The Desert of the Real?

Ontic Cafe One Bean Difficulty:
When the model becomes more real than the reality.

In the cult science fiction movie The Matrix, the character Morpheus reveals to the tale's main protagonist - the cyber culture hero Neo - that his entire life has been a hallucination sustained by an enormous supercomputer run by machines that have long since destroyed the real world of which Neo thought he was a denizen.

The science fiction novums and tropes are thick on the ground in The Matrix, but the desert of the real is arguably a special concept with special relevance for the Internet age - especially the commercialised Internet age.

The idea of the desert of the real was introduced by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. He used a portion of a tail by Jorge Luis Borges in which the leaders of an empire commission the creation of a map that is the same size as the empire and covers it. The map eventually becomes unpopular and disintegrates.

Baudrillard draws parallels between the concept of the map and the media, government, and even science as conducive to the building of models or simulations of the world that become what he calls hyperreal. They are simulations and models that become simulacra, hyperreal misrepresentations that are conducive to dissimulation (pretending that there is no simluation):

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map…Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory...(Baudrillard, J., ―The Precession of Simulacra‖ in Simulacra and Simulation, Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 1994., 1)

The desert of the real is the replacement of the real territory with that of the simulated territory, where the territory is all aspects of life.

Like most continental philosophers, Baudrillard was partial to the odd bit of sophistic word salad:

Simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game – total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control...

It is not clear how cybernetics has any bearing here. However, Baudrillard's point is that the media and technology - and science and science fiction writing - all come to be subsumed under the aim of control.

Although as far as anyone knows there has been no technological singularity (the term coined by computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge that denotes the point at which the computers become intelligent and the AI is smarter than us) - perhaps the machines of the Matrix are already with us.
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