The lights are pulsing; the music reverberates off every building, every body that surrounds you. And these bodies, exuding the commotion of a party atmosphere and crowding your space in every which way, seem to come out of nowhere and disappear back into nowhere. You shuffle your way in the tide towards your destination – one minute you’re in Paris, the next you’re in New York. How about the circus? Or just a Ferris wheel ride? And right when you begin to tire, a Venetian gondola pulls up and offers you a relaxing, unforgettable experience onboard. You get in without checking the price, because why not? After all, this is Las Vegas, baby.
We often marvel at the interconnectedness between places and culture today, and it’s true: at no other time in history has there ever been greater inter-cultural, inter-national understanding. Yet what comes to us are almost always the most fantastical, most noteworthy aspects of foreign lands and cultures, and increasingly, this information comes to us in visual forms – stunning mountain landscapes, breathtaking architecture, delectable-looking foods, magnificent costumes – produced neatly in social media reels and posts. Often, we consume the sights without any understanding or even regard for their origins and history.
It’s not hard to see why a place like Las Vegas would want to offer the kind of make-belief that lets visitors waltz from one representation of a faraway attraction to another, all within the short span of a few miles. It’s a physical reproduction highlight reel of the world wrapped in a convenient, familiar package of modern Americana.
We have now reached a point where the reference is so sanitized of its origins that images begin to stand in place of life itself. Get your ticket and ascend the Las Vegas “Eiffel Tower” without having to see the actual steel construction, take in the unmistakably Parisian scents and noise, and learn of the challenges faced by the workers frantically preparing for a cutting-edge World’s Fair in 1889 Paris. Or better yet, sit in your own living room and be transported to a simulation of the “Eiffel Tower” just by donning a VR headset. It’s like you’ve been there. And if you eventually do go to the real-life version, the wonder of the monument becomes diminished, because it’s like you’ve been there before.
Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra makes a disturbing claim: modern images no longer represent reality, but represent artificial images of reality. Like a jumbled message at the end of a long game of telephone, modern images are almost unrecognizable from the original message. In this debasing from reality, real meaning is destroyed, in support of the meaning created by the replicated signs that once represented an original. Signs detached from real meaning start to refer to other signs equally detached from real meaning. They circulate independently, referring only to other images, other signs, other simulations, without ever being grounded in reality.
Think back to the Las Vegas vacation and the Venetian Hotel gondola ride you have just boarded. For significantly more money than a ride on the actual gondola in actual Venice, you get to glide along in a climate-controlled, azure-bottomed canal filled with crystal-clear, continuously-filtered water. Underneath the “sky” painted with clouds of Renaissance perfection, you are serenaded by an interminable maze of manicured, sparkling, premium retail establishments. Compare this to the gondola rides that it is based on – among the most popular tourist attractions in Venice, Italy. There are the open elements, the debris floating past on murky waters, the moss and detritus clinging to buildings, and the risk of falling into the canal or the harbor. Yet this is already a far improved, tourist-centric version of the original, thousand-year-old gondola service from a time when Venice was not connected by bridges, from a time when the canals were essentially open sewers inundated with filth and pollution. In this case, the old gondola service is the real, simulated as an image in the tourist-centric version in Venice – the simulation; this is re-simulated as an image of an image by the sanitized version in Las Vegas – the simulacrum.
Baudrillard’s ontological perspective is more unsettling than Debord’s: there is no call to reclaim authenticity, because authenticity itself has become a simulation; there is no return to ritual, because ritual has been abstracted into gesture and metric.
Ironically, the image becomes self-sufficient. What matters is not truth, depth, or provenance, but operational success. Does the image circulate? Does it repeat? Does it attract attention? Does it please?
These days, clicking a “like” button on a social media post of a video of wildlife in distress has somehow become a proxy to “taking action” towards a cause. Each node in this chain – the photographer, the social media poster, the individual button-pressers – each seeks to experience a sense of engagement with what they understand to be the real problem – wildlife suffering and environmental degradation – yet each managing to be acting on different simulations of the problem, without really contributing to the actual relief of distressed wildlife. A million likes mean nothing to a starved polar bear whose habitat is vanishing day by day.
This is not a moral failure. It is a systemic one.
Ancient religious icons pointed beyond itself – to God, to eternity, to moral order. Even when cynically deployed for reasons other than spirituality, it claimed transcendence and conjured long-term belief. The modern icon, on the other hand, points nowhere. It exists to be seen, shared, archived, and replaced.
Thus they fall as quickly as they rise, because the waning of novelty is now obsolescence. Disoriented followers drift through a never-ending parade of manufactured entities, piling onto their phony altars a collective, real human desperation – because the desire to believe persists; perhaps it even grows because the craving no longer gets fulfilled in any real way. It is akin to being ravenously famished and malnourished, but the only available food is a Twinkies buffet. A Twinkie is not fake food. It is food engineered around the signals our bodies evolved to seek, but provides few of the nourishments that humans actually need from food. Likewise, the simulacrum is not a fake image. It is an image engineered around the signals our minds evolved to find meaningful.
Humans are still compelled to feel attachment. We still grieve the fall of idols – from celebrities to politicians; we still organize identity around images – from consumer brands to social media posts; but reverence no longer aspires to permanence. It burns brightly and briefly, only until the next attention-commanding image appears.