Beautiful Simulacra: A Literary Analysis of Roads, Paths, and VR Space Highways
When you look at a t-shirt, a door, a house, or some other familiar object, you’re not seeing an original. You’re looking at a copy of some earlier version. Often a mass-produced copy. A simulacrum.
I’ve been obsessed with this concept ever since reading Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. Consider Disneyland with its “fake” or “make-believe” streets, shops, characters, and amusements. Now think about the streets, shops, etc. of Los Angeles. Is the “real” city so different from the fantasy one? No; they’re both fundamentally built from simulacra—mass-produced structures, franchised businesses, and characters who are essentially caricatures. There’s the bodybuilder with spiked hair, the skinny model with ballooned breasts and lips, the screenwriter in the coffeeshop with the ironic t-shirt.
Is anything in the world really real? Is everything (even love! even the human spirit!) simply—at some level—fake?
If you get sufficiently obsessed with the simulation and simulacra concepts, you’ll likely say “Yes.” I’ve come to hold this position, if for no other reason than that it makes life more fun. More game-like. More magical.
Suddenly, a simple object like a t-shirt is not just a boring item with a practical use. It’s not just a bit of material that fits into well-defined spheres of fashion and commerce. It now also presents itself as a philosophical concept. A simple t-shirt becomes a kind of puzzle—a placeholder for something else, a sign that means something that’s not entirely obvious.
Also, if nearly all of human society is simulation and simulacra, then this opens up possibilities for drawing distinctions between the various layers. The inherent richness of life becomes all the more nuanced, colorful, and literary.
Let’s take a road. A dirt path created by uncalculated foot traffic is fully honest. It’s not a copy of something. It exists on its own terms to suit an organic purpose. It could have been created by humans on their way to a town. Or it could have been created by deer, or some other animal, walking to a stream. Now contrast this with a freeway in LA. Before this freeway was built, roads—starting with dirt paths—went through thousands of years of iterations. First we built for people walking, then horses walking, then cars driving. We developed cement and asphalt to sustain the impact of tires rather than feet. At some point the first modern freeway was invented. This was copied and re-copied the world over. One of these copies ended up—so to speak—in Los Angeles.
This description is a little boring. But it gets interesting when you start to discover the poetry between the various levels, from footpath to freeway. This is described wonderfully by Milan Kundera in his novel Immortality:
Before roads and paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and to enjoy it. What’s more, he no longer saw his own life as a road, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle of life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed.
Road and highway; these are also two different conceptions of beauty. When Paul says that at a particular place in the landscape is beautiful, that means: if you stopped the car at that place, you might see a beautiful fifteenth-century castle surrounded by a park; or a lake reaching far into the distance, with swans floating on its brilliant surface.
In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
In the world of roads and paths, beauty is continuous and constantly changing; it tells us at every step: “Stop!”
Kundera wrote this in 1990. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but 1990 was a pivotal year in the history of roads. An entirely new type of road was just coming into existence: the WorldWideWeb was created by Tim Berners-Lee that year at CERN.
A primary purpose of a modern road is to take you from one place to another. This is exactly what the internet—the Information Superhighway—does as well. Except rather than going from one physical location to another, you go from one digital location to another. A shopping spree is now like teleporting from the clothes racks at Banana Republic to the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble to the bedding section at Pottery Barn—instantly! A conversation in the public square with thousands of attendees is now like telepathy, where your thoughts are injected directly into the minds of anyone who stumbles across your social media feeds.
We’re just cracking the surface of all the new types of roads that will develop in the digital realm. From simulated cobblestone streets in a metaverse village to space wormholes in virtual reality games.
Unlike the streets of LA, we immediately recognize these digital spaces to be fake. The trick is to realize that it’s simulation and simulacra all the way down. With beautify and meaning waiting to be drawn out at every level. Like a puzzle. Like magic.