There are two aspects of this post worth reviewing: as an experiment in a different mode of discourse, and as a description of the procession of simulacra, a schema originally advanced by Baudrillard.
As an experiment in a diffferent mode of discourse, I think this was a success on its own terms, and a challenge to the idea that we should be looking for the best blog posts rather than the behavior patterns that lead to the best overall discourse.
The development of the concept occurred over email quite naturally without forceful effort. I would have written this post much later, and possibly never, had I held it to the standard of “written specifically as a blog post.” I have many unfinished drafts. emails, tweets, that might have advanced the discourse had I compiled them into rough blog posts like this. The description was sufficiently clear and compelling that others, including my future self, were motivated to elaborate on it later with posts drafted as such.
I and my friends have found this schema—especially as we’ve continued to refine it—a very helpful compression of social reality allowing us to compare different modes of speech and action.
As a description of the procession of simulacra it differs from both Baudrillard’s description, and from the later refinement of the schema among people using it actively to navigate the world. I think that it would be very useful to have a clear description of the updated schema from my circle somewhere to point to, and of some historical interest for this description to clearly describe deviations from Baudrillard’s account. I might get around to trying to draft the former sometime, but the latter seems likely to take more time than I’m willing to spend reading and empathizing with Baudrillard.
Over time it’s become clear that the distinction between stages 1 and 2 is not very interesting compared with the distinction between 1&2, 3, and 4, and a mature naming convention would probably give these more natural names than the numbering we’re using now, but my later attempt to name them was forced and premature.
This post makes a straightforward analytic argument clarifying the relationship between reason and experience. The popularity of this post suggests that the ideas of cultural accumulation of knowledge, and the power of reason, have been politicized into a specious Hegelian opposition to each other. But for the most part neither Baconian science nor mathematics (except for the occasional Ramanujan) works as a human institution except by the accumulation of knowledge over time.
A good follow-up post would connect this to the ways in which modernist ideology poses as the legitimate successor to the European Enlightenment, claiming credit for the output of Enlightenment institutions, and then characterizing its own political success as part of the Enlightenment. Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” might be a good foil.