First, we have to know how we got here. According to Baudrillard, “What has happened in postmodern culture is that our society has become so reliant on models and maps that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map.” Reality itself, since the birth of the internet has been stuck in a sort of echo imitating the model, which now comes before and creates the real world. Baudrillard explains, "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory."
When it comes to our postmodern simulacra, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.” Baudrillard isn’t just suggesting postmodernism is fake, in order to be artificial you have to push back against something real. We have lost the ability to make the distinction between what is the echo and the source. What is real, and what is fake.
Felluga Dino further clarifies this point, that there are “three orders of simulacra: in the first order of simulacra, associates with the pre-modern period, the image is a clear counterfeit of the real; the image is recognized as just an illusion, a place marker for the real.” In the second order of simulacra, Baudrillard associates the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century with the distinctions between the image and the representation beginning to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies. Such production misrepresents and masks an underlying reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening to replace it (e.g., in photography or ideology); however, there is still a belief that, through critique or effective political action, one can still access the hidden fact of the real. In the third order of simulacra, associated with the postmodern age, we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum.”
When we look to origins, imagine for a moment such a complex structure as the machine of thought. That thought would remove one of its creatures from the cycle of obedience—with billions of invisible strands covering the foundational floor of consciousness. Consciousness is now simultaneously exchanged with the omnipotent stratum of the natural world in which mankind seeks refuge. We are all witnesses to our finite experience, but the engine within the matrix of nature drives the mind to reconcile the body with its ultimate decay. Only consciousness and its labyrinth render mankind in eased illusions. But if we are tethered to the machine, we can be untethered to the illusion of the machine. Those that, in a blink of nocturnal morse code, listen and want to know why the first ape saw himself. It's fathomable our innate resilience drove mankind to reach for consciousness—did so like a hand piercing out of the depths of a great slumber to touch the light of consciousness at the end of the abyss—the abyss of the great primordial soup that visits us in our dreams.
When one soul returns, another soul awakens into a new life, and the consciousness clock gives and takes. A new life, his or her will to power superimposes the theater of consciousness upon the natural physical realm.
Now we're all machined out. But first, the machine was the original machine—the supreme matrix of nature. The second machine was the construct of thought, laying the foundation for social constructs with language. Ancient man's auditory skills from neural circuits made possible belief assembly lines, disseminating culture down generations.
Today, we are externalizing the machine of thought to further depths with the advent and then proliferation of the computer chip. But simulacrum and Its origin was sown in antiquity when man and woman ate the apple in the Garden of Eden, leaving the dream of nature. The Abrahamic archetypal story of Adam and Eve (seen even in pre-biblical myths) attempts to retell a lost origin story of man and woman falling from the hands of nature's innocence. Soon, mankind became both the purveyor of social control and a helpless agent against the torrent that is nature or Godhead.
We are Human Kind. We are disobedient creatures that both touch the divine-knowing and are eluded by the supra-animal force coursing through our DNA. While we've come a long way from the birth of Mind, removing ourselves from nature, our aboriginal spirit through the birth of awareness, then civilization, we are ever further along this ongoing separation through technology—a focus of intellect—a product of consciousness.
The original problem of self-awareness is meeting a daunting new challenge, as technology occupies the substrate of original consciousness structures. The substrate through which digital structures are rapidly built is being built upon by the unseeable structure of thought. To understand this, we must enter the abyss within like I did all too many times before in a city that engulfs you into madness. I clawed my way into higher consciousness, no longer a slave to programming or my base needs. It required a journey into the labyrinth, where I had to conquer The Guardian Of Thought to attain the treasure of a free mind. Freedom is thinking outside constructs of our lived experience and from the chaos of influence—which we are doomed to fight or conform to in our Hall Of Mirrors. Sri Ramana Maharshi once said in Reality In Forty Verses, Verse 35, “To discern and abide in the ever-present reality is the true attainment. All other attainments are like powers enjoyed in a dream.”
Technology and mass consumerism in the information age remove us from the natural world outright. The representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum. Only forms of technological-anarchism (naturalism) at heart can disrupt and remove the masses from the all-totalizing reach of advertisement of self as an image or product. The anonymous capture of attention by the Orwellian technologists must be met with brute counter-disruption and divestment. In the age of collective insanity and social contagion, may this book guide you out of the inertia of conformity.
You have read an excerpt of Nadeem Gibran Salaam's forthcoming book a collection of essay's on consciousness that's one part spiritual and psychological data for regeneration, and a punk rock fueled journey from the Lower East Side in 1990's NYC. The book is divided into problems and solutions.
