Oh heck yes, let's get all Baudrillard's Sign Order Stages. Are we here yet? > Stage 4 is a pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any

Oh heck yes, let's get all Baudrillard's Sign Order Stages. Are we here yet? > Stage 4 is a pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. From the article: > What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any "real life" anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic. Maybe not Full Stage 4 simulacra/hyperreal but it feels like the meaning is left, the signs are starting to blur & become indistinct, are indeed becoming little more than pointers to other signs. Hyperreal mmay be upon us. My hackles briefly came up with what seemed a dig at screens; I was afraid it was going to chalk up all the problems of culture to social media. But it avoided that & fell really really close to my feelings, with the hazy lack of resolution that seems due for a weird wild world spinning on: > It’s the culture available to them that is failing, by no longer being able to connect any of these categories with lived experience or social meaning. Kids, in all their blowzy creativity — the same creativity that invented movements from Romanticism to hippiedom to hip-hop — need more, deserve more. The local world around us have effervesced into far off high flying supply chains, and we are surrounded by whiz-bang fancy tech we absolutely positively can no longer disassemble & understand & figure out (there's always reams of code and trying to see it is a Felony Anti-Circumvention because the devices terms of service can say that now). Rebuilding local meaning seems so hard. This is such a challenge.