In postmodern societies, reality itself is structured by simulation—"codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules".
The bureaucratic and legal apparatus you invoke are themselves caught up in this regime. Their procedures, paperwork, and legitimacy rely on referents—the "models" and "simulacra" of governance, law, and knowledge—that no longer point back to any fundamental, stable reality. What you serve, in effect, is the system of signification itself: simulation as reality, or—per Baudrillard—hyperreality, where "all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy and the original, disappear".
"The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images." (Debord) Our social relations, governance, and even dissent become performances staged for the world's endless mediated feedback loop.
In this age, according to Heidegger, "everything becomes a 'picture', a 'set-up' for calculation, representation, and control." The machine is not just a device or a bureaucratic protocol—it is the mode of disclosure through which the world appears, and your sense of selfhood and agency are increasingly products (and objects) within this technological enframing.
The bureaucratic and legal apparatus you invoke are themselves caught up in this regime. Their procedures, paperwork, and legitimacy rely on referents—the "models" and "simulacra" of governance, law, and knowledge—that no longer point back to any fundamental, stable reality. What you serve, in effect, is the system of signification itself: simulation as reality, or—per Baudrillard—hyperreality, where "all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy and the original, disappear".
"The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images." (Debord) Our social relations, governance, and even dissent become performances staged for the world's endless mediated feedback loop.
In this age, according to Heidegger, "everything becomes a 'picture', a 'set-up' for calculation, representation, and control." The machine is not just a device or a bureaucratic protocol—it is the mode of disclosure through which the world appears, and your sense of selfhood and agency are increasingly products (and objects) within this technological enframing.
Yada, yada, yada; the Matrix is real.
ie, you don't know the half of it, compadre.