Perhaps depression and anxiety originate in the ability of our monkey brains to sustain the amount of data we’re forced to process in Hyperreality.

I get Baudrillard. I do. At the same time his ideas become so densely layered that I start to think of Jonathan Swift’s cloud city, where people are so wrapped up in/enrapt with their analysis that they lose their own function as humans and as a productive society. That is of course my own rebellion and longing to just go be a fucking farmer or something simple. My discomfort though hasn’t led to the red pill/blue pill choice but it surely illuminates the glitches… the wait something isn’t right realizations. (I do believe that Swift and Baudrillard, were they contemporaries in the 20th Century, would have gotten along famously.)

Still, Simulacra and Simulation remains such an important book, or rather the understanding of exactly what we’re seeing when things don’t exactly make sense, is kind of liberating. The knowing that one is in The Matrix makes navigating The Matrix easier. Read the book. Read the analysis. Knowing what’s real and what isn’t gives you freedom of choice. Much of what you don’t choose or choose not to participate in doesn’t matter.

It’s a lot more than that, but the groundwork is there.