fake-texting and the hyper-real: we seriously are a bunch of total morons
oh man.
Here i am at work, “raising funds for PBS” (which is to say: i’m not), sitting here online formulating an idea or two, when suddenly i hear a coworker in another room talking, and inadvertently providing the missing link—-I have to mention that the anonymity of this job is really strange; I hardly know anyone’s name or what they are interested in or where they come from. So it was incredibly funny when I hear a guy talking about how people in our society live in a state of fear, during which the blood in your system goes to your limbs (to prepare for a ‘fight or flight’ response), rather than your “viscera” (parts of us which function to benefit perception, on the basis of utilizing perception, I guess). Therefore, people in our society (due to a life-long conditioning in this context) are stunted emotionally and physically. This keeps people isolated from the collective consciousness. In this state of weak, fear-induced collective isolation, a powerful patriarch provides comfort and stability- especially when they base their dogma system on shame- which points particularly to religious institutions, along with presidencies, etc. Then he mentioned how the decay of ritual in our society has led to all of this.
SO, this brings me EXACTLY where I was trying to go, which is here:
There are THREE MILLION PEOPLE in this group who admit to fake-texting in awkward situations. Which, of course, is just an indicator of how many more people, not in this group, fake-text as well. Obviously, my anxiety about this partly stems from my own habit of doing this once in a while. It’s kind of like when Facebook revealed how many other people flip to the cold side of the pillow in the middle of the night. I digress; back to this fake-texting thing…
WTF
WTF
WTF
Here’s what my slightly cynical but incredibly brilliant friend Baudrillard has to say about this:
“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 inthe 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 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 al 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… 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.” (pgs. 2-3)
According to him, the real creates itself out of a nothingness at this point. A nothingness that is a very pointed nothingness. In this social state where we create ritualized behavior to subconsciously strengthen our relationship to the invisible- given the fact that traditional ritualized behavior is on the downfall (mega churches are a whole ‘nother barrel of monkeys that could be talked about here), what are we filling our voids with, if not the former types of obediences? Well, duh, things like iphones and the internet and so on now constitute the arena for our collective consciousness. Big duh. But not-duh, because as we slip more and more into the hyperreal of the internet, our self-perception and any normal human anxieties are curbed by this new real, further displacing our sense of a more earthly, temporal existence, and therefore distancing us from the “visceral”, and therefore we are obedient to the invisible
and we pretend to use our phones when we look awkward or lonely or like a major loser so that people will not think we are a total moron with no friends, and by using our phones in this way (the performance of texting? what the hell), our senses of self are stretched and diluted across this weird invisible network. And there’s another weird void that has to be filled
Because the difference between pretending and simulating is that pretending leaves a clear space between what is real and not real, but simulating “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (according to Baudrillard). The act of texting creates an impression on the public that you are engaged with other people, with a network, with a fulfilling and busy life.
Or maybe you are on your phone checking your email, which you have to check all the time because you obviously get about seventy to eighty emails a day because you are probably doing really well, which others will pick up on because you are so engaged with your cool friends.
But once that act becomes pretend, it’s strange because since the internet and phones and texting are a simulation of reality and stability in themselves, the false act of engaging with that simulation isn’t necessarily pretend anymore, especially because you are fooling your onlookers- deliberately.
So
the phenomenon of people fake-texting has officially put us into an age of what i think of as a rapidly snapping back and forth between basic human anxieties and needs that are comforted with this invisible (easily slipping into the realm of the spiritual) simulated reality, which is becoming exponentially larger, and the space between these two extremes is filled with: what?
I think it’s partially filled with the rise of tabloid culture because it’s a more tangible and physical way to forget ourselves— but this is still totally perplexing to me.
Here’s Baudrillard looking like a smug asshole because he knows he can properly articulate why tabloid culture is rising parallel with cell phone culture:
“Hey moron, why don’t you go engage with the hyper-real and fake-text so you look like you have friends? Fuck this blog, I have to go roll a couple of strawberry cigarettes and google myself until Bourriaud shows up with his FaBuLoUs quiche recipe…”
AND THAT IS THAT.
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