Leveraging Technoloy to Bring us Closer to Reality? (DICE 2010)

So, Jesse Schell wants to use the hyperrealities created by advanced technology to bring the public closer to reality? What? Huh? Did I just hear him correctly?

I bet you Schell has seen The Matrix Trilogy, but has he read Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacrum & Simulation", which the trilogy was "loosely" based upon? If he read the book, then he knows that he is selling his audience snake oil. If he has not read the book, then shame on him and his ignorance, for he does not know what he is doing. Given that he was a Disney Imagineer, I'm betting he knows that he is selling his audience snake oil and understands how technology serves as just another technique that the few use to control the many, for they must get the public to buy-in to the technological Simulacrum if we are to be controlled by it.

"There is no longer any critical distance between truth and falsehood -a hyperreal. Within Hyperreality, truth and lie can blur to create an ambiguous substance which answers to any demand made upon it. While God replied only with silence, the hyperreal mirrors our dreams and feeds them back to us. We consume shadows."

~ Baudrillard


SIMULACRUM (simulacra): Something that replaces reality with its representation. Jean Baudrillard in "The Precession of Simulacra" defines this term as follows: "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.... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real" (1-2). His primary examples are psychosomatic illness, Disneyland, and Watergate. Fredric Jameson provides a similar definition: the simulacrum's "peculiar function lies in what Sartre would have called the derealization of the whole surrounding world of everyday reality".

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/postmodernism/terms/simulacrum.html

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Big Brother
• Simulacrum
• 1984
• Brave New World
• Technological Society
• Gaming
• Skinner Box
• Jesse Schell
• DICE 2010
• Randy Pausch
• GDC
• RPG
• Jean Baurillard
• hyperreality

[shamanizing]

Thanks for posting this

-Ken

[Baile1984]

Creepy stuff. The things that he talks about are really very dehumanizing.

[Baile1984]

Creepy stuff. This stuff is so dehumanizing, so anti-human.

[cmrnlza]

Wow GREAT GREAT Talk I learned so much from this vid thanks for uploading !

[Mr1141998]

First!