Simulacra and Simulation

I read the book in college decades ago. It's very famous and he predicted a lot of stuff about media and culture that has become true in the modern era of Internet / social media / YouTube e-celebs / etc. However, his good ideas are cluttered up by the usual sloppy reasoning of postmodernists. He also has an unfortunate obsession with weaving Marxist far-left politics into everything, which is distracting. (Chomsky has the same problem for me.) The book did…

At the time I read this I mostly understood his themes through the lens of mass production and product/lifestyle marketing, to some degree an extension of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class and conspicuous consumption as class identity. Lately I have begun thinking about this book again particularly in the context of Covid and the 2020 U.S. election, where the pandemic has made apparent the inability of our institutions to serve their functions (e.g. for the CDC to prepare and…