I think it’s an unnecessarily confusing term in general. I think it makes sense when you’re specifically thinking of each level as a simulacrum of the one before, but the 2x2 grid version doesn’t feel that way to me – level 3 doesn’t (necessarily) feel like a distorted or reinforced version of level 2.
I think it’s useful to avoid unnecessary dependencies in jargon. The underlying concept here is something I’d want to be able to easily bring up in academic-twitter or whatever, and I don’t think there’s anything that complicated about it that requires explaining a whole background model, but I think framing it terms of simulacrum levels is opaque in a way that makes you open the box to understand how things connect.
I think mainstream intellectual circles basically understand some variation of “communication-as-politics/affiliation” (even if they mostly accuse other people of it most of the time), and the only really new thing the simulacrum frame adds in most conversations is that sometimes people are lying about affiliation vs doing so “honestly.”
I do still think the concept of simulacrum levels is useful, independent of the 2x2 grid, when you’re considering a domain where you specifically expect there to be a multiple-level-of-simulacrum mechanism for what’s going on, and it’s relevant to the discussion. Like, I ended up kinda re-deriving them in Recursive Middle Manager Hell, in a way that gave me more appreciation for the The Four Children of the Seder as the Simulacra Levels.
Huh, why? This is basically my summary of “Simulacrum levels” and matches how I’ve seen other people use those terms.
I think it’s an unnecessarily confusing term in general. I think it makes sense when you’re specifically thinking of each level as a simulacrum of the one before, but the 2x2 grid version doesn’t feel that way to me – level 3 doesn’t (necessarily) feel like a distorted or reinforced version of level 2.
I think it’s useful to avoid unnecessary dependencies in jargon. The underlying concept here is something I’d want to be able to easily bring up in academic-twitter or whatever, and I don’t think there’s anything that complicated about it that requires explaining a whole background model, but I think framing it terms of simulacrum levels is opaque in a way that makes you open the box to understand how things connect.
I think mainstream intellectual circles basically understand some variation of “communication-as-politics/affiliation” (even if they mostly accuse other people of it most of the time), and the only really new thing the simulacrum frame adds in most conversations is that sometimes people are lying about affiliation vs doing so “honestly.”
I do still think the concept of simulacrum levels is useful, independent of the 2x2 grid, when you’re considering a domain where you specifically expect there to be a multiple-level-of-simulacrum mechanism for what’s going on, and it’s relevant to the discussion. Like, I ended up kinda re-deriving them in Recursive Middle Manager Hell, in a way that gave me more appreciation for the The Four Children of the Seder as the Simulacra Levels.