Everything about you is a copy of a copy of a copy…. simulation and simulacra… Jean Baudrillard etc. Hyperreality means we can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is simulation.

Oh…

Ah, okay. Yes, this actually makes sense. This definition has been stated in so many different ways that most of the definitions don’t seem to match at all. So what is post-modernism? Refer to the above statement. Flip it about. Everything is real so nothing at all is real, but we know that’s not exactly true. It just means that real exists but we can’t really distinguish the real. This is why so many people scream about going back to a more simple time. That’s our sickness. We’re just smart enough to know that we don’t know anything at all anymore. We experience cognitive dissonance but it’s not as easy as choosing between an A and a B. It’s multi-layered like an onion, but it’s all inside out so “real” could be any of the layers from the first to the last or any in-between. Confused yet?

Me too.

But it’s hard. We define everything by our ability to see and touch it firstly, and then by assigning it a word. Words out of context though are slippery and the meaning evolves.

So does post-modern just mean that we’re all fucked up?

Pretty much. Check the video though.

Tangentially related to the video… with processed foods, different shades of red always represent the flavors assigned to cherry and strawberry. Would it have been so difficult to find another shade of red for raspberry? How did bright blue become the consensus across so many brands and marketers for raspberry? How did it end up being a shade of blue not found anywhere in nature, when it portrays a berry that occurs naturally with no human intervention. Was there a vote on this? How did it become part of our day to day reality? Was it by papal authority that blue became raspberry? To me, this is the conundrum of post-modernism. It’s plainly ludicrous, yet it’s our reality.

Neon blue is raspberry because we’ve all accepted that this is so and we’ve decided to ignore the nagging cognitive dissonance when we reach for a neon blue drink in the cooler at the store. It is what it is and we’ve decided it doesn’t matter. So many things don’t matter in this same way that it obscures similar situations that actually might matter. Things that our safety and security might depend on.