Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for talking me through this, it has been very enlightening. I’ll make sure to bore my coworkers with this come monday lunch (they’re cool and based so they’ll probably find it interesting too).
My lemmy app won’t let me use hexbear emotes but just imagine a few stalin hearts and lenin awards in here somewhere
I see. Putting it in clearer terms with examples like that definitely helps. Let me see if I can provide my own application of the model:
A picture of a beautiful forest
A stylized/romanticized painting more concerned with the feeling of beautiful forests
A video game with beautiful forests inspired by the stylized paintings of (2)
A video essay comparing forests depicted in the games in (3)
Here we can see that each stage is relatively innocent, but the insidious part lies in how a person seeking self-actualization through communion with nature in 2026 may only ever engage with stages 3-4 and thus shape their understanding of nature based on them, ultimately alienating them from the real thing they were actually craving.
Thank you for the thorough explanation! I think I understand a bit better now.
I still struggle a bit with discerning what the stages mean. Why are stages 3 and 4 “bad”? Isn’t the process described more or less just dialectics, with a series of quantitative changes resulting in qualitative change and all that? At some point it must be valid to say that while sure, you can sort trace the ancestry from the village campfire to hexbear, they are also just, you know, different things.
Sorry if that’s a bit too vibes based but I hope my general idea comes across ok.
Ok I’m going to confess that i feel like i don't fully grasp the model this quote (and related ones from the book) proposes. I understand it on a vibes level, but what does he actually mean by the stages of simulacra? How do I interpret it in a way that’s useful and applicable?
Can’t watch right now. Is he actually saying stuff or is it just vague gesturing towards “corporate greed” with a random side swipe against China (that somehow always makes it in even among otherwise nice people)?
Hot take: CSS is probably the closest thing we have to black magic in UI programming and there’s a reason why every single successful GUI framework and/or library (even the fully native non-webview) ones try their best to emulate it.
Thank you for the responses. Reading through the older post you linked it seems like the GDP KPI would be an easy place to start. Is there anyone pushing for such reform? Are there any factions making such criticisms of the system either at the federal or municipal level?
Yeah iirc we (sweden) is among the most indebted countries in the world while also exerting the highest tax pressure on low-middle income workers (the country is basically a tax haven for ultra wealthy). I would not be surprised to see pundits seriously start pushing for more privatization soon.
Interesting. Surely if, as you’re saying, the wealth disparity is so central to the current economic challenges facing China (both short and long term) there must be some people talking about it? Similar to yourself? Is this something that can be addressed at a local level or is all the power to change things in the hands of the central government? You talked about local government mostly concerning themselves with meeting goals/quotas (often by short-sighted numbers pumping as happened with real estate), but there must be someone yelling “bridges and trains are awesome but i also want socialism to mean having a house and luxury goods”
Could you elaborate on the last part? I know you’ve talked at length before about how western economics have sort of “eroded” attitudes towards marxist schools of thought, especially among policy makers. Is this still true, or even worsening due to the intensifying inequality or are there still policy makers who fall into the “damn times are getting tough where’s my little red book” crowd (if I understand your post correctly)
I know you get a lot of flak here sometimes, but I find you analysis fascinating and your explanations pedagogic. Please keep posting!
<3