Thus Spoke Simulacra

A poem and some philosophical musing

We still have visions
We just call them daydreams

We still have souls
We just call them psyches

We still have demons
We just call them bad habits

We still have hope for redemption
It’s just buried in our language

If you watched The Matrix, there was a hollowed out book with a disc in it that Neo gave to Choi near the beginning. That book was one of the major inspirations for the film — Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.

It’s dense, but Borge’s fable from it sums the idea up nicely I think:

Imagine if you made a 1:1 full size map of an empire. Every inch of land is covered in map. Then, people are living on the map instead of on the ground. Eventually the map decays, maybe new parts are refurbished. Someday, by mixture of decay and editing, the “real world” is indistinguishable to the inhabitants from the map.

Language does the same thing. Dashboards used to be things on horse drawn carts that protected the driver from muck thrown up by the horse’s feet. Then it was the word for the interface inside a car. Now it’s the word for an interface on a website…