Welcome to the postmodern present where reality is remixed ‘live’ to CNN theme-muzak. In a world where the real is no longer hip enough, there can be no talk of a future or a past; just an endless procession of simulacra (copies of copies of copies). Postmodern reality is a ghost event, a confused accident victim hooked on TV. Since the silver-screens first began to flicker, contemporary ‘reality’ has become an increasingly manufactured item. Instead of searching for the truth or learning from the past, we now learn from the ultimate fake - Las Vegas. Banality is our crowning glory; a capstone for a global culture so drunk on environmental destruction and impending catastrophe that it’s retreated into plagiarising its own worst commodity forms.

Washed up on psycho-social beach of pop-culture, postmodern reality is as abject and plastic as Barbie and Ken. One of the most striking examples of its brand of deadpan apocalyptic skepticism is to be found in the works of its French theorists, particularly that of Jean Baudrillard. In his book Simulacra and Simulation(1981), Baudrilard paints the ultimate postmodern picture: a social ‘reality’ that no longer exists in the conventional sense, but which has been supplanted by simulacra. Intensified commodification, social alienation and the continued abstractions of capitalist moneygrabbing has, according to Baudrillard, succeeded in creating a synthetic plastic-hassle of fakery. The mass media and other forms of mass cultural production are constantly re-appropriating and re-contextualising familiar cultural symbols and images, serving them up in an endless remix. This ‘simulation’ fundamentally shifts our experience away from ‘reality’ to what Baudrillard terms ‘hyperreality’.  In this scenario the new ‘real’ is simply a third-order copy – a fake ‘reality’ that seems more preferable than the gritty nature of the physical world.

Beginning with the fake fairytale-pastiche of Disneyland in the 1950’s, Baudrillard has mapped the spreading of hyperreality like a black smog across the western world, and increasingly across the rest of the globe. In the hands of Disney and co., the subversive and initiatory world of original folktales have been stripmined and geared for lite consumption. But that’s only one example amongst many … Under the aegis of MacDonald’s golden arches, the merchants of hyperreality have cut-and-pasted a swathe across the imagination of millions.

For Baudrillard and other post-modernists there can no longer be any form of valid protest. They argue that  any form of sub-cultural resistance is immediately colonised, appropriated and remixed by the mass-media. Hip-hop and rap stand as a case in point. Starting  as ghettoised forms of resistance, they soon ended up selling ‘bling’ lifestyles far-removed from the backstreets. Similarly, punk – the ultimate ‘fuck-off’ underclass statement – has become an item for fashion ramps and bored gliterati.

Behind hypereality and consumer fetishishm lies the ever-burgeoning world of technological innovation. The rate at which gadgets are taking over daily tasks has led some to speculate that technology is no longer an extension, but something that we’ve internalised completely. Entire economies, work forces, cultural institutions and definitions of self-hood have been displaced by the speed-culture of the information age, birthing a new world-view of ‘artificial immanence’. According to this position, everything (including our deepest values) is capable of being artificially replicated or simulated. “If truth is what is verifiable, then the truth of contemporary science is not so much the extent of progress achieved as the scale of technical catastrophes occasioned,” writes Paul Virilio. The synthetic reality we inhabit is anything but passive, he speculates; it is disaster personified: a pure and total war happening under a constant state of electronic surveillance. In this war, the self is nothing more than a marketable gimmick - “a matter of digital information … an algorithmic hallucination … a purely mathematical equation dominated by a technological ‘will to nothingness’”.  For some, the abject nature of postmodernity is simply an excuse to stick their heads in the sand and wait for a fabled second coming. Short of cancelling our TV licences and dropping out of the technological mainframe, however, we need to acknowledge the fact that our hyperrealities are tricksters who can no longer be switched-off at will. Erik Davis concludes: “technological constructs have their own increasingly alien and synthetic agendas … Human concerns will only survive and prosper once we have learnt to treat them not as extensions of ourselves (or disposable throwaways) but as unknown constructs with whom we need to make weary pacts.”