Hyperreality Quotes

“But where will this mania for entertainment end? What will people do when they get tired of television? When they get tired of movies? We already know the answer—they go into participatory activities: sports, theme parks, amusement rides, roller coasters. Structured fun, planned thrills. And what will they do when they tire of theme parks and planned thrills? Sooner or later, the artifice becomes too noticeable. They begin to realize that an amusement park is really a kind of jail, in which you pay to be an inmate.
‘This artifice will drive them to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that exists for its own sake and assumes its own shape. But of course, nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume its own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic.”
― Michael Crichton, Timeline

“People are obsessed with spectacle. We live in the society of the spectacle. People are addicted to the spectacular. They want bigger and better spectacles. They need more and more to keep them stimulated. They crave entertainment. They crave more powerful simulations, more breathtaking special effects, more everything. No one wants POR – plain old reality. Simulation – hyperreality – the simulacrum – these are what the people desire. We all live in Disneyland now – an utter fantasy world. Our true God is Mickey Mouse. At least he’s a lot nicer than Yahweh.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Hypersex

“Reagan’s easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.”
― Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology

“You are the ultimate reality, change the perspective and your life becomes a mirage. Examine a DNA molecule through an electron microscope, or observe Earth from orbit, or drop LSD for inner space psychedelica, and you’ll ascertain equally valid layers of hyperreality accessible to us modern humans. These 'layers of truth' would seem very weird to a prehistoric caveman, and levels of hyperreality are going to turn out far stranger than our wildest imaginings.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“This is not a drill. This is your life. Stop being what you have been. Become what you were meant to be. See the Light. Join the Hyperboreans. Become a HyperHuman. Only the highest, only the noblest, only the most courageous are called. A new dawn is coming... the birth of Hyperreason. It’s time to enter Hyperreality.”
― Joe Dixon, Why God Should Go to Hell: How God Is Outside the Moral Order

“Capitalism isn’t merely amoral, it is actively immoral, and it has to conceal its immortality via the simulation of morality. Morality is not part of capitalism. Capitalism is all about serving the self-interest of the individual, and there’s nothing moral about that unless, like Ayn Rand, you insanely proclaim, “Selfishness is virtuous.” Morality is always external to capitalism, something alien to capitalism. Capitalism addresses morality through simulation. It even reifies morality and turns it into commodities. The Vatican sells religious trinkets to the credulous masses. Evangelical Christianity in America is a vast money-making machine. Disneyland and Hollywood simulate a moral order where the good are rewarded and the wicked punished (the opposite of what actually happens in capitalism).”
― Mark Romel, Unreal City: The Strange Disappearance of Reality

“Meatspace and the internet were almost completely separate things, and now its mutated into this horrifying semi-permanent hyperreality.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“More real than reality itself’ is, therefore, Baudrillard’s favourite definition of hyperreality.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“A second way of interpreting Baudrillard’s hyperreality can therefore be found in his critique of the sign where consumer society, in its unstoppable process of deterritorialization, reduces objects to signs and the latter to empty signifiers. Hyperreality can eventually be understood as the pathway leading from a condition where the sign bears some semblance to reality to one where the sign becomes self-referential.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“The radical illusion of the world cannot be dispelled. The illusion of dispelling it is the secondary illusion of the disavowal and transformation of the world. But perhaps, in going to its extreme, that movement gets caught up in its own game and ends up wiping out its own traces, leaving the field free for misappropriation, imperfection, the original crime? Perhaps there is a ruse of the world, just as there is a ruse of history, and rationality and perfection in general might merely be implementing its irrational decree? Sciences and technologies would then merely be an immense, ironic diversion on the horizon of its disappearance.

What within truth is merely truth falls foul of illusion. What within truth exceeds truth is of the order of a higher illusion. Only what exceeds reality can go beyond the illusion of reality.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“The hierarchical structure of conscious systems, I maintain, is a collection of subjects not an amalgamation of objects. In the space of possible minds, entangled minds far separated as actors in a virtual space-time have no true spatio-temporal separation in the computational realm which, just like our world, exhibits non-locality, discontinuity and quantum network non-linearity. The coming Technological Singularity could unravel one of the deepest mysteries of fractal hyperreality: consciousness alternating from pluralities to singularities and from singularities back to pluralities.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“Digital Pantheism seems to offer the highest perspective on hyperreality: You are God exploring oneself within this vast experiential matrix.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality

“The simulated perfection that surrounds us is mediated by screens. On every screen we look at it, perfection stares out at us. Screens are everywhere. We are always staring at screens. Cinema screens, TV screens, iPhone screens, computer screens… Screens are omnipresent in our lives. And they are the delivery mechanisms of perfect images of perfect lives. Celebrities, the nobility and the super rich are those with the perfect lives we so envy. They rule the screens.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Hypersex

“What is “virtual reality”? It’s where people HIDE from real reality. What is the spectacular society? It’s where people watch other people having the spectacular life of which they dream. Why don’t they try to make it happen FOR REAL? There’s no high higher than REAL highs. There’s nothing better than being a real hero, not a fantasy hero. Ironically, all the spectacular people are a crashing disappointment in real life. They don’t have their scriptwriters with them to give then something clever and witty to say. They don’t have their make-up artists with them or the airbrushers or digital image enhancers that make them look so good on screen.”
― Adam Weishaupt, The Revolt of the Spectacular Society

“Events specially staged to demonstrate the reality of that which doesn’t exist stand out in the particular detail in which they are described. No one really knows, for example, whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were ever actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality. [...] In this sense, the ideology was accurate—it was describing itself. And any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist—it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact,” as in that American paragon of hyperreality, Disneyland, where reality itself is designed as a “land of imagination.”
― Mikhail Epstein, After the Future

“But the die is not cast, since, though the real is growing as a result of a breaking of the symbolic pact between beings and things, that break gives rise, in its turn, to a tenacious resistance, the rejection of an objective world, a separate world.
Deep down, no one desires this objective face-to-face relation, even in the privileged role of subject.
What binds us to the real is a contract of reality. That is to say, a formal awareness of the rights and duties attaching to reality. But what we long for is a complicity and dual relation with beings and things - a pact, not a contract. Hence the temptation to condemn this contract - along with the social contract that ensues from it.
Against the moral contract that binds us to reality we must set a pact of intelligence and lucidity.
Having said this, on the verge of this dramatic changeover, we may still ask the question:
Is the end of history still a historical fact?
Is the disappearance of reality still a real fact?
No, it is an accomplished fact and, in the face of accomplished facts, it is not objectivity, but defiance that is in order.
We must defy reality as we must defy any accomplished fact.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“[...]The same thing always happened to him: his indignation, which was torturous, came afterwards when he was alone, when he couldn’t fight with anybody but himself. Always the same concatenation between time and blunders. A civilized person like him couldn’t lament not having engaged in a knockdown-drag-out, but there remained a question about whether he was a Real Man or a scurrying rat. He was two blocks away from his house. He looked at the trees, the large banana trees along José Bonifacio Street, and it occurred to him that they were machines designed to crush the world until the atoms were released. That’s how he felt, and this was the natural effect of theater. Who said that lies lead to the truth, that fiction flows into reality? Theater’s misfortune was this definitive and irreversible dissolution. That was also its gravity, above and beyond the iridescent lightness of fiction.”
― César Aira, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

“The world has become a planetary Nozick Experience Machine, mediated by the ubiquitous smartphone. Everyone is plugged in, desperate for their pleasure fix, for their likes, their approvals. They have become addicted to hyperreality, yet hyperreality is soulless. It can’t satisfy exactly because it lacks, well, reality. You have been told you can have it all, you can have the perfect life. You can’t. However, you can be presented with images and experiences as if you had achieved it all. But you haven’t. You have to buy into the fantasy, but deep down there’s something missing. What is missing is you. You yourself have become hyperreal, which means you have lost the real you, and nothing can make up for the loss of yourself. You have become fixed to your persona, your mask, and now there is nothing beneath the mask. When you take the mask off at the end of an exhausting day of faking it, there’s no real face underneath, just a faked face, or a blank space. We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”
― Mark Romel, The Seer of Unreality: The Hyperreality Wars

“She kissed him quick but deep with her tongue; bubbling over, she pulled away from his mouth, still in an arm-on-shoulders mutual embrace, said: 'Jack, Jack I watched you on television, I mean really watched you, really saw for the very first time what you were doing. You were magnificent, you were everything I always knew you would be the first day I met you in Berkeley, but better — better than anything I could've imagined—because then I was a girl, and you were a boy, and today you were a man, and I... Well, maybe at the advanced age of thirty-five I'm leaving adolescence and I'm ready to try loving you the way a woman should love a man.'
'That's... uh... groovy,' he said, and now she thrilled even at the way he was preoccupied, the old Berkeley distant-focus preoccupation, thinking through her, above her, warm exciting man-thoughts enveloping her in him were the moments she had always loved him most.
'Groovy, and I dig what you're saying — I mean about us. But the show... look, Sara, there are things I've got to tell you. I mean, don't think I'm back in the silly old Baby Bolshevik bag. I suppose it looked that way to a lot of people, and there were moments when I... but I don't do things without a reason, and there are things going on that—'
'I know, Jack,' she said. 'You don't even have to tell me. It stands out all over you. You're involved in something big, something important, the kind of thing you were always meant to do. Something real like you used to — '
'It's not what you think, not what anyone thinks,' he muttered, brows furrowed at some hidden contrapuntal train of thought. 'I don't even know the whole story myself. But I feel something, can smell it... something so big, so... I'm afraid to even think about it until I —”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“State wants the alleged techniques, presumably.”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” Norman said. “I wonder if we do want them.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s a bit difficult to explain… Look, have you been following television at all since you came home?”
“Occasionally, but since the Yatakang news broke I’ve been much too busy to catch more than an occasional news bulletin.”
“So have I, but—well, I guess I’m more familiar with the way trends get started here nowadays, so I can extrapolate from the couple or three programmes I have had time for.” Norman’s gaze moved over Elihu’s head to the far corner of the room.
“Engrelay Satelserv blankets most of Africa, doesn’t it?”
“The whole continent, I’d say. There are English-speaking people in every country on Earth nowadays, except possibly for China.”
“So you’re acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere?”
“Yes, of course—these two who always appear in station identification slots, doing exotic and romantic things.”
“Did you have a personalised set at any time, with your own identity matted into the Everywhere image?”
“Lord, no! It costs—what? About five thousand bucks, isn’t it?”
“About that. I haven’t got one either; the basic fee is for couple service, and being a bachelor I’ve never bothered. I just have the standard brownnose identity on my set.” He hesitated. “And—to be absolutely frank—a Scandahoovian one for the shiggy half of the pair. But I’ve watched friends’ sets plenty of times where they had the full service, and I tell you it’s eerie.
There’s something absolutely unique and indescribable about seeing your own face and hearing your own voice, matted into the basic signal. There you are wearing clothes you’ve never owned, doing things you’ve never done in places you’ve never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world. You catch? We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.”
“I can well understand that,” Elihu nodded. “And of course I’ve seen this on other people’s sets too. Also I agree entirely about what we regard as real. But I thought we were talking about the Yatakangi claim?”
“I still am,” Norman said. “Do you have a homimage attachment on your set? No, obviously not. I do. This does the same thing except with your environment; when they—let’s see… Ah yes! When they put up something like the splitscreen cuts they use to introduce SCANALYZER, one of the cuts is always what they call the ‘digging’ cut, and shows Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sitting in your home wearing your faces watching the same programme you’re about to watch. You know this one?”
“I don’t think they have this service in Africa yet,” Elihu said. “I know the bit you mean, but it always shows a sort of idealised dream-home full of luxy gadgetry.”
“That used to be what they did here,” Norman said. “Only nowadays practically every American home is full of luxy gadgetry. You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?”
Elihu chuckled, then grew grave. “That’s too nearly literal to be funny,” he said.
“Prophet’s beard, it certainly is! I found time to look over some of Chad’s books after Guinevere’s party, and… Well, having met him I was inclined to think he was a conceited blowhard, but now I think he’s entitled to every scrap of vanity he likes to put on.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“Donald was stunned. They must be making a sensaysh out of it, to sacrifice so much time from even their ten-minute condensed-news cycle!
His Mark II confidence evaporated. Euphoric from his recent eptification, he had thought he was a new person, immeasurably better equipped to affect the world. But the implications of that expensive plug stabbed deep into his mind. If State were willing to go to these lengths to maintain his cover identity, that meant he was only the visible tip of a scheme involving perhaps thousands of people. State just didn’t issue fiats to a powerful corporation like English Language Relay Satellite Service without good reason.
Meaningless phrases drifted up, dissociated, and presented themselves to his awareness, all seeming to have relevance to his situation and yet not cohering.
My name is Legion.
I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.
The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.
Say can you look into the seeds of time?
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Struggling to make sense of these fragments, he finally arrived at what his subconscious might be trying to convey.
The prize, these days, is not in finding a beautiful mistress. It’s in having presentable prodgies. Helen the unattainable is in the womb, and every mother dreams of bearing her. Now her whereabouts is known. She lives in Yatakang and I’ve been sent in search of her, ordered to bring her back or say her beauty is a lie—if necessary to make it a lie, with vitriol. Odysseus the cunning lurked inside the belly of the horse and the Trojans breached the wall and took it in while Laocoön and his sons were killed by snakes. A snake is cramped around my forehead and if it squeezes any tighter it will crack my skull.
When the purser next passed, he said, “Get me something for a headache, will you?”
He knew that was the right medicine to ask for, yet it also seemed he should have asked for a cure for bellyache, because everything was confused: the men in the belly of the wooden horse waiting to be born and wreak destruction, and the pain of parturition, and Athena was born of the head of Zeus, and Time ate his children, as though he were not only in the wooden horse of the express but was it about to deliver the city to its enemy and its enemy to the city, a spiralling wild-rose branch of pain with every thorn a spiky image pricking him into other times and other places.
Ahead, the walls. Approaching them, the helpless stupid Odysseus of the twenty-first century, who must also be Odin blind in one eye so as not to let his right hand know what his left was doing. Odinzeus, wielder of thunderbolts, how could he aim correctly without parallax? “No individual has the whole picture, or even enough of it to make trustworthy judgments on his own initiative.” Shalmaneser, master of infinite knowledge, lead me through the valley of the shadow of death and I shall fear no evil…
The purser brought a white capsule and he gulped it down.
But the headache was only a symptom, and could be fixed.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“Superman – Moses in a costume, with his underpants on the outside. Captain America – the poster boy of the mad American patriot. Wonder Woman wore a bathing suit bearing the American flag. She was as beautiful as Aphrodite, as wise as Athena, as strong as Hercules, and as swift and as great a warrior as Diana. Superheroes fought enemy spies at home. They battled reds under the beds. America is a mythological country in the modern world. By surrounding itself with modern myths, it has made itself less and less real. America simulates being a real country via its modern myths, but only succeeds in become phonier.”
― David Sinclair, Superheroes and Presidents: How Absurd Stories Have Poisoned the American Mind

“We live in strange times, being bombarded with information 24/7, having a hard time to distinguish between reality and hyperreality, between what is fake and what is real. I guess having strange dreams might be the most normal thing we can experience nowadays. As paradoxically as that sounds”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“Scratch the surface and what do you get?" asked Way Bandy, the two-thousand-dollars-a-day make up artist who "designed" Nancy's face. "More surface.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Una sociedad en la que los hombres desaparezcan repentinamente pero no se sepa que han muerto; no existe la muerte, no hay ninguna palabra para designarla, y ellos están contentos. PDH”
― Elias Canetti, Il libro contro la morte