Chambers of the past and future. The simulated worlds of Baudrillard, Cyberpunk and the Metaverse – BAUDRILLARD NOW
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POSTMODERN THEORY, SOCIOLOGY
Chambers of the past and future.
The simulated worlds of
Baudrillard, Cyberpunk and the
Metaverse
BAUDRILLARD NOW
APRIL 22, 2023
Chambers of the past and future. The simulated worlds of
Baudrillard, Cyberpunk and the Metaverse
Prof. Dr. Jiré Emine Gözen
The renaming of Facebook to Meta at the end of 2021 has
sparked and updated discussions about the potential for a
future where humanity increasingly operates, works, plays,
and lives within the metaverse. In this article, I aim to
illustrate through a speci!c example that the conception of
virtual worlds, as represented by the metaverse, is an
amalgamation of theoretical considerations and topoi from
Jean Baudrillard’s work with cyberpunk literature.
Cyberpunk authors have used Baudrillard’s theoretical
concepts to shape virtual worlds, which have then been
perpetuated and expanded upon in both popular culture and
academic discourse. These ideas have had a profound impact
on societal visions of future virtual worlds, shaping their
semantics and signi!cance.
Baudrillard’s ideas were widely regarded as the vanguard of
subversive contemporary social sciences in the discourse on
postmodernism. His views on the drastic transformation of
modern society were embraced by both academic circles and
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the artistic avant-garde and gained him the reputation of a
postmodern prophet. Of particular interest were Baudrillard’s
writing strategies, which blend aesthetics and materials from
diverse !elds, resulting in texts that vacillate between literary
and scienti!c styles, eroding the boundaries between theory
and !ction. But despite Baudrillard’s theoretical and
discursive subversion, some critics in the 1980s began to
argue that his works lacked new ideas since the 1970s. They
claimed that the French philosopher had been recycling his
previous ideas rather than genuinely developing his concepts.
Douglas Kellner notes in this regard:
“For some years, Baudrillard was cutting-edge, high-tech
social theorist, the most stimulating and provocative
contemporary thinker. But in the early 1980s, Baudrillard
ceased producing the stunning analyses of the new
postmodern scene that won such attention in the previous
decade. Burnt out and terminally cynical, Baudrillard has
instead churned out a number of mediocre replays of his
previous ideas […] Baudrillard’s travelogues, notebooks,
theoretical simulations, and occasional pieces fell
dramatically below the level of his 1970s work, and it
appeared to many that Baudrillard himself had become boring
and irrelevant, the ultimative sin for a supposedly avant-garde
postmodern theorist.” (Kellner 1995, 298)
It is noteworthy, that during the exact period when
Baudrillard’s creativity seemingly began to decline, the !rst
works of cyberpunk science !ction appeared. Whereas my
discussion of cyberpunk literature here pertains to a
particular corpus of works authored by a group of writers
who assembled in Austin, Texas in the late 1970s. This
literature represented a revolution in science !ction writing,
led by authors such as Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Greg
Bear, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and Pat
Cadigan. The group criticized the science !ction of their time
in the fanzine Cheap Truth and in the preface of the
cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades, which could be seen as
the cyberpunk manifesto – the discursive foundation for a
newly emerging movement. Similar to Baudrillard, the
authors of cyberpunk literature traversed the previously
separated domains of philosophy, social sciences, literature,
natural sciences, and media culture, attempting to capture the
rapid changes of their present.
At the time, many critics regarded the works of Gibson,
Sterling, Cadigan, Shirley, Bear, and Shiner as some of the
most remarkable and intriguing engagements with
contemporary media culture. As I argued before, Cyberpunk
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literature should even be regarded as an important
companion to media theories, both as a means of artistic
expression and as a method of knowledge production,
including its theorization (Gözen 2012). So it is not surprising
that this new type of science !ction was immediately declared
a prominent literary trend of the present, both in academic
and artistic circles, and was subsequently recognized as
avant-garde and innovation in the !eld of speculative visions.
According to Douglas Kellner, “these texts produce one of the
most impressive bodies of recent writing on the fate of
hypertechnological society since Baudrillard’s key texts of the
1970s” (Kellner 1995, 298). Timothy Leary, on the other hand,
assigns a philosophical signi!cance to the texts of cyberpunk
writers that is comparable to the importance Mann, Tolstoy,
and Melville held for the industrial age (Leary 1996, 56). Brian
McHale, who has explored the mutual in#uence of
postmodern literature, science !ction texts, and
poststructuralist theorizing, also positions cyberpunk
literature prominently within this framework (McHale 1992,
244f).
It is especially notable that in cyberpunk literature many
motifs and themes resonate with Baudrillard’s work. A
Baudrillard-oriented reading of cyberpunk literature reveals
that the principal categories of hyperreality, simulation, and
implosion are not only evident in numerous narratives but are
also omnipresent as symbolic representations. Authors such
as Gibson, Maddox, and Bear not only incorporated
Baudrillard’s ideas into their stories but also expanded and
developed them. It is worth noting that these interpretations
and extensions of Baudrillard’s ideas were recognized by
media theory and in#uenced it. Baudrillard views such
interaction as symptomatic of a postmodern discourse, in
which previously distinct cultural and societal phenomena
implode and create something new (Kellner 1995, 301). In this
VOLUME 4. ISSUE 1
regard, Scott Bukatman, a !lm and media scholar, emphasizes
that:
“And so Baudrillard, the students of chaos, the cyberpunks,
and others have constructed a master-narrative, one
grounded in the centrality of human intention and perception,
which has the culmulative e$ect of inaugurating a new
subject capable of inhabiting the bewildering and
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disembodied space of the electronic environment – the virtual
subject.” (Bukatman 1993, 118)
Conspiracy Thinking: Towards an
Both Baudrillard and cyberpunk authors depict societies
Ambiguous Theory of
where all types of boundaries have collapsed, including those
Photography
between di$erent cultures, biology, technology, and
The Supreme Illusion of Real
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Chambers of the past and future. The simulated worlds of Baudrillard, Cyberpunk and the Metaverse – BAUDRILLARD NOW
Time as the Limit of All
particularly between reality and simulation. New technologies
Accelerations
have dramatically transformed the body and human
experience, with the perception of reality now permanently
Baudrillard’s Spirit of Terrorism:
A Generation Z Perspective interlaced with simulation. Despite Baudrillard’s literary style
and his numerous references to contemporary issues, politics,
One More Spiral in the
and media culture, his descriptions of simulation remain
Simulacrum: Jean Baudrillard’s
largely abstract. Conversely, cyberpunk authors present
Games with Reality
worlds where the human existence is persistently surrounded
byof
simulations. Characters interact with arti!cial
Baudrillard and the Forgetting
Death as a Challenge
intelligences, androids, cyborgs, virtual personalities, and
simulated realities. The portrayed !gures themselves are
Baudrillard’s “The Violence of the
often arti!cial forms of existence, with such depictions
Global” Revisited: Comments and
varying signi!cantly among the di$erent authors.
New Perspectives
this context, an example that stands out is the novel “Eon”
The Violence of the Global byIn
Jean
from 1985 by Greg Bear, wherein an asteroid from a parallel
Baudrillard
universe enters our own and is examined by humans during
the turn of the millennium. The asteroid, which has been
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Baudrillard and McLuhan in t
Social Media Age
Douglas Kellner and Steve
Gennaro
In the social media age, our
interminable digital identities
works of art, and we are artists
equal parts performance,
photography, !lm, composition
and graphic design, we write
ourselves into stories to depict
virtual existence. At the same
time, the “tethered togethernes
(Schroeder, 2018) of the social
media age illustrates how digit
selves are not a collection of
monologues but communal ar
hollowed out, contains several arti!cial chambers that
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represent the abandoned living spaces of a future humanity.
These chambers contain future cities from di$erent epochs,
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demonstrate how simulation has progressively advanced and
ALAN N. SHAPIRO
displaced reality. Through the lens of these chambers, Bear
AMERICA
exempli!es various stages of simulation.
ANDREW MCLAVERTY-ROBINSON
In one of the !nal chambers, Bear depicts a society where
digitalized minds exist within a computer called “City
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Memory”. Nonetheless, people still have the option to live
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beyond the city’s memory. The external environment, outside
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of the virtuality of the city computer, is a featureless space
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onto which landscapes, homes, objects, and weather
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conditions are projected. To navigate within this simulated
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space beyond the computer simulation, individuals create
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bodies that often bear little resemblance to a natural human
ILLUSION
form. Should any harm come to this body, the brain contained
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and the changing decor and architecture of the cities
within it is equipped with an implant that records all
experiences and memories. Thus, in Bear’s novel, virtual
reality constitutes the absolute simulation of a bodiless and
disembodied present, which remains unbreakable even with
the intentional creation of a material body. The convergence
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of the future, the perfect simulacrum. The #awless simulation
of digital and future humans uploaded into a body highlights
that the physical opposition between illusion and truth has
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given way to playing with reality. Bear’s radical interpretation
of Baudrillard’s dictum of self-referential signs demonstrates
that the human, based on digital bits and bytes, has merged
into an in!nite circulation of self-referential signs, becoming a
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model without origin and hence a sign in and of itself.
In one of the earlier future cities, advanced media
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technologies enable the contemporary humans in “Eon” to
immerse themselves in a virtual world that creates a
simulation of the abandoned city and its inhabitants, which is
indistinguishable from reality:
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
“She called up a student’s basic guide to the second chamber
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city.
French thinker, Jean Baudrillard,
is a hard to describe dazzling
In an instant, Alexandria surrounded her. She appeared to be
!gure. Some “classify” him as a
standing on the portico of an apartment in the lower #oors of
sociologist, cultural theorist,
one of the megas, looking down on the busy streets. The
philosopher, scientist,
illusion was perfect—even providing her with a memory of
photographer, prophet or even
what “her” apartment looked like. She could turn her head
“God.” Conversely, some consider
him to be a “philosopher clown”,
and look completely behind her if she wished—indeed, she
or not completely sane, “a political
could walk around, even though she knew she was sitting
idiot … ignorant and cynical” down.
whose writings are too obscure;
She
spent half an hour in Alexandria, observing the clothes
so many men, so many minds.
Yet,
don’t we see this hardwired the people wore, their faces, their hair styles and expressions
inescapable repetition in the and ways of moving.” (Bear 1985, 275)
history of humanity, as the
world’s greatest minds have The degree of overlap between Greg Bear’s 1985 descriptions
always been controversial forand
thethe 2022 META advertising campaign video “Education in
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masses? It’s a rhetorical question.
the Metaverse” is remarkable.
Jean Baudrillard authored more
than 60 books that stirred and
Education in the metaverse
shook the world, and still do
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today, by revealing the nature of
modern-day “existence”, which is
immersed and overwhelmed by
peoples’ delusion,
misconceptions, and total
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delirium. His writings cover
practically every signi!cant issue,
from reality, consumerism,
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political intricacies, sexuality and
history, to the future’s long term
prognosis and human beings as
The two works not only present similar scenarios, but even
such. Baudrillard was a professor
the physical movements Bear describes appear to have been
at the Paris X Nanterre University
and later at the European
incorporated into the clip. Both depictions of simulation-
Graduate School.
based virtual worlds reveal a high degree of implosion in the
sense of Baudrillard, as space and time collapse. As the
description in Bears text, the footage presented in the clip
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portrays a future that has not yet occurred in the recipient’s
reality, and may never do so, yet it insists on presenting it as
past history. Consequently, it constitutes both a genuine
model and an illusion, in which truth vanishes behind
simulation. The media-mediated reality overlays sensory
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experiences perfectly, as illustrated by the description of the
divergent experiences of real and simulated space and body.
It is evident that the simulated worlds advertised by META,
aimed at their practical implementation, have strong links to
the worlds of cyberpunk literature that rely on Baudrillard’s
theories. This ultimately suggests that the incorporation,
re!nement, and theoretical exploration of Jean Baudrillard’s
ideas through cyberpunk literature continue to shape current
conceptions and designs of technologies, which we anticipate
will in#uence our future.
References
Bear, Greg. Eon. Castell Group vista edition, 1998 (!rst
published 1985)
Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in
Postmodern Science Fiction. Duke University Press, 1993
Gözen, Jiré Emine. Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Literarische
Fiktionen und Medientheorie. Transcript, 2012
Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture. Cultural Studies, Identity and
Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern. Routledge,
1995
Leary, Timothy. Quark of the Decade. In: Mondo 2000 #7,
1996, S. 53-56
McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge, 1992
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