(§12) “Hyperculture”: Afterword from In the Delirium of the Simulation (2025)
“Who else decodes you?”
— Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department
Jean Baudrillard once wrote that art is like a currency: more and more, its value does not have any relationship with reality and is, instead, only decoded according to the criteria of the market (1993c: 14–15). In the twenty-first century, there is no longer any difference between economics and aesthetics. If in 2014, Bloomberg equates the music industry with Taylor Swift, it is because as a pop star she is already beyond music and economy: the love song is only the currency in which she does business.
Today, Swift Studies is a sub-field of Baudrillard Studies. Higher education institutions, such as Stanford, Harvard, and New York University, already offer courses on Miss Americana and her music. She is everything that Jean Baudrillard theorizes. She is everything this book is against.
Taylor Swift knows that capitalism is all about the simulation of value. As Achim Szepanski argues in his article entitled Taylor Swift Does Not Exist (2024), Taylor Swift is the sign of capital itself: there is nothing beside her love songs except more information to consume, more and more signs to reproduce.
If Taylor Swift is never demonetized it is only because her images, her voice, and her name are never out of circulation, to paraphrase Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl (2012: 88). If there are more and more conspiracies about Taylor Swift, it is because she is nothing beyond the mere reproduction of information: true or false it does not matter. Whether she is the product of a Pentagon psy-op, as Donald Trump’s supporters like to believe, or whether she is an Aryan idol for the American neo-Nazis, with her white skin, her blonde hair, her blue eyes, and her country roots, this only further increases the derivative value of her music. She is nothing beside it.
And yet, she is more real than reality itself. In the near past, political figures such as Keir Starmer, Justin Trudeau, and Emmanuel Macron have praised the Taylor Swift effect, albeit she is only the metonymy (like the crown for the queen) of the political economy. Strictly speaking, Taylor Swift does not reproduce value: she is the sign of value. Swiftonomics, the term used to refer to the queen of pop music’s impact on the global markets, is a virtual economy without any relationship to the so-called real ones. To misquote the lyrics from one of her love songs about London: “So (so) long (long), reality (reality)” (2024b).
In Taylor Swift’s song Wonderland, the city of Lewis Carroll’s story is used as the allegory of everlasting love. “We found Wonderland, you and I got lost in it (In Wonderland) / And we pretended it could last forever (In Wonderland)” (2014b). But, in fact, her lovers never end and return with another epithet in the next tune. In Taylor Swift’s music, Wonderland is an unreal city that hides the fact that Taylor Swift herself is not real, like America in Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of Disneyland (1994: 12ff).
There is nothing outside the hyper-market of music. Following the financial theory of In the Delirium of the Simulation, simulation is only ever the definition of value. It is always money that gives value to gold. In this regard, Szepanskian economics is equal to Swiftonomics.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was the highest-grossing music tour ever with $2 billion in revenue. For the queen of pop, each aesthetic “era”—from the cowgirl boots and butterflies of her debut album to the lipstick of Red—is also another financial era. In contrast with geological time, there is no catastrophe that puts an end to the present age. Her eras proceed through one and the same conveyor belt. “I know I’m just repeating myself,” as she sings (2024a) in The Tortured Poets Department, the most-streamed album of all time. The “global apparatus of distraction,” of which Taylor Swift’s music is a part, “not only exchanges the objective for the new, which is in fact the repeated obsolete, but stages the conditions under which one moment uneventfully replaces the next” (Szepanski, 2025: 129).
In this book, following Jean Baudrillard, Achim Szepanski never theorizes the subject in its own right. Nonetheless, the system is always and first of all a format of subjectivity. If the end of history is like a speedball of amphetamines and tranquilizers (ibid.: 55), it is the same formula for the consumer of popular music in the twenty-first century. As he writes in Taylor Swift Does Not Exist: “the pop [culture] that absurdly demands the ever more will always find its audience, because what is it but our own boredom in the face of the spectacle of this never-ending end” (2024). In this regard, the value of Taylor Swift’s music is, at the same time, the cause and the effect of the anxiety, boredom, and anger of her fandom.
Winners of the award category for “Most Extreme Fan Outreach” and “Fiercest Fans,” as well as nominated for “Fandom Army of the Year,” Swifties are less like a music community and more like a cultural war machine co-opted by the system. “Happy decoding!” tweets Taylor Swift in 2021 next to a video of a golden safe and letter pairings. When deciphered, the letters spell out the titles of six songs from the upcoming album Fearless. Once again, “information is the computational power of money itself and is thus inevitably tied to capital” (Szepanski, 2025: 158). Easter eggs and secret messages (from numerology to color symbolism in her songs and video clips) only reproduce the derivative value of her music: “and everyone was watching” is one of the secret messages decoded from the liner notes of 1989 (2014a). The Swifties are the shams of the music industry. They are only the hype of a hyperrealistic economy. “I’ve trained them to be that way,” the American singer says about her Swifties in an interview for Entertainment Weekly (2019). They are the capitalist form of subjectivity par excellence.
Taylor Swift’s music is beyond beautiful and ugly, as much as the market is beyond good and evil, to use the words of Jean Baudrillard (1993c: 19). But the problem is less about the value of her music than the impotentiality to create new ones. It is the monopoly of the same. As Achim Szepanski once told me, “today, everybody is a Swiftie.”