About Gianni Infantino

It’s funny to think that in the early years of this blog, when I discussed authenticity, it was usually in strictly analogue terms, about fake Asias and fake Europes, fake beaches, Ernie Wise’s fake hair (which was in fact a fake of a fake). It’s almost as if Barthes and Baudrillard had been sent as decoys, so we wouldn’t notice that the real fakery was creeping up on us in the forms of ones and zeroes and then suddenly your job’s been handed to a bot. (Placeholder: an AI semiologist called Roland Bothes?)

In related news, for reasons of ethics and taste and lack of emotional bandwidth, I probably won’t be watching the World Cup, which finally shudders into effect in the next few days. But the whole shebang will doubtless offer much material over which bedroom postmodernists can stroke their chins. Barney Ronay has started early: 

This is Gianni Infantino’s world now, a man who carries with him at all times that oddly alluring sense of complete conviction in his own inauthenticity...

About the Winter Olympics and the Northern Lights

Still recovering from the various disappointments of the Winter Olympics, above all that the American hockey player who I thought operated under the Zola-esque nom de glace “J’accuse” was in fact called Jack Hughes. Then I follow the all-conquering Norwegians back to their homeland, although I travel even further north, inside the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights.

And there I meet further disappointment. I’m well aware that the garish colours in the adverts were a photographic mirage but when I look to the skies I see the extraordinary, looping interactions of solar winds in strict monochrome. As others aah and ooh over a green one and a pink one, I start to wonder whether the whole thing is a practical joke. Is it down to me to suggest that this icon of meteorological spookiness is a naked fraud? But apparently it’s not unknown for some people to be unable to see the colours. It’s not you, Aurora Borealis, it’s me. And then, when I take a photo, it’s as pretty as, well, a picture. What I can’t capture is the black-and-white that I see. Do my eyes, not to mention technology, deceive me? Well, yes, of course they do.

And inevitably I turn to Baudrillard, who would no doubt have insisted that the image, the simulacrum (which most people see) has superseded the thing that is only seen by people who are daft enough to take a cable car up a mountain in Tromsø in sub-zero temperatures and which is only a different kind of mirage anyway. And I think back to the exertions of J’accuse and his fellow Olympians and remember that so many things (curling for example) just look better on a screen.

About cruising

From the Instagram account (of all things) of The Face magazine (ditto), a piece that affects to investigate the phenomenon of Gen Z and younger millennials going on cruises. And among the factors they apparently appreciate is the fact that a cruise offers “a way to have everything from your day-to-day life replicated”.

So what the younglings really want from these cruises is a simulacrum of normality, but on a big boat. Damn, I’m so old, I remember when the whole point of a holiday to leave everything from your day-to-day life at home.

PS: They’ve deleted it now.

About not reading Baudrillard

As ever behind the curve, I’m only now reading Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface and I’m not going to feed some kind of global metanarrative by presuming to comment on its themes of cultural/ethnic appropriation and attendant rights/wrongs. Instead, I’ll pluck out one sentence and leave it hanging, like an image in search of an absence to conceal:

Back then it was still cool to quote Baudrillard as if you’d read him in full.

About pumpkins etc

Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.

And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.

And then...

(And all the time I’m simultaneously worrying about and luxuriating in the exclusivity of all of these. Are they funny in spite of the fact that a lot of people won’t get the gag, or because of the fact? And somehow this ties into the most depressing article I’ve read this week, Elle Griffin on how nobody buys books any more.)

About horses

The recent incident that saw horses from the Household Cavalry running loose in the streets of central London is surely open to all sorts of interpretations: musing on the place of such ceremony in a modern army; questions of the relationship between humans and animals; hints towards the Book of Revelation.

But Simon Duke of Chronicle Live wasn’t going to follow the herd, was he? Faced with these weird, almost dreamlike images, at once beautiful and terrifying, surreal in the true sense of the world, Simon knew instinctively that what his readers would want to know was how Ben Shephard and his colleagues were covering the story on ITV’s This Morning. No analysis, no context, no insight, none of that poncey stuff. Just the fact that Cat Deeley said “Wow”.

Inevitably we can paint this in Baudrillardian terms, where the reality (terrified, blood-streaked horses weaving between bemused Londoners) is eradicated by the image (Vanessa Feltz’s reaction); or just see it as the death of useful journalism, where one set of media hacks cannibalise the responses of another set, the whole circus consuming itself like a massive digital ouroboros. And, to be honest, I’m just catching scraps from the table as well, aren’t I?

PS: Another urban tale that surely symbolises something even if we can’t agree what: the sails fall off the Moulin Rouge.

About Yoko Ono

 And Ms Ono also appears, in a roundabout way, to have invented the simulacrum before Baudrillard did.

(Both images stolen from Andy Miller on BlueSky)

About Theseus

The Ship of Theseus, aka Trigger’s Broom, isn’t quite the same thing as Baudrillard’s simulacrum, but it occupies a similar space. And it does emit some lovely memeage.

About images

I’m not going to add to all the partially-informed verbiage prompted by the story apparently involving the BBC, The Sun, £35,000 and some unedifying pictures, except to stroke my chin over one legal oddity the case has highlighted. Someone 16 years old or more has the capacity, the law says, to choose to display his or her or their naked body to someone older, provided said viewer isn’t in a position of responsibility. However, said 16+-year-old is not allowed to distribute an image of said body. The image, one might infer, is more powerful than the original. Baudrillard vindicated again. 

About Penny Mordaunt

Of course I haven’t read Greater, the book by the woman who might be Prime Minister in a matter of weeks, so I’ve had to rely on artful filleting by lefty journalists (in this case John Harris of the Guardian) to acquire this gem: “The British prefer a future that looks very much like the past, only a lot better.” Which seems to hint at both a Baudrillardian simulacrum and a Radiohead lyric, while meaning precisely nothing. Which is a pretty good fit for this blog, and for 2022 as a whole.

And if Mordaunt does bellyflop into Number 10, she’ll have to decide whether to carry on her party’s deranged feud with the BBC. If she does, she should ask herself how a commercially-driven broadcaster might have made this rather wonderful production of The Waste Land. Except that that might expose a fatal cognitive dissonance in modern Conservatism, which seeks to exalt the best culture of the past, while simultaneously deriding intelligent examination or experience of that culture as elitist.

About Taylor Swift, etc

Idly Googling with a vague idea for a blog post or a Tweet or a seven-volume novel sequence (that ends in a tantalising manner when I die halfway through writing book five), I came upon this eight-year-old article by Darren Franich, which surprises less by encompassing both Taylor Swift and Jean Baudrillard (meh, that’s the sort of thing The Modern Review used to do in its sleep) than by appearing in, of all places, Entertainment Weekly. An excerpt: 

Eight years before Taylor Swift was born, playboy French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay called “Simulacra and Simulation,” which is filled with important ideas that barely anyone understands. The most explicable and most important idea: Reality as we understand it is actually an elaborate construct, a pale imitation of reality. This was a heavy concept back in 1981; now it’s something that everyone kind of vaguely understands, partially because there are enough people who are young enough to live part-time on the internet who are also old enough to recognize how weird that is, and also partially because “Simulacra and Simulation” inspired all the boring parts of The Matrix.

About video games

From the Fake Baudrillard Post-Post Posting Facebook page:

About the dissertation

For the past couple of years I have been studying for an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies, which is essentially a slightly more coherent version of this blog. And now, having completed my dissertation, I am not. What have I learned? That Foucault is far funnier than I ever gave him credit for, that Adorno definitely isn’t, that nobody except me loves Baudrillard any more and that ultimately the human race as we know it is doomed and we’ll all be reduced to a small pile of ones and zeros by the year 2100.

About Fyre

The documentary about the Fyre Festival farrago (in which hundreds of rich twits were persuaded to pay good money to trek out the Bahamas for a big party that didn’t happen, because some pretty ladies on Instagram said that was a good idea) prompts a couple of thoughts.

First, and sorry about this, but the whole thing is a perfect Baudrillardian simulacrum, in which the glossy, bikinis-and-jetskis imagery precedes and occludes a reality that, in the end, didn’t exist and never would. But, while the idea of flying out to a beach, staying in a wet tent and being fed bad cheese sandwiches isn’t exactly on my bucket list, the social media version of it, where influencers were paid good money to flaunt their bronzed, waxed, purged bodies to say how ruddy wondrous the whole thing was going to be, looked even worse. I’ve done bad camping. I survived. The other thing would have prompted a heady cocktail of aneurysm and psychosis irredeemable by any IG filter.

Also, the overriding feeling from watching footage of Billy McFarland, the man behind the whole thing, is that right up until the very last hours, he looks as if he believes it will really come off. It didn’t, which is why he’s currently doing six years as prisoner #91186-054 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York; but if a scammer manages to scam himself into believing his own hype, is he still really a scammer?

PS:

About The Matrix

The Matrix films owe much to the theories of Baudrillard, and when they were making the sequels, the Wachowskis approached the great man, hoping to get him involved. But he steered clear. In his words, The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

PS: A more recent Keanu offering gets a coruscating review that almost makes me want to see it...

About AI

We should no longer be surprised that Artificial Intelligence is generating much of what we are encouraged to call “content”, whether it’s words or pictures (ceci n’est pas your mum). The tipping point comes when it’s not just the product, it’s the consumers who exist beyond meatspace. As Max Read reports in New York magazine:

Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

Which raises all sorts of questions: can there be a valid Turing test if neither party is human (but each assumes the other to be)? And does Baudrillard’s hyperreality become hyper fraudulent? (“Wasn’t it always?” chuckle the cynics.) And if we’re not brains in vats, could we just be phones in racks?

About drones

There I was, wondering whether to write something about the Gatwick drone, but it looks as if I don’t need to.

the drone was pretty Baudrillardian to begin with but by transfiguring itself into pure simulation it has become the most Baudrillardian thing ever

— bat020 (@bat020) 24 December 2018

About Threatin

I was going to write something covering the bizarre tale of the band Threatin, which appears in reality to be a figment of its own imagination, with a fanbase to match. In short, an LA-based musician called Jered Threatin booked several venues in the UK, claiming to have sold hundreds of tickets to each gig, but he hadn’t really and as a result the venues and support bands were the losers. I’m torn by this; I dislike dishonesty, but I’m also wary of people who put too much emphasis on the chimera of “authenticity”. In a battle between a bad-haired twit living out his rock ‘n’ roll delusions in public and local metal bands who make a virtue of their “realness” (above and beyond being any good) I’d probably side with old Jered. And yeah, I’d probably have said something about Baudrillard, and how the illusion of Threaten conceals a reality that never existed and all that sort of good stuff.

But I won’t bother because the excellent Everett True wrote a review of their recent London gig which is utterly true, and utterly inauthentic. Which is pretty much what you want, isn’t it?

About billboards

And a tip of the hat to Jennifer Bolande, who populates billboards with images of the landscapes they’re blocking. (Via Toby Amies.) A practical manifestation of Baudrillard’s simulacra and Borges’ 1:1 map, I reckon.

About reality (again)

Via the lovely Hegemony Jones: a heretofore obscure governmenty-type chap announces that Baudrillard is dead, we’re not in The Matrix and, er, that’s it. (I paraphrase.) He’ll do Nietzsche vs God next, but he’s having his tea right now.