The Orders of Simulacra
I. Brutal Truth: Reality Evolves Through Illusion
Baudrillard maps human civilization into three historical orders of simulacra. These are not time periods, they’re modes of representing reality:
1. First Order (Pre-modern / Renaissance)
Signs are “natural” reflections of reality.
Example: A painting of Christ represents the real Christ. The representation has sacred value.
Reality still matters.
2. Second Order (Industrial Age / Enlightenment)
Signs start to distort reality.
Mass production copies reality endlessly. You get forgeries, replicas, and propaganda.
Think: mechanical reproduction, photography, printing press.
The copy begins to dominate the original.
3. Third Order (Postmodern / Now)
Signs no longer refer to any reality.
They create their own self-referential system. This is hyperreality.
Think:
Disneyland (a fake that presents itself as fake, so we accept the rest of America as real)
Instagram “lifestyles”
Influencers selling identity instead of information
AI simulations that never had a human origin
II. Key Insight: Reality is Now a Code
In the third order, the code precedes the experience.
You don’t travel for wonder, you travel for content.
You don’t feel before you express, you express to feel.
You're not living, you’re performing life.
III. High-Leverage Takeaways
Most businesses today sell simulations
Not products, not services, symbolic experiences.
If you understand this, you can engineer desire better than anyone.
Human behavior is coded
Language, status, rituals, it’s all symbolic simulation now.
You can predict and manipulate behavior by altering symbols, not substance.
Relevance is reality
In the hyperreal economy, attention = existence.
If it’s not perceived, it’s not real.
IV. Direct Challenge
Map your brand through the 3 Orders
What part is still “real”?
What part is aesthetic fiction?
What’s a pure simulacrum?
Create a hyperreality asset
Design something for your brand that has no basis in material reality, but feels real.
Examples:
An invented origin story
A fake “behind-the-scenes” persona
A symbolic product with no function (e.g. NFT)
Prepare for Chapter 3:
“Simulacra and Science Fiction” where Baudrillard dismantles the genre by saying sci-fi can’t escape simulation, because it's already absorbed by it.
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