This type of article about PKD comes around more and more often these days. What Dick really got his fingernails under was the idea that our subjective reality

This type of article about PKD comes around more and more often these days. What Dick really got his fingernails under was the idea that our subjective reality, our semantic map of the real, has become more real to us than any objective reality. He probes this at many levels, from that of our individual perceptron driving our subjective reality (eg. Dr Bloodmoney, A Scanner Darkly) or even the perceptron of others or another being so overwhelmingly powerful that it drives our reality (eg. Flow my Tears, Our Friends from Frolix 8). He also explores more directly manufactured realities, as in Ubik and The Simulacra, where forces actively set out to deceive, both out of compassion and cruelty - and sometimes just because. Jean Baudrillard formulated much of PKD’s weltanschauung in his Simulacra and Simulation, which is as mind-bending a collection of essays as one is ever likely to read. A particular recurrent topic for both is the idea that “The Empire Never Ended” - that we live in the latter-day Roman Empire, having inherited our fundamental western Judeo-Christian semantic symbol set from the commingling of Roman culture (Mithratic cult, god co-option, etc.) with first century Palestinian culture. Our map of reality is that which was last substantially updated then, and everything we have done since is on the map, rather than the underlying reality. It all gets very gnostic (another favourite theme of PKD’s), but I do think that there’s a fundamental and valid observation that is made and expounded upon about the malleable nature of human reality. In today’s world of ubiquitous hyperreality, sensationalised and manufactured narratives, instantaneous and often wildly speculative coverage of ambiguous events so far removed from us yet seemingly right on our doorstep, this philosophy becomes deeply compelling. That reminds me - Hypernormalisation, an Adam Curtis documentary, provides a light introduction to many of these ideas, if a bit of Baudrillard is a steep start.