I have a simple answer: freedom. Consciousness of hyperreality means being aware that our “reality” is a simulations composed of many simulations, themselves fragmenting into other simulations. Knowing this means freedom from whatever particular simulation you’re stuck inside of.
What kind of freedom, though? In Borges’s story “The Secret Miracle” a writer, Jaromir Hladik, “the author of an unfinished verse drama called “The Enemies”, of a Vindication of Eternity, and of an inquiry into the indirect Jewish sources ofJakob Boehme” is condemned to death by a Nazi firing squad. The night before his death, Hladik
“addressed himself to God. If I exist at all, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errata, I exist as the author of The Enemies. In order to bring this drama, which may serve to justify me, to justify You, I need one more year. Grant me that year, You to whom belong the centuries and all time.”
But morning comes and Hladik is lead out to the firing line. The killing is scheduled for 9:00, but it’s a few minutes early (Germans!) so the troops give him a cigarette out of courtesy. Then the firing squad comes, Hladik is told to stand up, and then, the moment before his execution, time stops for everything except Hladik’s thought. At first he thinks he is in hell, frozen in the last moment of his life, but then comes to realize that God has granted his wish. Hladik has a whole year, frozen there before the firing squad, to finish his verse drama.
Our freedom could be this narrow — simply the possibility of tuning into the right simulation and finishing our work before the bullet arrives and ends our mortal existence. But it is still freedom.
And it is a freedom we are always forgetting. I am forgetting this freedom whenever I open Safari in order to get around my own internet blocker installed in Chrome, scroll to drudgereport or new york times or new york post or new york mag and tune into an absolutely unimportant simulation, a simulation that teaches me nothing, that has no point for me at all. And I am forgetting this freedom when I blend with the pains of my Scorpion or my Goat, convince myself that my life is a terrible joke (a repetition, an errata) and feel so shitty that the only escape is sleep.
Are you forgetting this freedom when you tune into those OSINT channels? Is that the work which justifies yourself? Is it really so strange or mindbending that warring states seek to use whatever media available to create favorable impressions of their war? Yes, the media form is distinctive in its speed and reflexivity, but the underlying intention no different than Ottoman fetihnames or Trajan’s Column.
You love beauty already, so I do not need to shake you, simply ask whether watching this simulation of a simulation of violence is the creation you were sent here for. Of course writing about these worlds is, in itself, a step towards the creation and away from the entrapment in them. And writing short stories about addictions to OSINT or encounters between doubting millennials and trans-forming zoomers, or about an effort to try to demonstrate to a substacker why his theories about wokeness are wrong: those are all even closer steps towards that creation.
See you at the omega point,
