simply the support for the operation of the code, the medium. The function of the code is simply to reproduce the masses. Information devours its own contents by turning the real into the hyperreal.

[James Morris, Lecturer in Journalism at City University and PhD in philosophy from the european graduate school, 12-3-2020, "Simulacra in the Age of Social Media: Baudrillard as the Prophet of Fake News," Journal of Communication Inquiry, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0196859920977154,]//owen

¶ The Simulacra of Confirmation¶ Political controversies accentuate this separation of a simulated world view from its connection to a more fact-based conception of reality. Baudrillard discusses Watergate as not so much a re-establishment of profound reality, but part of the simulacrum of reality. This is because truth suffocates under the plethora of possible explanations for global events, such as the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner, the poisoning of Russian political refugees, or the destruction of two tall buildings in New York City. All of these events are surrounded by competing conspiracy theories. Baudrillard (1994) asks, “Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mise-en-scene to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation” (p. 16).¶ This scenario echoes Deleuze’s concept of the fold, where the same reality is seen in different ways depending on alternative perspectives, none of which fully represents an underlying reality that can never be known in its entirety (Deleuze, 1992). Most people are convinced that their perspective is the “true” one, and it is nearly impossible to convince someone with an opposing perspective to change their beliefs, since these now revolve around a system of meaning that reinforces itself and is not directly connected to reality. There is no common ground of information during online discussions from which to build a shared perspective, since arguments stem from beliefs and faith, not facts.¶ The controversy over climate change denial is a case in point. Even when 97 percent of scientists believe that climate change is a real phenomenon,3 many still refute its human causation. In most cases, they don’t want to listen, because believing in climate change would force them to fundamentally alter their way of life, and those companies that rely on this way of life for their income encourage this situation, such as those in the fossil fuel business. Similarly, “anti-vaxers” continue to cling to long-discredited research linking the MMR vaccine to cases of autism. Baudrillard (1994) argues that this is how we deal with the effect of rampant simulation, where we can no longer tell whether anything we hear about in media is true: “‘Take your desires for reality!’ can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power since in a non-referential world, even the confusion of the reality principle and the principle of desire is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality” (p. 22). The emergence of “deep fake” technology has further accentuated this situation. This is artificial-intelligence-powered software that can make famous people (or, indeed, anyone) appear to say anything you want on video, ready to share online via social media. Even video evidence can no longer be trusted, no matter how real it looks.¶ Brett Nicholls (2017) has confirmed these arguments, saying that “in the post-truth situation objective facts about the world are less influential than feelings, beliefs and personal opinions.” He also points out that the social media detractors against Trump confidently assert “that there is a clear difference between objective knowledge and speculative constructions.” However, Nichols sees in this a fascination with naïve realism, arguing: “Both Trump and his detractors make precisely this claim. Both claim they are the real America!” He then goes on to discuss four critiques of how reality is produced: “the critique of the commodity form, the rise of objective reality, hyperreality and integral reality,” with the latter two venturing into the world as theorised by Baudrillard. This reads like a recent socio-political history of reality formation, starting with Marx’s view about how commodities are created from their exchange value, which is then abstracted into monetary representation, in opposition to the use value of those items. “In this way of thinking, capitalist exchange is less real than the materiality of utility and social conditions of the working class” (Nicholls, 2017). However, while “there is no doubt at all that the objective and discoverable world exists outside systems of representation,” the real question is how we get past those systems of representation. Most of the controversies revolving around post-structuralist and postmodernist thinking such as Baudrillard’s comes from the fact that these theorists argue that you can never wholly escape linguistic representation. Because, as Gadamer (2014) has argued, “Being that can be understood is language.”¶ Nicholls understands the implications of this, arguing that Baudrillard’s concept of simulation “is not pretending” (Baudrillard, 1994), but actually “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (Baudrillard, 1994). He then goes on to explain that: “The problem of Trumpism, from Baudrillard’s perspective as I see it, is thus not is Trump correct or incorrect on established matters of fact (a banal problem), it is what does this phenomenon tell us about the contemporary principle or concept of reality itself” (Nicholls, 2017). He then ventures onto the third mode of reality creation: hyperreality, which is not an imaginary fake but “more real than real.” The spectacle of the US presidency—and the UK Brexit controversy—becomes the key feature. This means that Trumpism’s rebellion against the “deep state,” “MSM” and “Washington elites” is a commodified spectacle in the mode of the Frankfurt School’s culture industry. Nicholls then goes on to quote Baudrillard’s famous statement from Simulacra and Simulation that he reiterated in later work in a slightly updated form: “it is not illusion which conceals reality. It is reality which conceals the fact that there is none” (Baudrillard, 1997).¶ This destruction of the previous notions of the real, finally, leads to the fourth mode of reality creation: integral reality. Nicholls (2017) argues that “Trumpism exposes the ungrounded nature of the political system itself.” This is “inseparable from media spectacle,” where “instead of standing in for an outside object, as in reality and hyperreality, the sign itself ends up becoming the object.” This certainly rings true when you look at the cultish belief of MAGA hat-wearing Trump supporters, or slavish followers of “Get Brexit Done” in the UK. For Trump: “His pronouncements do not refer to a referent, they are the thing itself. He is convinced that there is no distinction between what is pronounced and reality.” However, this is also the logic of advertising, a realm that it will later be argued (with Baudrillard) has become the mode of media in general and therefore journalism as part of that media system. Nicholls argues that: “Branding works without irony via signs with no referent, signs that no longer simulate.” The Nike swoosh is filled with meaning, even if it doesn’t refer to anything specifically real. Similarly, neither Trump nor Brexit have clear real referents, yet they mean so much to their adherents. Before we return to this theme, we need to take a trip back into history to see how journalism cemented its status as part of the advertising-driven entertainment industry.¶ The Rise of Partisan Media¶ In the US, a key stage in the demise of news media’s direct relation to reality could be argued to be when the Fairness Doctrine of 1949 was abolished under Ronald Reagan in 1987. This paved the way for the totally partisan news commentators that arose at the end of the 1980s in the USA, followed by the success of Fox News, which ironically described itself as “Fair and Balanced,” in complete contrast to the right-wing pro-Republican stance that the news channel actually promoted. This was exposed in detail in the 2004 Robert Greenwald documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. Greenwald shows clearly how Fox simulates the right to reply by bringing on a commentator with an opposing view, while ensuring that the representative of that view is weak, outnumbered and portrays the alternative perspective in a way that is easily challenged and defeated by the Republican-friendly guests and Fox presenters. Chadwick et al. argue that UK tabloid news media have been partisan in this way for decades and have merely translated this style into digital media.¶ However far Fox News has diverged from traditional standards of journalistic integrity, the results have fared well with viewing figures. Fox News had beaten its rivals in this respect for 66 quarters in a row by the second quarter of 2018.4 This has pressurised other news networks to follow its model of promoting entertainment value and “giving viewers what they want” over presenting information the audience may not wish to hear but is closer to “the truth.” This is in surprising contrast to the ability of modern communications technology to provide a bewildering level of access to information, which common sense might suggest should lead to a better-informed population, not a more ignorant one. But there are systemic reasons why the opposite is the case, which we will turn to in the next section.¶ Before we get to this, however, we should ask the question whether the loss of neutrality in news media necessarily leads to the end of objective truth. Richmond and Porpora (2018) have argued that this comes from poststructuralist theory based in positivism, because “positivism equates objectivity with neutrality, and since there is no neutrality, it has been argued conversely by poststructuralist theorists that there is no objectivity.” They go on to define this as the basis for a political dialogue where “without a shared commitment to truth, rival factions lose their ability to say anything persuasive to each other.” They cite Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” as a reference to a non-existent past golden era that is pure simulacrum, and “Where simulacra dominate, there is no validity in epistemological and ontological claims as there is no real against which to compare them” (Richmond & Porpora, 2018). They then claim that for Baudrillard this kind of situation leads to his conclusion that “there is no way to establish what is real.”¶ Against this, Richmond and Porpora contrast modernist journalism, characterised by objectivity, value neutrality and “cool style.” The basis of objectivity is a trust in ontological realism, “the belief in an ontologically objective world outside of and independent of the analyst’s perceptions or our ideas about it.” This is arrived at via epistemological realism, which claims that “when the objective world corresponds to our thoughts about it, we have truth.” This ends up in social science and the journalism allied to it with a foundationalism that asserts “strict adherence to their canonical research methods will in principle generate the epistemic certainty that gets equated with truth.” This is based on the age-old fact-value distinction, where facts can be neutral, if only they can be separated from biased values. However, one of the main themes of poststructuralist thought is to question whether this is possible, due to our inability to escape our own prejudices and biases completely. The “cool style” reporting Richmond and Porpora discuss is related to this need to maintain a semblance of objectivity. They explain that “cool style” is a journalistic approach “which tries to separate opinion reporting from straight news.”¶ As we have seen from the news examples so far, the era of social media has shown that “cool style” reporting is not what is most likely to gain popularity in this engagement-driven media landscape. Richmond and Porpora admit that there is “no escape from value judgement. An absolute fact-value distinction is a myth.” They then go on to cite Kuhn’s work on paradigm shifts in the world of science to show that even in this supposedly neutral and fact-based realm, experimental results “can always be and generally are rhetorically contested.” However, they misunderstand Foucault’s related critique of how knowledge and power are interconnected via discourse systems as implying that these are regimes of truth that are “various, equally arbitrary, cultural constructions.” They argue that “rhetoric can also be understood following Aristotle as a way to evaluate what is truthful in contexts where proofs or other algorithmic procedures are lacking.” But rhetoric is still the underlying form of politics even in the post-truth era, and it can be argued that this has transferred well into the social media age, because good rhetoric makes for engaging entertainment. Rhetoric can be spectacle too. When Trump promises to “Make America Great Again,” this is a spectacularly powerful rhetoric, and it drowns out any truth about whether America was great in the first place or whether Trump will be able to re-establish this even if it was. But it doesn’t necessarily negate the possibility of truth. Before we return to this notion, we must further delineate the current status of journalism in the digital era.¶ Promoting the News¶ One of the biggest problems for news is that it is part of a spectrum of media forms that includes entertainment and news thereby competes with those forms for attention as an impoverished relative. Where audiovisual news formats started life as the newsreels that were an integral part of a cinema programme including A and B movies as well as cartoons, on commercial TV news has had to vie for ratings alongside entertainment formats. In August 2018, for example, only 12 per cent of the TV-watching population were consuming programming in the News or Current Affairs categories, with the rest viewing more entertainment-focused content.5 Printed newspapers have also generally been a commercial enterprise, even in the era of “free sheets,” so have had to market themselves to an audience that has a range of choices about which publications to buy and read. In the current digital era, individual stories now fight online for clicks and shares from social media against many other types of content. Media, including news, has been subsumed under what can be most successfully promoted with viewers. This means that the truth of news has been downplayed in favour of its popularity.¶ This has been the way tabloid newspapers in the UK have built and maintained their circulation for years. Social media has merely provided a new platform to amplify what they already did. In the US, the end result of the removal of any central governmental oversight over news organisations’ requirement to provide both sides of a story is epitomised by the success of Alex Jones’s Infowars. This quasi-news organisation promotes conspiracy theories as if they were journalism, with a rapacity that seems unbelievable to those outside its core readership. It does this with some considerable commercial success.¶ Right-wing sites like Infowars and Breitbart, or the left-wing The Canary, owe their success in large part to their knowledge of how to promote themselves in the contemporary digital context. More “mainstream” news sources that have arrived successfully in the last decade, such as Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and Quartz, also demonstrate the same trend. This should be seen in a more general media context where Hollywood blockbuster movies have tended towards the spectacular rather than complex plot formations, in a quest to lure the biggest possible audiences for each individual release.¶ The ability of news to be promoted comes first over its truthfulness, and journalism finds itself having to consider how it can be advertised as much as whether the stories are in the public interest. Baudrillard (1994) argues that: “All current forms of activity tend towards advertising and most exhaust themselves therein. Not necessarily advertising, the kind that is produced as such—but the form of advertising, that of a simplified operational mode, vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual (all the modalities are confused therein, but in an attenuated, agitated mode)” (p. 87).¶ Politics has also been subsumed to the same logic, since our experience of it is primarily via news media. It has been this way for most of the 20th century, with populations controlled via propaganda, which is essentially a political form of advertising that is generated by the same companies, such as Saatchi and Saatchi’s involvement with promoting the government of Margaret Thatcher. In Baudrillard’s (1994) words: “Propaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces, of political men and parties with their ‘trade-mark image’” (p. 88). With so many news organisations espousing political bias unashamedly, and successfully building audiences as a result, politics and journalism have been conflated into one promotional whole.¶ Data-Driven News¶ An integral factor in the rise of websites and social media has been the use of data analytics to optimise online media usage. If the age of electronic media tended towards content that lent itself to being advertised, the shift to networked digital distribution has foregrounded the power of data to influence success. This has resulted in some very strange phenomena, where “fake news farms” in Macedonia chase right-wing eyeballs not because they care about promoting right-wing politics, but purely to maximise profit from Google advertising (Sabramanian, 2017). Essentially, the Google algorithm is calling the shots, and it doesn’t care who wins an election, just how many people click through.¶ Again, Baudrillard (1994) saw this coming, arguing that traditional advertising was losing its power as digital technology developed: “today this power is stolen from it by another type of language that is even more simplified and thus more functional: the languages of computer science” (p. 89). Data processing is taking over as advertising moves from the creatively conceptual explosion of the 1950s advertising—the Mad Men era—towards a method based on behavioural analysis and data matching (Maex & Brown, 2012). Baudrillard argued: “It is information, in the sense of data processing, that will put an end to, that is already putting an end to the reign of advertising.” Essentially, it no longer matters what advertising messages mean, only how people respond to them, and this can be user-tested and mapped in fine detail. If a blue logo provokes a better response than an orange one, it’s not important why. Only the user reaction statistics are important.¶ However, this doesn’t mean the end of advertising per se, merely its transformation into a data-driven activity, with a knock-on effect on all media forms that have been influenced by advertising, including political messages and news. Propaganda is still advertising; “fake news” is still advertising. Cambridge Analytica is (or was) an advertising company. But instead of using seductive modes derived purely from creative artistry, the seduction is based on what the data shows is proven to work. The content and meaning of that seduction is irrelevant, so long as its numbers are better. Try a range of ideas and run with the one that works. This is a trend that Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has analysed in particular detail down to its most nefarious depths, arguing that the attention economy propagated by companies such as Google and Facebook promotes user participation so that behavioural data can be collected in order to optimise advertising messages and nudge activity.¶ This is why trying to analyse the social media popularity of a given news story purely at the level of the information it imparts has become so problematic. As the research of Chadwick et al. shows, many people do not share “fake news” because they think it’s true information, but because it conforms to the logic of the social media context they inhabit. That logic revolves around grabbing attention and status within the user’s social network, and posts are primarily shared that will achieve this result. It becomes part of a dynamic of self-promotion and personal advertising. This is not a language in the traditional informational sense of signs referring to phenomena in the real world. A popular Instagram user posts images to present the appearance of a certain lifestyle. They may or may not have that lifestyle, but it only matters that their followers believe they do. This is very much an advertising business, and they will adjust their activities based on analysis of what has and hasn’t been successful in the past.¶ Although services like Instagram were not even a twinkle in the technological eye when Baudrillard wrote these words, his description of advertising as a mockery of language fits the contemporary context perfectly: “It is useless to analyse advertising as language, because something else is happening there: a doubling of language (and also of images), to which neither linguistics nor semiology correspond, because they function on the veritable operation of meaning, without the slightest suspicion of this caricatural exorbitance of all the functions of language, this opening onto an immense field of the mockery of signs, ‘consumed’ as one says in their mockery, for their mockery and the collective spectacle of their game without stakes—just as porno is a hypertrophied fiction of sex consumed in its mockery, for its mockery, a collective spectacle of the inanity of sex in its baroque assumption” (Baudrillard, 1994).¶ Can We Get Beyond the Journalism Simulation Servers?¶ One of the most prominent messages from evangelists of the Internet and its concomitant digital systems has been that they democratise both production and distribution. In this view, everyone potentially has access to the tools for blogging, producing videos for YouTube, and viral promotion via Facebook. New genres have arisen as a result. The young gaming video producers of YouTube epitomise this conceptualisation, and the hundreds of millions of monthly viewers that some of their channels receive are testament to the impact of what they do. However, Anita Elberse (2014) argues that while the Internet may have given everyone the chance to distribute their material, which fulfils the promise of digital media software tools that allow anyone to create their own content, this doesn't necessarily mean that everyone can now make a living creating media online.¶ On the contrary, Elberse argues that a few big media franchises and blockbuster stars are using the facilities of social media and online distribution to aggregate bigger audiences than ever before. YouTube celebrities like PewDiePie (the most subscribed-to YouTuber at time of writing) are few and far between, and should be set against the literally millions of wannabes that achieve only limited success, or none at all. Even YouTube channels with tens of thousands of subscribers will most probably only provide enough revenue to remain a hobby or side-line income source, not a living. Marisol Sandoval has argued that social media organisations are no different from the traditional media organisations that preceded them, because they are still driven by the same monetary profit motive and drive to build shareholder value (Sandoval, 2014). The ability of traditional UK newspaper tabloids to become some of the most successful brands online as well exemplifies this. Their track record for generating profit was already proven during the print era.¶ For most people, the experience of the brave new consumer-producer world is primarily from a much more passive engagement with social media than becoming a YouTube star. Although it is possible to build considerable influence via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their ilk, the owners of the networks used to distribute this content are the real winners, as Jaron Lanier (2014) argues in Who Owns the Future? He explains how the companies set up to provide information or a service essentially for free (or at least more efficiently and cheaply than what went before) are in fact repositories for the collection of data about user behaviour. “The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of ultrasecret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power. It doesn’t matter whether the concentration is called a social network, an insurance company, a derivatives fund, a search engine, or an online store. It’s all fundamentally the same” (Lanier, 2014).¶ Lanier calls these mega-dossiers “siren servers” and cites retail giant Walmart as an early example of the genre. Certainly, Twitter in particular, due to its openly viewable nature (unlike Facebook), is providing marketers with an unparalleled level of real-time intelligence on public taste and reactions to events, which can be analysed via expensive software tools such as Salesforce’s Radian6 or Meltwater Buzz. This can then be fed back into how new marketing strategies and content are shaped. The most successful content brands of the last few years, for example Buzzfeed, owe their success to precisely this strategy of shaping what they produce through user behaviour data, while “Google can individually target ads, and document the click-throughs that follow” (Lanier, 2014). Despite the fact that participation in these siren servers locks users into their systems, with data contributed often being lost when an attempt is made to move from one company’s system to another, people are still expending huge amounts of time and energy using these services to be creative and formulate their opinions about the world. Zuboff has gone even further than Lanier in her analysis of this, arguing that we are willingly participating in our own enslavement to an algorithm-driven hoarding of behavioural data, about which we know very little.¶ Although it would be very satisfying to see a global conspiracy behind the rise of “fake news,” there could well be no evil wizard behind this frustrating phenomenon. Instead, it could represent the latest phase in the separation of media imagery from the traditional informative function we have given to language, which was discussed earlier in this paper. Analysing trends in social sharing so that you can take advantage of them creates a massive feedback loop where the representational content of what is being shared takes a distant second place to the popularity figures that have been discovered analytically. As has already been argued, journalism, because it is a mode of communication competing for entertainment attention like fiction film productions or TV drama, has also shaped itself around what can be marketed. Now that this marketing is being dominated by the real-time analysis of user-behaviour data, so journalism is finding itself influenced by data processing as well, such as search engine optimisation and social media analytics. Simulated news can potentially be even more successful than “real” news in this context, because the factuality of a story is secondary to users’ engagement with it.¶ This has serious consequences for civic life. The current failure of news organisations to cope with the increased drive towards simulation in media poses an important question regarding political power and our ability to do effective journalism about it. David Ryfe of The University of Iowa argues that, thanks to the circumstances described above, we have moved from an information-centred model of journalism to a group-centred model, where news performs a role within a particular community of interest. He recognises that news now does less to inform than affirm, following emotional and affective motivations, arguing that:¶ “On a group-centered perspective, new terms like representation, voice, power, and equality come to the fore. In a group-centered world, journalists may have less interest in providing impartial information (which members of different groups may interpret in vastly different ways) and more in ensuring that all relevant social groups are represented in the political process” (Ryfe, in press).¶ However, whilst it has become clear that relentlessly fact-checking Donald Trump’s statements on Twitter hasn’t convinced many, or even any, of his supporters to turn away from him towards more “rational” political stances, Ryfe’s suggestions don’t promise a return to traditional journalistic values of telling truth to power. Trying to frame news so that it appeals to a tabloid-level online audience risks that news turning into the same clickbait-chasing vacuity that it hopes to combat.¶ Richmond and Porpora, in contrast, propose a “critical realism” approach to finding a truth that doesn’t have to be certain. They argue: “Without proofs in the mathematical or logical sense, we must follow Aristotle’s Rhetoric and turn to the best argument” (Richmond & Porpora, 2018). They eventually go on to suggest that late night comedians and satirists re-establish a more savvy, critical form of truth that can act as an antidote to what they call “Entertainment Politics” (Richmond & Porpora, 2018). They hope as a result that: “Truth will be recaptured as the pivotal theoretical premise behind critical theory and journalism itself.” However, this still fits within the hypothesis of Baudrillard’s simulacra. Satire isn’t necessarily effective due to it being true, but because it’s funnier than what it critiques, or shows the absurdity of its subject matter in an amusing way. Satire may be a rhetoric that appeals to a more “liberal” audience but it still works at the entertainment level like the form of politics it attempts to critique.¶ Nicholls (2017), on the other hand, argues that “Trump’s non-dual relationship with the world could be disrupted by rediscovering what Baudrillard calls the vital illusion.” This aims to take “the world for the world and not for its model” (Baudrillard, 2008), but again pushes us back to the problem of how we can escape the fact that we can only perceive the world through our linguistic representation of it. This doesn’t appear to provide an obvious antidote to the popularity of “integral reality” or the spectacle of politics and its consumption through journalism and social media.¶ As the third decade of the 21st century approaches, the situation seems grave for traditional civic-minded journalism that aims to convey information honestly to promote healthy debate in the public interest. But realising how we got into this situation is the essential first step towards building a way forward. Baudrillard recognised almost 40 years ago that media no longer perform the classic linguistic function of meaningful reference to the real world. Instead, they point towards an idealised simulacrum, an advertising-driven aspirational utopia, but with dire implications for political life. Baudrillard continued to argue this even in his last published work, The Agony of Power:¶ “The most serious of all forms of self-denial—not only economically or politically but metaphysically—is the denial of reality. This immense enterprise of deterrence from every historical reference, this strategy of discrediting, of divesting from reality in the form of parody, mockery, or masquerade, becomes the very principle of government. The new strategy—and it truly is a mutation—is the self-immolation of value, of every system of value, of self-denial, indifferentiation, rejection and nullity as the triumphant command” (Baudrillard, 2010).¶ This excerpt could very accurately describe Donald Trump’s approach to political campaigning and government, even though it was written more than a decade before his rise to power. It’s clear that the current political turmoil is not a new phenomenon, but the current stage of a much longer trend that predated digital media and social networks. For decades, tabloid news in the UK has fed its readers the “world as people want it to be.” The sharing of “fake news” via social media is merely the latest incarnation of this phenomenon. The process may now have become dominated by the analysis of data on user behaviour, and harnessed by populist political movements, but it’s part of the same nihilistic drive inherent in media for over a century, where truth and meaning become subsumed to entertainment success for economic benefit. The new element is that behavioural analytics has potentially become a law unto itself as algorithms act in a semi-autonomous way to maximise income for the companies with the most influential “siren servers”—the digital technology giants.¶ News organisations such as Buzzfeed have partnered with the likes of Facebook to produce journalism that successfully takes advantage of social media sharing habits. But until the advent of the Web, it was news publishers themselves who employed the journalists, owned the printing presses or TV production equipment, and even the trucks that delivered the newspapers or transmitters that broadcasted the news channels. In contrast, today’s news organisations don’t own the Web, search engines, or the social media platforms that they now rely on for public visibility. Journalists may never again have the power over public opinion they had during the majority of the 20th century, when their employers owned the means of distribution too. Maybe now the algorithms that prioritise one piece of content over another on social networks are the new media barons, and simulated news that appeals to people the most will remain the dominant form of journalism. But these algorithmic barons are generally owned by large, American companies, such as Google and Facebook

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) - as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.*1 Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. In fact, even inverted, Borges's fable is unusable. Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all of metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control - and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself - such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

What no longer exists is the adversity of adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes.

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

The media response to the recent assassination by American MQ-9 Reaper drones of Qassem Suleimani and several Iraqi officials shows the unanimity of the Trump administration and his liberal ‘opposition’ in America’s weapons-centred foreign policy. According to Secretary of State Mark Esper, for the administration, Iraqis should not be angry about these murders on their soil, for ‘the American people have been extraordinarily generous … to the people of Iraq’.1 The New York Times, while voicing some demurs over the strategic wisdom of the action, affirms that ‘what should not be in doubt is the justice’, for ‘he was an evil man’.2 The New Yorker describes the killing as the result of an imaginary legal process – ‘A drone strike … executed Major General Qassem Suleimani’ (emphasis added) – and blames him for the ‘roadside bombings and other attacks … that had killed at least six hundred Americans during the Iraq War’.3 Neither side weighs these allegations against the hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths caused by that invasion carried out under false pretences, that the handmade Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) were weapons used by native Iraqis in response to that devastating attack, or that Suleimani’s ‘evil’ work was done in aid of resistance to US and US-sponsored aggression in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Yemen. None of these justifications mentions the thousands of others killed by the US drone programme or that the policy of killing by remote control people who appear somehow threatening to a very distant America, along with many innocent bystanders, might be morally suspect.

Thus, the liberal media demonstrate the same poor logic as does Condoleezza Rice, who stated in 2010 that the way to end the continuing war in Iraq is to stop the flow of ‘foreign arms’ and ‘foreign fighters’ into that country, with no sense of the irony of the statement considering the overwhelming presence there of heavily armed American troops. Noam Chomsky cites Rice’s statement as illustrating the paradox of an American identity that makes them indigenous everywhere (since they own the world) while the natives who oppose their conquests are always ‘renegades’.4 This article seeks to explain this inability of American discourse to make sense in terms of the influence of the internet by means of Jean Baudrillard’s psycho-social analysis of technological (American) man.

It is now the left (or the Third Way) that tries to re-inject moral order and justice into a failing system, thereby protecting it from its own collapse. Baudrillard implicitly criticises theories such as Laclau’s, which seek to re-inject meaning and intensity into politics. For Baudrillard, this task is both impossible and reactionary. Baudrillard sees the system as creating the illusion of its continued power by drawing on or simulating antagonisms and critique. There is thus a danger that critique actually sustains the system, by giving it a power it doesn’t have. Trying to confront and destroy the system thus inadvertently revives it, giving it back a little bit of symbolic power. He also sees conspiracy theories and current forms of Marxism as attempts to stave off awareness of the reality of a systematic code. In any case, the energy of the social is simply a distorted, impoverished version of the energy of “diabolical” forces (i.e. of symbolic exchange). Baudrillard thinks that societies actually come into being, not for the management of interests, but coalesce around rituals of expenditure, luxury and sacrifice. Politics itself was a pure game until the modern period, when it was called upon to represent the social. Now politics is dead, because it no longer has a referent in reality. This is because it lacks symbolic exchange. The absence of symbolic exchange leads also to an absence of possibility of redistribution, either North to South or elite to masses. Fascism also resists the death of the real, in a similar way. It tries to restore in an excessive way the phenomena of death, intensity and definite references, in order to ward off the collapse of the real. Fascist and authoritarian tendencies revive what Baudrillard terms ‘the violence necessary to life’ – they keep up some kind of symbolic power. (Baudrillard’s Lacanian heritage is clearly shown in this idea of a necessary violence). Baudrillard has a certain sympathy for the desire to escape hyperreality in this way, but also sees it as futile. People doing this – both left and right – are trying to resuscitate causes and consequences, realities and referents, and recreate an imaginary. But the system deters such efforts from succeeding. Le Pen for instance is ultimately absorbed, as the mainstream integrates and repeats his racist ideas. This analysis could also be applied to various “fundamentalisms” and ethno-nationalist movements today. This kind of resistance is ultimately reactionary, seeking to restore the declining regime of signs. But it can only be understood if its basis in energies of resistance to simulation is recognised. It is because it channels such resistance that it is able to mobilise affective forces. Baudrillard’s analysis is here similar to that the sovereign gesture is now exercised everywhere because of the rise of indistinction and indeterminacy. The paradox is that the performance of fundamentalism often leads back towards the world of simulation and deterrence. Such movements map symbolic exchange onto the state, restoring some of its reality, but ultimately contributing to the persistence of simulation. Resistance from inside the regime of power is impossible because of deterrence. Baudrillard suggests that it’s now impossible to imagine a power exercised inside the enclosure created by deterrence – except for an implosive power which abolishes the energies preventing other possibilities emerging. He also suggests that the loss of the real is irreversible. Only the total collapse of the terrain of simulation will end it, not a test of reality. A truly effective revolution would have to abolish all the separations – including the separation from death. It cannot involve equality in what is separated – in survival, in social status and so on. The strategy for change is now exacberation, towards a catastrophic end of the system. Baudrillard believes that the resultant death of the social will paradoxically bring about socialism.

Examining the importance of media communications, Baudrillard proposes the con-cept of “simulacra”, defined by its capacity to replace reality for its operational signs on the screens. We consider that mediatized Science is part of the “precession of the simulacra”. The catastrophic scenario that justified the most draconian policies was first and above all that of the simulations and mathematical models presented on our screens. In the reduction of meaning to the circulation of significations within a system of signs, as it is the case of mediatized Science, our non-mediatized experiences had to be ignored and be replaced by the duplication of its operative signs. Most of us were constantly consuming signs of the catastrophe, thereby suffering from the pandemic (and the new pandemic rules) without suffering from the disease. And the (very real) suffering caused by the governments’ measures, such as lockdowns or other mobility restrictions, is still confused with the sign “pandemic”. “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory –precession of simulacra–that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map”98. We had to rely completely on the map drawn by this mediatized Science in order to move; we had to see nothing but the map to conduct ourselves. “Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact -the models come first [...]”.99The mathematical simulations that predicted a terrify-ing reality of indefinite exponential growth were what we had to look at with total atten-tion and mechanical assent. For the public, everything is framed and manipulated within a “neutral” informational space in an aseptic setting. Local politicians had to follow this “information” and the public opinion thus fabricated. In Baudrillard’s terms, “there is nothing now to protect politicians from the virus of opinion; but nothing protects that opinion from the virus of information”.100The numbers, announced by the authorities in the media, were a more perfect, precise and real reality than the reality experienced in our local communities. They were what Baudrillard called the “hyperreality”.101The growing media coverage –the omnipresence of the infosphere–allows “hyperreality” to prevail. It is a reality more important than anything else, with its truths, its facts; it is intended to cover the entire territory, prevent-ing any other perceptions, perspectives or experiences. Behind each piece of information, an event disappears, and virtuality covers the territory. “It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double”.102In 2020, there was a hyperreality vociferated as “scientific”.103This hyperreality then turned into the daily rumor of the people themselves, becoming common sense and public opinion. “The magnified impression of a catastrophe goes viral. [...It is the] social con-struction of an excess believed to be scientific and prudent”.104 Paradoxically, people sought to alleviate the anxiety and uncertainty generated by the media by consuming more information in the media. In this way,there was a “hyperreal certainty.”105We also witness here a modern obsession for the emancipation from contingency through control, through the annihilation of an “enemy”. The result is not virus control but social control by manipulating the signs of the virus, achieving the most impressive blow of governmentality on a planetary scale. Power depends on virtuality and, among other things, on the capacity –through the model, the map, the simulacrum–to designate the Other, the enemy, the threat. “Power exists only as long as it has this symbolic po-tency”.106The “Observable Reality” of pseudo-scientific journalism, as Lyotard107would call it, is based on the criterion of commensurability, which is inseparable from scientific-technical accumulation, and whose most immediate materialization is its operability. Computer language, translatable into media, is a technical-semantic transformation of the Causality Principle108and Sufficient Reason of Philosophy.109Only the calculable, the measurable, the computable is “real”, and it is precisely so because it can be reduced, totalized and manipulated. We all became potential “asymptomatic” threats; we could all cause the death of someone else. An apparently scientific language but without any possibility of falsifiability. Thus, we ask ourselves with Baudrillard: “what can medicine do with what floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, with the duplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer either true or false?”.110It is no longer true or false because the language game that governs it is not epistemic, but performative, and its veracity criterion lies in its efficiency/inefficiency in representing itself, corroborating itself and projecting itself on our screens. The performative efficiency is what matters from a governmentality perspective: statistics were combined with videos of crying doctors and images of hangars full of coffins. The media communicated the horrors and chanted the arrival of our salvation through technological innovation. In both cases, it did not matter much whether their claims were true or false according to the scientific method. It was not necessary to present before the public –not even to the most demanding academic public–any scientific evidence on the general convenience of the lockdowns; why go to the trouble of “the production of proof” in a seamless order of “indisputable truths”?

In Bleistein, Holmes defined a copy of reality as “the personal reaction of an individual upon nature.”80 Under this view, the copy is infused with subjectivity as the author imprints the referent with an element of her personality. This definition of a copy, however, was formulated in the particular context of a copy of public domain reality (which includes, among other things, “nature”). More broadly, the Copyright Act defines a copy as a material object that is fixed in a tangible medium.81 To be protected by copyright law, a copy must also be an expression, i.e. it must be produced by a human author.82 Notably, a copy need not be copied in the sense of having a referent (although, practically, most works do have some referent).83 Now for the complicating. Where reality is the original, the precise type of copy may change the relationship between that copy and the original. Because the purpose of this Comment is to relate the ontology of reality generally to new reality technologies, I focus here on a particular type of copy: the simulation.84 At its heart, a simulation is simply a type of copy that seeks to imitate its original very closely.85 To discuss the concept of the simulation and its place in our ontology of reality, this Comment borrows from the conceptual model created by media theorist Jean Baudrillard.86 Baudrillard extensively theorized the nature of the simulation and argued that we should understand simulation in three orders: (1) the representation; (2) the simulation; and (3) hyperreality. At each stage, the copy becomes increasingly indistinguishable from its original. In the first order of simulation, the representation is clearly based on reality and there is no confusion between the original and the copy.87 The original is the unmistakable referent for the simulation. A first order simulation is the type of copy that we are most familiar with and how we would currently classify most of the works protected by copyright law. In the second order of simulation, the copy is still based on reality, but the borders between original and copy become blurred.88 As an imaginative example, Baudrillard described a map that has a one-to-one relationship with the territory it depicts such that it covers the territory exactly: If once we were able to view the Borges fable89 in which the cartographers of Europe draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly . . . as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.90 This map entirely covers the geographic reality underneath, which only peeks through in the map’s tattered, remote edges.91 The key difference between a representation and a simulation lies in the fact that a representation reflects reality, while a second order simulation masks it.92 Augmented reality technologies are of particular interest as second order simulations, as they mix “the completely real with the simulated or synthetic [by projecting] images and information in the wearer’s line of vision.”93 Mixed reality technologies—a specific type of augmented reality—are able to retain specific knowledge of an individual’s world in order to keep stable the location of digital objects: In mixed reality, a user can navigate through the real world and a virtual environment seamlessly, and simultaneously. The virtual objects are accurately positioned in the real-world space. If one moves towards an object it will get larger and vice versa. And when one moves around it, the virtual objects are seen from different angles and perspectives—just like the behavior of real objects.94 The ability of new reality technologies to blur the lines between the real and the simulated is one of their core claims and attractions. As these technologies become more common, their users may lose the ability to distinguish between public domain reality and simulation in their everyday lives.95 Creators have already started to imagine how this mixed world might appear to a user.96 For example, the animator and futurist Keiichi Matsuda is cluttered with advertisements, games, and messages.97 There, only a small slice of the physical world peeks through.98 This is the second order of simulation promised by new reality technologies. In the third order of simulation, a new type of reality is born. Reality becomes hyperreality, which is itself based on a simulation.99 Public domain reality, as we know it, disappears as a referent: With first and second-order simulation, the real still exists, and we measure the success of simulation against the real . . . . [T]he model now generates . . . ‘hyperreality’—that is, a world without a real origin. So with third order simulation we no longer even have the real as part of the equation.100 Here, our reality is itself a simulation, and that simulation is based on another simulation, which is based on another simulation, and so on.101 In this kind of copy, the copy is “not merely indistinguishable from what it copies but . . . the very distinction between copy and original disappears.”102 The role of public domain reality as a referent is no longer relevant to the model, as only created reality persists as a referent.103 Extending the example of the Borges fable discussed above, Baudrillard explains that in hyperreality, “[t]he territory no longer precedes the map”—instead, the map “precedes the territory.”104 In summary, the relationship between the original and the copy change due to the nature of the simulation, becoming increasingly blurred as the simulation becomes more accurate. For our purposes, the idea of hyperreality represents a world in which individual perceptions of reality are teeming with created things. In such a world, all of the referents for creative expression are themselves created.105 It is important that such a world factors into our conceptual model so that we can evaluate how well the current ontology of reality would balance the needs of progress and protection in an entirely created reality. This Comment uses Baudrillard’s three orders of simulation in section III as a structural basis for illustrating how the proposed conceptual model of reality might function for varying levels of simulation. Section IV discusses the potential implications for copyright protection of new reality technologies. The blurring of the original and the copy, so pronounced in the simulation, has troubling analytical repercussions. Even outside of the realm of the simulation, this blurring has appeared when courts analyze technologies that merely reproduce reality with a high degree of accuracy. 3. Reality-is-Subject-Matter; Originality-is-Variation The reality-is-original and representation-is-copy metaphors establish that the difference between the original and the copy is essential to understanding the ontology of reality in copyright law. Importantly, we must distinguish between reality itself and a copy of reality because it is only the copy that can obtain copyright protection. In addition, identifying whether the original is public domain reality or itself created is essential to determining infringement. However, there has been a conceptual blurring between the original and the copy in case law on the question of originality in heavily reality-dependent technologies.

The individual, as it appeared in Enlightenment philosophy, a creature of passion and character, is ‘swept out of our functional universe’ (ibid.). This ‘lost being’ is then reconstituted in coded, differential and semiotic form by the consumer system, resulting in ‘a synthetic individuality’ (ibid.). People as constituted by the system are not different or singular in any meaningful way. They are merely different from each other according to a coded system of marginal differentials: a ‘chav’ is not cultured, a ‘square’ is not fashionable, a ‘goth’ is not mainstream. These differences, no matter how marked or dramatic they seem at the level of content, represent conformity at the level of form; that is, at the level of the code, an ‘integration within a sliding scale of values’ (1998a: 89), the scale of identity/difference. Consumption, as a ‘generalised code of differentiation’ (1998a: 94), establishes a new and distinctive mode of exchange between individuals: ‘the unconscious discipline of the code’ is a system of ‘competitive co-operation’ (ibid.). Baudrillard insists that ‘the status of the individual is changing totally’: It is a move from an individual principle based on autonomy, character, the inherent value of the self to a principle of perpetual recycling by indexation to the code . . . of ‘personalisation’, which traverses each individual in his signified relation to others. (Baudrillard, 1998a: 170) Consumerism is saturated with ‘false spontaneity’ and ‘orchestrated emotions’: the ‘have a nice day culture’. It is certainly possible to move around within the code, there are freedoms within the code, and, of course, power relations and constraints. Indeed, we are enjoined to manoeuvre within it, to improve ourselves, to become more assertive, or more attractive in the career and relationship markets. Within the code everything is a market, an abstract system for the interactive exchange of goods, money, bodies and images: communications companies tell us that ‘It’s good to talk’, that we should ‘get closer’ (Wrigley’s chewing gum), celebrity chefs tell us how to cook, how to eat, government initiatives tell us how to parent, popular publications tell us how to flirt or perform cunnilingus. The code entreats us to ‘be’, to verify ourselves, to be through self-coding; indeed, to take responsibility for oneself is to be self-coding. These processes lead to new or deeper forms of alienation and to a ‘terrorism of solicitude’ (1998a: 167). The code presents a gift, but at the same time makes a request and demands a response. The response can only be made in the terms of the code; the code leaves ‘practically no way of saying “no” ’ (1998a: 168). This is the symbolic violence of the code; it closes off the possibility of symbolic exchange by giving a gift that cannot be reciprocated or annulled – the gift of self.

There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. Strictly speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather-- on a rising statistical curve -- with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages. This runs from the very complex organization of the household, with its dozens of technical slaves, to street furniture and the whole material machinery of communication; from professional activities to the permanent spectacle of the celebration of the object in advertising and the hundreds of daily messages from the mass media; from the minor proliferation of vaguely obsessional gadgetry to the symbolic psychodramas fuelled by the nocturnal objects which come to haunt us even in our dreams. The two concepts `environment' and `ambience' have doubtless only enjoyed such a vogue since we have come to live not so much alongside other human beings -- in their physical presence and the presence of their speech -- as beneath the mute gaze of mesmerizing, obedient objects which endlessly repeat the same refrain: that of our dumbfounded power, our virtual affluence, our absence one from another. Just as the wolf-child became a wolf by living among wolves, so we too are slowly becoming functional. We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession. Today, it is we who watch them as they are born, grow to maturity and die, whereas in all previous civilizations it was timeless objects, instruments or monuments which outlived the generations of human beings. Objects are neither a flora nor a fauna. And yet they do indeed give the impression of a proliferating vegetation, a jungle in which the new wild man of modern times has difficulty recovering the reflexes of civilization. We have to attempt rapidly to describe this fauna and flora, which man has produced and which comes back to encircle and invade him as it might in a bad science fiction novel. We have to describe these things as we see and experience them, never forgetting, in their splendour and profusion, that they are the product of a human activity and are dominated not by natural ecological laws, but by the law of exchange-value. The busiest streets of London are crowded with shops whose show cases display all the riches of the world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian corsets, furs from Russia and spices from the tropics, but all of these worldly things bear odious, white paper labels with Arabic numerals and the laconic symbols £.s.d. This is how commodities are presented in circulation. (Marx) 31 Profusion and the Package Profusion, piling high are clearly the most striking descriptive features. The big department stores, with their abundance of canned foods and clothing, of foodstuffs and ready-made garments, are like the primal landscape, the geometrical locus of abundance. But every street, with its cluttered, glittering shop-windows (the least scarce commodity here being light, without which the merchandise would be merely what it is), their displays of cooked meats, and indeed the entire alimentary and vestimentary feast, all stimulate magical salivation. There is something more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity, the maternal, luxurious sense of being already in the Land of Cockaigne. Our markets, major shopping thoroughfares and superstores also mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity. These are our Valleys of Canaan where, in place of milk and honey, streams of neon flow down over ketchup and plastic. But no matter! We find here the fervid hope that there should be not enough, but too much -- and too much for everyone: by buying a piece of this land, you acquire the crumbling pyramid of oysters, meats, pears or tinned asparagus. You buy the part for the whole. And this metonymic, repetitive discourse of consumable matter, of the commodity, becomes once again, through a great collective metaphor -- by virtue of its very excess -- the image of the gift, and of that inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterizes the feast. Beyond stacking, which is the most rudimentary yet cogent form of abundance, objects are organized in packages or collections. Almost all the shops selling clothing or household appliances offer a range of differentiated objects, evoking, echoing and offsetting one another. The antique dealer's window provides the aristocratic, luxury version of these sets of objects, which evoke not so much a superabundance of substance as a gamut of select and complementary objects presented for the consumer to choose among, but presented also to create in him a psychological chain reaction, as he peruses them, inventories them and grasps them as a total category. Few objects today are offered alone, without a context of objects which `speaks' them. And this changes the consumer's relation to the object: he no longer relates to a particular object in its specific utility, but to a set of objects in its total signification. Washing machine, refrigerator and dishwasher taken together have a different meaning from the one each has individually as an appliance. The shop-window, the advertisement, the manufacturer and the brand name, which here plays a crucial role, impose a coherent, collective vision, as though they were an almost indissociable totality, a series. This is, then, no longer a sequence of mere objects, but a chain of signifiers, in so far as all of these signify one another reciprocally as part of a more complex super-object, drawing the consumer into a series of more complex motivations. It is evident that objects are never offered for consumption in absolute disorder. They may, in certain cases, imitate disorder the better to seduce, but they are always arranged to mark out directive paths, to orientate the purchasing impulse towards networks of objects in order to captivate that impulse and bring it, in keeping with its own logic, to the highest degree of commitment, to the limits of its economic potential. Clothing, machines and toiletries thus constitute object pathways, which establish inertial constraints in the consumer: he will move logically from one object to another. He will be caught up in a calculus of objects, and this is something quite different from the frenzy of buying and acquisitiveness to which the simple profusion of commodities gives rise. The Drugstore The synthesis of profusion and calculation is the drugstore. The drugstore (or the new shopping centre) achieves a synthesis of consumer activities, not the least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, playful wandering and all the permutational possibilities of these. In this respect, the drugstore is more representative of modern consumption than the department stores. There, the quantitative centralization of the products leaves less margin for ludic exploration, the arrangement of departments and products imposing a more utilitarian path on the consumer. And, generally, the large stores retain something of the period in which they emerged, when broad classes of the population were first gaining access to everyday consumer goods. There is a quite different meaning to the drugstore: it does not juxtapose categories of merchandise, but lumps signs together indiscriminately, lumps together all categories of commodities, which are regarded as partial fields of a signconsuming totality. In the drugstore, the cultural centre becomes part of the shopping centre. It would be simplistic to say that culture is `prostituted' there. It is culturalized. Simultaneously, commodities (clothing, groceries, catering etc.) are also culturalized in their turn, since they are transformed into the substance of play and distinction, into luxury accessories, into one element among others in the general package of consumables. A new art of living, a new way of living, say the adverts -- a `switched--on' daily experience. You can shop pleasantly in a single air-conditioned location, buy your food there, purchase things for your flat or country cottage -- clothing, flowers, the latest novel or the latest gadget. And you can do all this in a single trip, while husband and children watch a film, and then all dine together right there. There's a café, a cinema, a bookshop, places to buy trinkets, clothing and lots more in the shopping centres: the drugstore takes in everything in kaleidoscopic mode. If the department store offers the fairground spectacle of commodities, the drugstore presents the subtle recital of consumption, the whole `art' of which consists in playing on the ambiguity of the sign in objects, and sublimating their status as things of use and as commodities in a play upon `ambience'. This is generalized neo-culture, where there is no longer any difference between a delicatessen and an art gallery, between Playboy and a treatise on palaeontology. And the drugstore is to modernize itself to the point of introducing `grey matter': Just selling products doesn't interest us. We want to put a bit of grey matter in there too ... Three levels. A bar, a dancefloor and sales outlets. Knick-knacks, records, paperback books, intellectual books, a bit of everything. But we aren't trying to flatter the clientele. We are really offering them `something'. A language laboratory operates on the second level. Among the records and books, you can find the major movements which are stirring our society. Experimental music, tomes which explain our times. This is the `grey matter' that goes with the products we sell. It's a drugstore, then, but a new-style drugstore with something extra -- a little intelligence, perhaps, and a bit of human warmth. The drugstore can become a whole town: this is the case with Parly 2 with its giant shopping centre in which `art and leisure mingle with everyday life' and each group of residences radiates out from its swimming-pool, where the local clubhouse becomes its focus. A church built `in the round', tennis courts (`the least we could do'), elegant boutiques and a library. The tiniest ski resort borrows this `universalist' model of the drugstore: all activities there are encapsulated in, systematically combined around and centred on the basic concept of `ambience'. Thus Flaine-la-Prodigue offers you a complete, all-purpose, combinatorial existence: Our Mont Blanc, our spruce forests; our Olympic runs, our children's `plateau'; our architecture carved, chiselled and polished like a work of art; the purity of the air we breathe; the refined ambience of our Forum (modelled on the forums of Mediterranean towns. A lively time is to be had there after a day on the slopes. Cafés, restaurants, shops, skating-rinks, a night club, a cinema and a cultural and amusement centre are all located in the Forum to make the life you live off-piste particularly rich and varied); our internal TV system; our world-scale future (we shall soon be listed as a cultural monument by the Arts Ministry). 32 We are at the point where consumption is laying hold of the whole of life, where all activities are sequenced in the same combinatorial mode, where the course of satisfaction is outlined in advance, hour by hour, where the `environment' is total -- fully air-conditioned, organized, culturalized. In the phenomenology of consumption, this general `air-conditioning' of life, goods, objects, services, behaviour and social relations represents the perfected, `consummated' [consommé] stage of an evolution which runs from affluence pure and simple, through interconnected networks of objects, to the total conditioning of action and time, and finally to the systematic atmospherics built into those cities of the future that are our drugstores, Parly 2s and modern airports. Parly 2 `The biggest shopping centre in Europe.' `Printemps, BHV, Dior, Prisunic, Lanvin, Franck et Fils, Hédiard, two cinemas, a drugstore, a Suma supermarket, a hundred other shops -- all in a single location!' In the choice of shops, from grocery to high fashion, two imperatives: commercial dynamism and aesthetic sense. The famous slogan, `Ugliness doesn't sell', is now passé. It might be replaced by: `The beauty of the setting is the prime requirement for happy living.' A two-storey structure organized around a central mall, which is the splitlevel main thoroughfare -- the triumphal avenue. Small-- and large--scale traders reconciled. The modern pace of life reconciled with age-old idle wandering. The unprecedented comfort of strolling among shops whose tempting wares are openly displayed on the mall, without even a shop-window for a screen, the mall itself being a combination of the rue de la Paix and the Champs-- Elysées. Adorned with fountains, artificial trees, pavilions and benches, it is wholly exempt from changes of season or bad weather: an exceptional system of climate control, requiring 13 kilometres of air-conditioning ducts, makes for perpetual springtime. Not only can you buy anything here, from shoelaces to an airline ticket; not only can you find insurance companies and cinemas, banks or medical services, bridge clubs and art exhibitions, but you are not a slave to the clock. The mall, like any street, is accessible night and day, seven days a week. Naturally, for those who want it, the centre has introduced the most modern style of payment: the `credit card'. This frees shoppers from cheques or cash -- and even from financial difficulties. To pay, you just show your card and sign the bill. There's nothing more to it. And every month you get a statement which you can pay off in full or in monthly instalments. In this marriage of comfort, beauty and efficiency, the Parlysians are discovering the material conditions of happiness which our anarchic cities denied them. We are here at the heart of consumption as total organization of everyday life, total homogenization, where everything is taken over and superseded in the ease and translucidity of an abstract `happiness', defined solely by the resolution of tensions. The drugstore writ large in the form of the shopping centre, the city of the future, is the sublimate of all real life, of all objective social life, in which not only work and money disappear, but also the seasons, those distant vestiges of a cycle which has at last also been homogenized! Work, leisure, nature and culture: all these things which were once dispersed, which once generated anxiety and complexity in real life, in our `anarchic and archaic towns and cities', all these sundered activities, these activities which were more or less irreducible one to another, are now at last mixed and blended, climatized and homogenized in the same sweeping vista of perpetual shopping. All are now rendered sexless in the same hermaphroditic ambience of fashion! All at last digested and turned into the same homogeneous faecal matter (naturally enough, this occurs precisely under the sign of the disappearance of liquid cash -- too visible a symbol still of the real faecality of real life, and of the economic and social contradictions which once inhabited it). That is all over now. Controlled, lubricated, consumed faecality has passed into things; it seeps everywhere into the indistinctness of things and social relations. Just as the gods of all countries coexisted syncretically in the Roman Pantheon in an immense `digest', so all the gods -- or demons -- of consumption have come together in our Super Shopping Centre, which is our Pantheon -- or Pandaemonium. In other words, all activities, labour, conflicts and seasons have been united and abolished in the same abstraction. The substance of life unified in this way, in this universal digest, can no longer have in it any meaning: what constituted the dreamwork, the labour of poetry and of meaning -- in other words, the grand schemata of displacement and condensation, the great figures of metaphor and contradiction, which are based on the living interconnection of distinct elements -- is no longer possible. The eternal substitution of homogeneous elements now reigns unchallenged. There is no longer any symbolic function, but merely an eternal combinatory of `ambience' in a perpetual springtime.

Abstract (EN): Intellectual property law is concerned with control over the production and distribution of copies (“materially fixed expressions”) of ideas. Copies are in fact ubiquitous and the attempt to situate copies within a certain discourse or discipline relies on particular philosophical decisions that can be shown, historically and otherwise, to be finally political and ideological. If the copy always evades and exceeds disciplinarity, including “multidisciplinarity” and law, what do we do about these copies that are ultimately depropriated, that is, lacking a “proper” place or location, yet nonetheless recognizably present? The author explores the work of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard as an example of an attempt to think and make a copy-based art that refuses the logic of IP, and argues that legal scholars need to consider broader issues of political economy when debating contemporary IP law.

Résumé (FR): Le droit de la propriété intellectuelle s’intéresse au contrôle de la production et de la distribution de copies d’idées («fixations matérielles de l’expression»). Les copies sont omniprésentes et la tentative de les situer à l’intérieur d’un certain discours ou discipline dépend de décisions philosophiques particulières dont on peut, de façon historique ou autre, finalement démontrer le caractère politique ou idéologique. Si la copie se soustrait toujours à la disciplinarité—y compris la «multidisciplinarité»—et au droit, et les dépasse, que pouvons-nous faire de ces copies qui sont ultimement désappropriées, c’est-à-dire auxquelles manquent une place ou un lieu «propre», mais qui sont toutefois visiblement présentes? L’auteur explore le travail du cinéaste français Jean-Luc Godard en tant qu’exemple d’une tentative de penser et de créer un art basé sur la copie qui refuse la logique du droit de la propriété intellectuelle et soutient que les spécialistes du droit doivent considérer des problèmes d’économie politique plus larges lorsqu’ils débattent du droit de la propriété intellectuelle contemporain.

[Franco Berardi, Professor of Social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arit in Milan and Founder of A/traverse, March 2022 , "War and (Senile) Dementia," e-flux, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/125/454088/war-and-senile-dementia/,]//owen

Annihilate¶ Anéantir (Annihilate), the most recent book by Houellbecq, is seven hundred pages long—half that length would have been enough. It isn’t the best of his books, but it does succeed in sketching a simultaneously submissive and irate representation of the decline of world domination by the white race.¶ Deep in France, a family gathers around their eighty-year-old father who has suffered a stroke. The patriarch, who had worked for the secret service, has now fallen into an interminable coma. Meanwhile, his son Paul, who also works for the secret service as well as the Ministry of Finance, discovers he has terminal cancer. Aurélien, Paul’s brother, kills himself, incapable of continuing a life in which he has always been considered a loser. Lastly, there is the daughter Cécile, a Catholic fundamentalist married to a fascist notary who has lost his job but has found another in the right-wing circle of the Lepenists, still on the rise.¶ The central theme of this mediocre novel is terminal illness. In other words, it is about the agony of Western civilization.¶ It is not a pretty sight, because the white mind does not resign itself to the inescapable. Tragic are the reactions of agonizing, old, white men.¶ Here, this scene unfolds in contemporary France—a place that has been culturally devasted over the last forty years of neoliberal development. It is a ghost of a country in which political struggle now takes place in the corrupt stages of ultranationalism, racism, Islamophobia, and economic fundamentalism.¶ But this scene does not only unfold in France; it is the condition of the post-global world that is now threatened by the senile delirium of the dominant culture as it falls—that of the white, Christian, imperialist empire.¶ War, Agony, Suicide¶ At the Eastern borders of Europe, two old white men play a game in which neither of them can retreat.¶ The old white American is on the heels of a humiliating and tragic defeat. Worse than Saigon, Kabul is fresh in the global imaginary as a sign of the cognitive breakdown of the long-dominant, imperialist power.¶ The old white Russian knows that the base of his power is a nationalist promise: to avenge the honor of “Holy Mother Russia.”¶ The one who retreats first will lose everything.¶ The fact that Putin is a Nazi was already clear at the conclusion of the second war in Chechnya. But at the time, he was still lauded by the American president, who looked him in the eyes and praised his sincerity. The Russian also enjoyed the favor of British banks, as they were filled to the brim with rubles robbed by Putin and his friends through the dismantling of public infrastructures after the fall of the Soviet Union. Geriatric Russians and Anglo-Americans were brothers in arms when it came to destroying the social spheres produced by past labor and communist movements all over the world.¶ But friendship and camaraderie don’t last among assassins. In fact, what use would NATO be if peace was actually brokered? And how would a successful peace have affected the bottom lines of the multinational companies producing weapons of mass destruction and death—today making endless profits.¶ The expansion of NATO only serves to reignite a hostility that capitalism could not let die, to keep the profitable conflict alive.¶ There is no rational explanation for the war in Ukraine, especially because it is the climactic movement in a psychotic crisis of the white brain. What rationality is there in the expansion of NATO, which arms Polish, Baltic, and, yes, Ukrainian Nazis against Russian Nazism? In exchange, Biden gets the result most feared by American war strategists: forcing Russia and China into an embrace that fifty years ago Nixon had succeeded in weakening.¶ Given that the war is inexplicable in strategic terms, to understand the war we don’t need to think geopolitically, but rather psycho-pathologically. Perhaps we need a geopolitics of psychotic outbursts.¶ At stake here is the political, economic, demographic, and finally psychic defeat of white, Western, (post)colonial civilization, which cannot accept the prospect of exhaustion, which prefers destruction or suicide to the slow extinction of white dominance.¶ West, Future, Decline¶ With the war in Ukraine, a hysterical arms race begins, borders are consolidated (along racialized lines), and violence increases exponentially—all demonstrations of the senile marasmus into which the West has fallen.¶ On February 23, 2022, when Russian troops were already in the Donbass, Trump praised Putin as a peacekeeping “genius,” and suggested that the US follow his lead on the Mexican border.¶ Let’s see if we can figure out what Trump’s obscenities mean. Is there a kernel of truth in his delusions? At issue is the very concept of the West.¶ But first, what is the West?¶ If by “West” we refer to a geographical definition, then Russia is of course excluded. But if we think about the anthropological and historical meanings of that word, then Russia is more Western than any other West.¶ In short, the West can be defined as the land of decline and of obsession with the future. Those two traits are in fact one, given that for organisms subject to the second law of thermodynamics—as are individual and social bodies—the future can only mean eventual decline.¶ We—both the “we” of the West and the Westerners of the boundless Russian lands—are therefore united in futurism and decline, that is, in the delirium of omnipotence and in the desperation of impotence.¶ Trump gets credit for telling it like it is, claiming that our enemies are not Russians, but migrants from the Global South; China, which we have humiliated; Africa, which we have plundered. Those are our enemies, not the very white Russia, which is part of the “Great West.”¶ This Trumpist logic is based on a white supremacy that sees Russianness as the most extreme form of acceptable whiteness.¶ Biden’s logic is instead based on the defense of the “free world”: a world born from genocide, from the forced deportation of millions of slaves, and organized around foundational systemic racism. Biden chooses to break the “Great West” apart in favor of a smaller West without Russia, which is in any case destined to tear itself apart and to involve the whole planet in its suicide.¶ So, let’s define the West as a sphere of racist dominance obsessed with the future. Time stretches out in an expansive pulse: economic growth, accumulation, capitalism. It is exactly this obsession with the future that feeds the machine of dominance: a concrete present (of pleasure, of muscular relaxation) is invested into and exchanged for abstract future value.¶ Perhaps we could reformulate the classical Marxist analysis of value to say that exchange value is precisely this accumulation of the present (the concrete) in abstract forms (like money) that can be exchanged for something else tomorrow.¶ The fixation on and fetishization of the future are by no means a natural cognitive modality of the human. Most human cultures have been organized around a cyclical understanding of time, or on the insuperable dilation of the present.¶ Futurism is a transition to complete self-consciousness (also in aesthetic terms) of cultures of expansion. But there are many futurisms.¶ The obsession with the future has different implications in the theological-utopian sphere that is central to Russian culture and the techno-economic sphere of Euro-American culture. Federov’s cosmism and Mayakovsky’s futurisms both share an eschatological breath that is lacked by the technocratic fanaticisms of Marinetti and Musk. Maybe that’s why it is Russia’s destiny to end history—and here we are.¶ Nazism Is Everywhere¶ The new horizon is war that pits one Nazism against another. In his writings from the 1960s, Gunter Anders predicted that the nihilistic charge of Nazism would not die with the defeat of Hitler. He presaged that it would return onto the world stage when technical power developed to such a degree that it provoked the humiliation of the human.¶ Nazism is reemerging as a psycho-political form of the demented body of the white race, which ragefully reacts to its own unstoppable decline. Viral chaos has created the conditions for the formation of a global, biopolitical infrastructure, but it has also accentuated the widely experienced perception of matter’s ungovernability as it loses order, disintegrates, and dies.¶ The West has forsaken death because that concept is not compatible with its obsession with the future. It has rejected senility because it is not compatible with expansion and growth. But now, the (demographic, cultural, and economic) aging of the dominant cultures of the Global North are presented as a specter that white culture cannot even contemplate, let alone accept.¶ This is where the white brain (that of both Biden and Putin) enters a furious crisis of senile dementia. Then the white brain most lost to senility—that of Donald Trump—utters a truth that no one can stand to hear: Putin is our best friend. Sure, he’s a racist murderer, but we are no less so.¶ On the other hand, Biden represents the impotent anger that old people express and feel when they notice the decline of their strength, psychic energy, and cognitive efficiency. Now that exhaustion is in its advanced stage, extinction is the only reassuring prospect.¶ Can humanity save itself from the murderous violence of the demented and agonized Western, Russian, and European brains?¶ The invasion of Ukraine will continue, whether it becomes a stable occupation (unlikely) or concludes with the withdrawal of Russian troops after the destruction of the military apparatus donated to Kyiv by the West (more likely). Regardless, the conflict will not be resolved by the defeat of either of two patriarchs. Neither one can accept retreat. Therefore, this invasion signals the beginning of a phase of continuous war that will be global (and that may express itself in nuclear terms). The final war against humanity has begun.¶ In the suicidal war that one West wages against the Other West, the first victims are those who have suffered from the deliriums of both spheres of influence and power—those who want no war but are made miserable by its effects.¶ The only thing we can do is to desert, to abandon, to collectively transform fear into thought, to resign ourselves to the inevitable. Only in this way can we produce the unpredictable: peace, pleasure, life.¶

[James Morris, Lecturer in Journalism at City University and PhD in philosophy from the european graduate school, 12-3-2020, "Simulacra in the Age of Social Media: Baudrillard as the Prophet of Fake News," Journal of Communication Inquiry, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0196859920977154,]//owen

“Fake News” has been a frequent topic in the last couple of years. The phenomenon has particularly been cited with regards to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. The creation of “post truth” reports that are disseminated via the Web and social media has been treated as something new, a product of the digital age, and a reason to be concerned about the effects of online technology. However, this paper argues that fake news should be considered as part of a continuum with forms of media that went before in the 20th Century, and the general trend of postmodernity detailed by Baudrillard. The simulation of communications media and mass reproduction was already evident and has merely progressed in the digital age rather than the latter providing a wholly new context. The paper concludes by asking whether the political havoc caused by fake news has an antidote, when it appears to be a by-product of media simulacra’s inherent lack of connection to the real. In a communications landscape where the misrepresentations of the so-called “Mainstream Media” are decried using even more questionable “memes” on social media, is there any possibility for truth?¶ “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.¶ The simulacrum is true.”—Ecclesiastes¶ Thus, begins Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. It sounds like the kind of statement King Solomon might have made in Ecclesiastes; except that if you read Ecclesiastes you won’t find anything like this quote. Considering the current debates about partisanship and pure lies “going viral” in new media, from its opening sentence Baudrillard’s 1981 work appears every bit as relevant today as it was nearly 40 years ago, or maybe even more so after recent events.¶ Politics (and its portrayal particularly in Western English-speaking media) has felt like it underwent a sea change in 2016. The “normal rules” no longer seemed to apply after the UK voted for Brexit and Donald Trump was elected President in the USA. The prominent phrase in this disruption, already a cliché a few months after its emergence, was “fake news” (also known as “alternative facts” by some on the right-hand side of the political spectrum). Pundits and academics were soon describing the new era as “post-truth” (Ball, 2017; d’Ancona, 2017; Davis, 2017; Fuller, 2018; McIntyre, 2018), arguing that we have entered a phase where facts are radically devalued in favour of shallow appearances and confirmation bias, fuelled by the meteoric rise in our usage of online social media over the last decade. Some have even argued that truth itself has been weaponised (Merrin, 2019).¶ Social media is new technology that didn’t exist at all before the mid-1990s, and not in its contemporary form until Facebook went beyond universities and Twitter was launched, both in 2006. But are the phenomena of “fake news” and “post-truth” that are allegedly the side-effect of social media really so revolutionary? This paper argues that Jean Baudrillard was already recognising these trends in the 1980s, based on the media in existence back then, and so what has occurred in the 21st Century should be viewed as a continuation of the same phenomenon. It then asks if there is anything that journalism can do about that situation.¶ Social Media and the Transcendence of Reality¶ It cannot be denied that culture has changed with the advent of online digital media. Go back ten years and you would not have found people entranced by their smartphone screens as they spend increasing amounts of time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other social networks that come and go with bewildering rapidity. It’s also evident that traditional news media in its multiple forms—particularly print and broadcast—have seen revenues decimated by the arrival of digital online systems. This has impacted the abilities of news organisations to perform their traditional role of telling truth to power.¶ However, the cultural trends of online and social media were already evident in electronic broadcast media throughout the 20th century. Baudrillard argued that these technologies of communication engendered a media world that exists in parallel to reality, breaking the traditional linguistic relationship of sign and meaning. He talks about the image having gone through successive phases in its evolution into 20th century media:¶ it is the reflection of a profound reality;¶ it masks and denatures a profound reality;¶ it masks the absence of a profound reality;¶ it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 6)¶ We will address the potential causes of this situation, and whether the hypothesis is valid, later in this paper. However, assuming it is the case, this separation of the image from reality would pose a profound problem when media plays such an important role in contemporary political life. Chadwick et al. (2018) have argued that “The healthy functioning of liberal democracies has long been said to rely upon citizens whose role is to learn about the social and political world, exchange information and opinions with fellow citizens, arrive at considered judgements about public affairs, and put these judgments into action as political behaviour.”¶ But it’s clear that this civic information process is not what has been happening when citizens engage with news via social media. According to Buzzfeed’s analysis of Facebook data, by the time of the US election, Facebook users were more engaged with fake stories than real ones. Measuring the totals for the top 20 election stories on Facebook (this includes shares, reactions and comments), “fake news” stories received 8.7 million engagements whilst “true” mainstream news stories only received 7.3 million engagements (Silverman, 2016). Here, “engagement” refers to an aggregate of clicks through, likes, shares, comments and other interactions on the Facebook platform.¶ This phenomenon has been cynically manipulated by political movements on both sides of the ideological divide, but apparently more so by the right (or “alt-right” as it has been come to be known), judging by the successes achieved. The infamous “£350 million a week for the NHS” advertisement on the side of a bus promoting a Leave vote during the UK Brexit campaign was clearly aimed at those who share for emotional reasons without considering the facts properly. US Republican politicians similarly aimed to harness this phenomenon for the Trump campaign. During a CNN TV interview in 2016, US Republican politician New Gingrich argued:¶ “The current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics that theoretically may be right, but it's not where human beings are… I'll go with how people feel, and I'll let you go with the theoreticians.”1¶ Trump’s personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani went even further on August 19th, 2018, claiming that “Truth isn’t truth.”2¶ In terms of Baudrillard’s progression of the image, this is the final phase where the image bears no direct relation to reality and has become its own pure simulacrum. The logic of political messaging via news media is no longer about “the economy, stupid,” i.e. actual material wealth, or whether crime really is worse than it used to be. It’s about how those messages fit with a pre-existing idealised world view, or how they provoke an emotional response from those who engage with them. This is the only way human beings have found that they can cope with the deluge of information they are met with every day—by focusing on what fits with how they imagine the world to be, or how they want it to be.¶ Baudrillard (1994) argues that: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning” (p. 79). He suggests three hypotheses as to why this has occurred. The first is that meaning can’t keep up with the supply of information; the second that meaning is a separate system to information; and the third that information actually destroys meaning. For example, science takes away the meaning people find in religious belief, which explains why the Christian right in the USA has an ongoing war with scientific discoveries. Further than this, since human beings are required for meaning, the heavily automated production of information in the computer age devoid of human involvement works in parallel, with knock-on effects we will be discussing shortly.¶ “Fake News” and the Tabloid Press¶ In their insightful and thorough empirical analysis of UK news-sharing habits, Chadwick et al. (2018) have argued that “democratically dysfunctional news-sharing behaviour is a potential systemic outcome of the tabloidization of the social media environment.” Their research has shown that there is a correlation between sharing tabloid news of questionable value and dysfunctional online behaviour such as trolling. Indeed, just as “fake news” was more popular on Facebook than “real” mainstream news in the run-up to the 2016 US election, the most popular story on Facebook during the UK Brexit campaign of the same year was a factually incorrect one from the Daily Express about the European Union planning to kill off the National Health Service (Waterson, 2017).¶ However, what this implies is that the kind of tabloid news stories that promote the separation of meaning from reality, which Baudrillard discusses, existed well before the advent of online culture. In the UK, and the USA, tabloids already had a long history of publishing journalism of questionable factual quality, a tradition that merely continued into tabloid-like TV news channels such as Fox News. In the UK, the tabloid press has since then made the transition to digital online audiences very successfully, with three of the top five sites in terms of visitor numbers being tabloids (Chadwick et al., 2018).¶ Sharing these kinds of stories follows a different logic to civic duty. Chadwick et al. (2018) argue that: “The goals that comprise this motivational cluster—to entertain, please or upset others—are all focused on eliciting emotional responses. For these users, news sharing is not about seeking to inform others; the quality of the news they share appears to be unimportant. Indeed, perhaps the more sensational, ludicrous, or exaggerated the news is, the better it fits with the motivation to disrupt the rationality and veracity upon which political discussion must, in the final reckoning, depend.”¶ The logic of online sharing appears to diverge from the need to inform, or debate with the intention of finding a shared consensus. This was predicted by Baudrillard for media in general. The social media conversation is aimed not so much in the direction of trying to uncover the way the world is, but at promoting the way participants want it to be or find the most entertaining. Confirmation bias reinforces itself as social media users turn away from any messages that challenge them. Chadwick et al.’s (2018) research illustrates that: “The more users engage with politically like-minded others online, the less likely it is that they will be challenged for dysfunctional behaviour. Over the longer term, these people are less likely to encounter the kind of opposition that might make a difference to the quality of the news they share.”¶

For most economists, asymmetries in information between social planners and the participants in markets in inventions were central to the analysis of mechanisms to induce and disseminate inventive ideas and to ensure commercialization of innovations. Theorists agree that, in the presence of such imperfections, patent systems are “obviously superior” incentive systems and have a “peculiar informational advantage” relative to alternatives such as research contracts or prizes.47 The concerns about strictly economic issues are compounded by problems in political economy, accountability, and the possibilities for corruption and cronyism. Despite the undoubted contributions of mathematical approaches to the economics of incentives and innovation, these abstract discussions highlight the need for more specific studies of the actual implementation of rules and the actual effects of institutional mechanism design.

Technical expertise or the creation of the most technologically-advanced discovery did not guarantee success in the marketplace, which depended on the scale of consumer demand. The typical great inventor combined ingenuity at both invention and commercial exploitation. More than 85 percent of the great inventors were directly involved in commercialization of their invention through manufacture, or both manufacture and licensing. Their enterprises incorporated the latest technology, including developments by other inventors. Cyrus McCormick, Charles Goodyear, and Richard Hoe, were typical in their aggressive management of extensive portfolios of owned and acquired intellectual property rights. Almost half of the postbellum great inventors engaged in patent litigation, and those who were principals in firms accounted for over two thirds of all lawsuits.

Markets in patented ideas were central to ensuring that rewards were effectively calibrated to contributions. When Abraham Lincoln declared the patent system kindled the “fire of genius,” nobody supposed he meant exceptional creativity was limited to a particular class or group. The American patent system facilitated the entry of relatively disadvantaged individuals into the field of technology, enabled them to specialize in invention, mobilize resources to fund patenting and commercialize their discoveries, and enhanced the diffusion of information and inventions. Patent rights comprised secure assets that were extensively traded, and gave inventors with only modest resources the opportunity to appropriate private returns as well as to make valuable contributions to society.

Juries, however disinterested or expert, are unlikely to be able to predict the course of future developments or to pick the winners who will prevail through shifting and dynamic conditions. They are typically charged to limit their consideration to the proposals before them rather than to incorporate comprehensive information about the next best alternative on a larger current or intertemporal scale. The standard analysis of decision- making under uncertainty indicates that an option to flexibly defer choices will, holding other things constant, have a greater expected value than a “now or never” decision. Administered systems are likely to exercise options too early, leading to irreversible choices and monolithic path dependence. Markets, by comparison, engender higher-valued options owing to the ability to defer decisions until more information becomes available. For instance, modern patent grants maintain an open option during the life of the patent with a maximum term of twenty years. Markets will thus tend to have more prolific branches on the binomial decision tree than an administered process such as a prize system, which perforce will prematurely lop off a greater number of branches at the date when the prize has to be awarded.

Consider a prize system where n ideas are submitted at time t, but only the top three can be selected at time t + 1. This implies that n – 3 are rejected, even if their value is positive, and those paths are foreclosed and no longer available to the administrator. If market conditions change sufficiently in the future, in such a way that one of the n – 3 options is now viable and possibly more valuable, it is unlikely that the administrator will be able to revisit the decision. Administrators further have control over their institutions, and researchers show that the option to defer choices is less likely to be chosen when conflict is low.42 Planners do not internalize all of the returns from risk-taking, and are thus ill-equipped to confront an innovation process that Bill Janeway wryly characterizes as trial and error and error and error.43 Administered systems tend to be more closed, with little outside knowledge of the factors that led to the decisions, and once a prize is awarded with great fanfare, it is difficult to trace the subsequent outcome because attention is diverted to other competitions. Planners have an incentive to proclaim their successes and downplay or deny their failures, leading to an asymmetry in the information that is made available. Markets are less likely to have this sort of lock-in and will tend to have access to a greater number of the initial options, as well as more useful information about failures that can benefit all participants.

One of the major ramifications of Myriad was the uncertainty that the investment world felt after the Supreme Court's decision.319 This uncertainty led to an unwillingness among investors to invest in biotechs that relied on gene patents, thus hindering ongoing research and development of gene-based diagnostics.320 Although big, sweeping changes like those proposed by Senator Tillis or those that would see gene patents split off into their own field of patent law might ultimately be able to address the gene patent problem,321 they are unlikely to foster the economic certainty needed to stabilize the U.S. biotech industry. Such drastic solutions will likely only serve to increase uncertainty around gene patents as biotechs, investors, and courts try to sort out the implications of such moves.

As such, this Note advocates for a more incremental change effected through amending subject matter eligibility to allow for specific types of gene patents, without totally upending gene patent jurisprudence. Such an approach would likely not have as unsettling an effect on the biotech industry and, if well-crafted, could quickly inspire the confidence needed to get investment, and thus scientific progress, into genetic diseases back on track.322 This approach could further be crafted to protect access of genetic research into important topics like viruses, thus achieving the right balance of incentive and innovation.

Economic studies of innovation further assume that the legal monopoly accorded to patented ideas leads to monopoly in the market. Simple textbook models posit that monopolies create higher prices and lower output, which results in net social costs or “deadweight losses.” The unexamined assumption that underlies this argument is that the alternative to the monopoly is a more efficient competitive system. This sort of reasoning leads to the conclusion that incentives like innovation prizes are necessarily socially desirable because they avoid deadweight losses. By contrast, this book emphasizes that all institutional arrangements have both costs and benefits that need to be explicitly addressed. Far from being competitive, administered innovation systems typically involve monopsonies, or situations where a single buyer faces numerous potential applicants. Monetary prizes involve fixed returns/prices offered by a sole buyer, where adjustments are limited to one side of the market (variation in the number of applicants for the award). Standard economic analysis of monopsonies suggests the likelihood of a misallocation of resources. Such systems can generate serious efficiency concerns, including the potential for unjust discrimination and rent-seeking, which the historical evidence presented in these pages suggests likely outweigh the costs of market-oriented patents for invention.

Free markets adjust to disequilibria through changes in prices and profits, so firms and their agents internalize the costs and benefits of their decisions. Administered systems, by contrast, generally involve a separation between those who make the decisions and those who suffer the consequences of failure. A crucial feature is that no third-party mechanisms, such as a legal right of appeal, are put in place to ensure that arbitrary or unjust decisions are censured or overturned. The Fields Prize in mathematics, for instance, is overseen by a committee whose decisions are sealed for seventy-five years, and its awards at times reflected the personal agendas of the members of the committees, rather than the objective achievements of the candidates.41 Thus, unlike market transactions where participants are (directly or indirectly) disciplined by the costs of incorrect choices and of failures, in administered systems there are fewer incentives or impulses to ensure efficient decision-making even in the long term.

Proponents further contend that gene patents ultimately do serve the purpose of promoting access to healthcare.239 They argue that the lack of development of gene-based diagnostics and therapeutics actually deprives people of the ability to test and treat diseases because less research is going into developing those tests and treatments.240 Noting examples like the Lupus flare-up indicator or the Noonan syndrome diagnostic,241 proponents argue that Myriad has had the effect of killing development of these and other technologies that, had Myriad been decided differently, might be on the market today.242 Proponents further note that although patented gene technologies can lead to prohibitively high costs for some, as was the case with Myriad and BRCA testing, this issue is actually one of insurance coverage, not gene patentability.243 They suggest that issues over specific individuals being unable to afford tests or treatment because insurance will not cover it should not be grounds to deny the general public access to potentially lifesaving technologies.244