Socio/Photo/Video-synthesis

The Matrix was famously inspired in part by the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, who in turn was not particularly inspired by the Wachowskis' movie, prompting this somewhat typical observation:

“The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.”

Anyway, by the mid-90s he had already said so many very prescient things about artificiality/virtuality and the modern media machine.

Some examples...

"All this digital, numeric, electronic equipment is merely incidental to the deep-seated virtualisation of human beings. And if this so grips the collective imagination, that is because we are already — not in some other world, but in this life itself — in a state of socio-, photo and videosynthesis.

"The virtual and the media are our chlorophyllous function.

"If the rate of reality is falling every day, this is because the medium itself has passed into life, has become the ordinary ritual of transparency.

"And if we are able today to produce a clone of a particular famous actor which will be made to act in his place, this is because long ago, without knowing it, he became his own replica or his own clone, before he actually was cloned.

"In denouncing the ghostliness of those technologies - and of the media - one implies that there is somewhere an original form of lived existence."

One little glitch in the Matrix as it currently stands which I have to flag up here is that Grok 2 does not seem able to come up with a passable likeness of Baudrillard, of all people, albeit deceased.

I mean, if he's not wearing those oversized specs and waving a cigarette around, it's not him. 

 

After trying so many times I got locked out, this is the best I could do.

I ended up adding the VR headset, not because it's somehow appropriate, but because it covers the fact that this AI is seemingly incapable of a convincing rendition of this pivotal thinker in the role of technologies of virtual reality in our culture.