Streaming into Oblivion: The Rise of Hyperreality
Over the past month, a truly bizarre scene played out across the American political landscape. A question that should have a reasonably direct answer, “is the Senior Senator from Kentucky alive or not?” has proven remarkably difficult to answer. While there are speculative partisan motives surrounding the reasons for this vagueness, they are somewhat less interesting than the broader cultural phenomenon that has delivered us Schrodinger’s Senator.
After weeks of silence, a chorus of Republican politicians each reported talking to Senator McConnell for twenty minutes, a claim that was quickly turned into a social media trope. Days later, the Senator’s office released a statement with an accompanying photo, proof of life as it were. Instead of creating any degree of assurance, the photo sparked further speculation, claims the image itself was AI generated, and yet another round of memes. Still no public appearance from Senator McConnell, but that is somehow unimportant.
This entire series of events is a manifestation of the ever-intensifying experience of hyperreality. The concept, initially proposed by Jean Baudrillard, describes a state where there is a convergence between the real and the unreal to the degree that distinguishing or separating them is effectively impossible. In the early 1980s, this concept was something of a hard sell, tied up as it was with social theory and the semantics of meaning. Now, hyperreality is one of the clearest modes of understanding the broader socio-cultural landscape and the channels through which we receive information and create meaning.
It would be easy to make this about AI, and artificial intelligence is certainly part of it, but it is a small part; a late arrival after the fourth wall has already been broken. Any interaction that is technologically mediated - phone calls, job interviews, conversations with banks or insurance companies or healthcare providers - should now be regarded with a modicum of suspicion. Of course, outsourcing these types of functions isn’t new but the experience of interacting with a simulated human is distinctly different from working through a phone tree. And no one ever thought an actual person was asking them to press one.
These interactions are also small things, but their impact is cumulative and compounded by the myriad other experiences where the lines separating the real from the unreal have increasingly blurred. Researchers have found a proliferation of “ghost jobs” on LinkedIn, advertisements that look like legitimate job opportunities yet exist only to collect data. An increasing number of both teenagers and adults are developing romantic relationships with AI partners, simulating the intimacy and connection of interpersonal relationships while also complicating real-world relationships. Within scientific literature, LLMs have been “hallucinating” (a polite term for wholesale fabrication) citations which appear to be authentic and often attributed to real researchers, that simply do not exist. A similar problem has begun to emerge within legal research as well, with references to nonexistent or misinterpreted case law. With the exception of ghost jobs, these things don’t exist specifically to deceive, but instead represent the slippage between experienced and approximated realities.
Of course, the hyperreal has been a constant element of contemporary society, but the tools that allow for the seamless, uninterrupted merging of perceived realities are relatively new. Professional wrestling is one of the clearest examples of the proto-hyperreal. With narratives and personalities strictly presented as authentic (kayfabe in the parlance of the industry), professional wrestling presented an alternate reality that tracks just closely enough to the viewer’s lived experiences to land within the realm of believability. Yet, there was always the acknowledgement of performance; iced tea in the Jack Daniels bottle.
The advent of reality television blurred these lines further, dispensing with the nod to performance and leaning into the notion that what was being presented was reflective of someone’s reality. The recursive pipeline of reality television both creating and recruiting from social media influencers finalizes the collapsing of boundaries, creating a set of social environments and a cast of people who exist and are consumed as hyperreal. The fact that the concept of “parasocial relationships” has entered into mainstream discourse is further evidence of the fusing of realities supported via media-mediated relationships.
Individual experiences across all aspects of daily life, from social interaction, consumer engagement, or professional development, are collapsing around the hyperreal and the tools we’ve historically used to create meaning and understand the world are coming up short. The challenge is how to communicate meaning and value is this evolving landscape. It also demonstrates the importance of the tangible. Indeed, the notion of an analogue resurgence suggests that people are looking for things that are anchored to a physical form and often unchangeable. In the world of the hyperreal, the most valuable experiences and products will be those that deliver something tactile, observable, and undeniably "real.”