“Wired Subjects” | @ MGLC Švicarija, Ljubljana
By Stefan Kafidov
Transcription
Maks Valenčič: The last speaker today is Stefan Kafidov, a philosopher and a member of the Faust collective. His work has been or will be featured in Šum Journal, Razpotja magazine, and it's a pleasure to have you here.
Stefan Kafidov: Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation recently peaked in popularity for a short period of time, with many people "throwing it in someone's face" to finish an argument, like they often do with Marx's Kapital and Said's Orientalism. We must know better than to just dismiss it as pop-philosophy LARPing — something must have guided a noticeable body of people to acknowledge the book's existence in favor of something else; some stars must have aligned. The most obvious answer to this question would be Baudrillard's description and analysis of what is now called post-truth reality — not to be confused with a more straightforward approach related to the direct factuality of public claims, of the kind discussed by Hannah Arendt or even Nietzsche. What Baudrillard focused on was the dimension where these "facts" are at home, not the one where they lack connection with their ascribed inherent value. To him, this hyperreal dimension functioned by its own logic, initially determined by power structures, and distributed information within it in ways that end up aligning with the status quo — essentially producing a simulation of a just, sensible system that can be challenged and can change accordingly in alliance with good-faith feedback. On the other hand, power aimed to reproduce the simulation of itself to its own eventual demise. In a way, Baudrillard came to a very accelerationist conclusion: that resistance only fortifies the mainstream by providing it with a functioning dialectic, and systems only collapse by intensifying on their own undisputed terms.
The ideas described in Simulacra and Simulation ended up becoming ever more relevant with the widespread implementation of the internet. Unfortunately, this does not make him a prophet, but rather a person who was fortunate enough to describe the preexisting matrix of thinking that was later applied onto our use of this technology. Technically, the internet is a shortcut to the process our civilization started with the invention of language, then writing, then print, and then radio waves — more or less reliably transferring information through time and space, solidifying our stance in the symbolic plane of concepts. Biologically speaking, humans gave up short-term memory capacity in favor of long-term, an investment that only paid off in this fascinating way quite recently compared to the rest of the history of homo sapiens. Our evolution did not halt — on the contrary, we are most likely the fastest-evolving organism in the history of our planet. The development has now completely transferred to the fourth dimension, time, which is only a claim that can be made from our point of view, due to the otherwise inherent connection of "time" and "development" as concepts. Regardless, the medium of that process is not DNA but the connections in long-term memory that humans draw as a collective body through economies, constitutions, legal codes, social networks and, eventually, culture. My usage of the singular number when talking about human evolution is not accidental: this is why we are unique — we actively evolve in an exclusive, abstract plane that exists outside of our immediate atomized biology, thus separating ourselves from other Earth organisms by the sheer intensity of this development, but not its existence.
When talking about protein-based life like this, the intensity of this evolution runs parallel with the cohesion of this mass body. Of course, it will never be homogenous — even now, we are individually described as dynamics between the conscious and subconscious, different brain parts, or even different personalities in divergent cases. Then, social personalities come into play, akin to the show Severance, where organisms are literally inhabited by different persons depending on the settings where they are residing. Cultures are adapters between practical needs created by the system's demands and human brains that satisfy them — or, as I'm also going to call them from now on, the wetware of culture. When it comes to historical orders, their oppressiveness and the degree to which they monopolized violence were not always directly equivalent to each other: some systems sacrifice their citizens' privacy in many ways to achieve better efficiency and safety for their populace, while others leave more space for violence, due to various factors such as lack of care or impending collapse. In cases of the former, like medieval China compared to other societies at a similar stage of development, a culture had to be created as a rigorous ritual of interpellation for millions of decisively different people — this can be seen in every aspect of their order, like a script meant to emphasize meaning instead of pronunciation, or a Confucian philosophy that focused heavily on biopolitical control. Because the system was so well-organized for its time and yet so stretched out, individual needs and wants were disregarded far more than in later civilizations of similar scale, due to that need for control and communication — a super-culture of the courts that would unite administrative units along with the lingua franca of the period, a function partially performed by religion in Western countries. Every act of communication took significant effort from people who spent decades training specifically to be a cog in that process, which created a system that achieved cohesion but paid with spontaneity and dexterity.
This extreme-ish example contrasts heavily with the web as we know it today. While establishing a system of near-instant and increasingly dense communication, it also spans almost all parts of the globe and creates new dialectics on top of preexisting ones. The internet provides infinite opportunities for surveillance in all its possible manifestations of varying subtlety — it penetrates one's desiring machines, their conception of space, their very self. Regardless of how moderated, undiluted desire spills here and there in weirdly hidden ways, like the infamous "bad cooking fetish" content that circulated on Facebook. These videos feature mostly archetypal white suburban women showing off their "recipes" — for example, uncooked pasta baked in ovens while wrapped in raw ground beef and sprinkled with Skittles — while excitedly explaining it to the cameramen, who react to the display in an exaggerated, "content-like" manner. This example can be listed alongside many "porn-like" manifestations of otherwise safe-for-work notions or activities. Rule 34 applies to everything, at least a little, with the addition that the definition of porn is now more about presentation than content. The levels of depravity, heresy and iconoclasm that people casually encounter on the internet, whether they want to or not, are incomparable to those of previous ages. That brings forth questions which create dialectics where previously there were none. What does the Finnish lesbian community think of the deportation of Asians from Vladivostok by Stalin's government? Would second-generation Australian Ukrainians be more incentivized toward advocating for Australia's boycott of Eurovision than Ukrainians living in Ukraine or Australians in Australia? Are Austrians more into feet than people from Berlin?
The invasiveness of the internet forces people to participate in the randomest of discourses and account for suppressed desires that could previously be ignored. The safety of anonymous viewing leaves the content out there for people to see without actually interacting with the personal carriers of such desires and views, but nevertheless exposes their existence to the greater public. Whether people want it or not, most of that is now common knowledge to an impressive and endlessly embarrassing depth. The average person who spent their fair share of time online now understands desire better, even if they lag behind on education or social skills, simply because they do not get to look away or "unsee" certain things. It is true that an accidental Liveleak visit is not a core part of a young person's coming-of-age anymore, but subliminal messaging is still out there, now developed and firmly entrenched within algorithms, without exoticism or hypocrisy. Regardless of how much states attempt to control their networks, they will only give the fetish content a new framing. The internet is a place where individuality is separated from the symbolic, unless the symbolic in question is about individuality. Just like that, desire is allowed to roam with no way to stop it, out there for millions and billions of lurkers to see.
So, what would be the point of resisting such a medium and its invasiveness? The surveillance of the state will get to everyone if mandated, just like corporate influence — any abuse of this knowledge is a political question that, do not misunderstand me, must, is, and will be faced with decisiveness and violence. But there is another side to the critique of the breach of privacy so inherent to our datafied reality: opposition is actually allowed to project its fear of being faced with itself, with the way desire always clashes with and transgresses moral norms. They wish for their incognito-tab activity to stay there and their conversations to remain theirs, not only because they do not want to end up in the most boring, 1930s-authoritarian version of cyberpunk, but also because they can't help but reinforce the systems and social codes that constrained them for their entire lives. They mourn the passing of a time when there was separation between one's personas, when the link between them could be taken to one's grave, when that knowledge was stored in an organic brain and not somewhere else. The levels of discomfort people are facing are titanic when they are confronted with the reality of the demise not only of their privacy, but of the entire framework that defined it — individuality, rights, focus, everything that was ever supposed to be sacred.
As you anticipated, I'm not going to say it never was. The internet is the most accurate mirror of culture to date, as it pretty much perfectly reflects the patterns of our societal production as a species. And when it does not, society adjusts. The unearthing of previous demons is a very common theme online — previously isolated consequences of our ways of thinking, exposed and mixed with everything else, now intertwined with everyone's expectations of the outside world. The recent rise of right-wing thinking and politics can be attributed to that, especially given the timing of it — the surge happened shortly after COVID, when a significant portion of humanity was forced to spend most of their time online at the mercy of content farms, influencers and news websites. All of a sudden, the process of digitalization was accelerated, and millions started feeling more comfortable in online spaces than they were before, interacting with information, producing it, and ever more conforming to the patterns of its presentation. The most obvious example of that is, of course, short-form content, the influence of which can be seen in the way even White House officials speak publicly — obviously, and kind of pathetically, producing snappy one-liners that make little sense in context but look right at home in propaganda edits. This fragmentation of information, combined with an already preexisting tendency of the masses to look at the titles instead of the contents, lured in many people previously less in touch with the world, if not on the informational and logistical, then on the libidinal level. Currents of desire intertwined and produced a new pool of wetware with beliefs that reflect the strife produced by this sudden unification — reaction, isolationist tendencies, and, of course, tribalism and egoism, stemming from the shock of exposure. It goes against the digitalizing mainstream and thus creates a hyperreal dialectic of reactionary isolation against digitalized, homogenized desire.
Of course, there are countless ways in which this dichotomy is challenged, like the use of the internet for reactionary or state-fascist reasons — but all of that can be explained by Baudrillard's analogy with Watergate: the system produces scandal and spectacles of self-punishment to sacrifice a part of itself and be refreshed in all its glory. In this case, the system is digitalization appropriated by states that preserve a sterilized and molded version of rural ignorance, like in the show Westworld — a curated spectacle of the wild west, built with ambitious ulterior motives while presenting itself as a theme park that pacifies people. The ultimate play of current politics regarding this question is that of territories — everyone disagrees on what signifies what, everyone is ridiculously progressive on some questions and fascist on others. Forces that can hardly be anything but liberating are used for genocidal reasons; manosphere influencers speak out in favor of Palestine, rich trans women advocate for Israel. For a long time, this was attributed to algorithmic bias toward ridiculous information, but this logic now lies in the very base of popular movements — like the complete, essentialist rejection of AI as a technology, with statements that rival Monty Python's writing, radicalizing millions against even being in proximity to anything remotely associated with LLMs.
What is happening is a complete desync between desire and the link we've drawn between reality and hyperreality. A very strong sense of trust has to be placed in information gained online, a sense that is overwhelmingly feeble and misaligned with one's subconscious feelings on the matter. It is not hard to imagine that nothing in the world is real — what remains is only libido that must be spent on believing in something. The weak grasp on reality that internet users have is perpetually reinforced with the paranoid building and rebuilding of one's map, often forgetting what constitutes it due to the sheer volume of information processed daily. This insecurity goes beyond their trauma, ambitions, or their parents' expectations. A digital subject is locked in Plato's cave and can't help but know it — the cave is right there in their hands, their monitor, their car; this is how they experience the world. Regardless of how much history they witness with their own eyes, there will always be more of it on the screens.
To avoid insanity, moral maps have to be built. Narratives, evaluations, territories are constantly drawn in a manner that must be optimized, decisive and rigid, relating what was witnessed back to themselves and assuming a position on the matter by placing it within their own vision of the world, with themselves at the center. What must be avoided is uncertainty, and the way of escape is memefication — rapid, intuitive moral judgment of a myriad of things all at once, creating self-referential constructs that need no further explanation, as they represent a religious attribute of a larger force distinctly hostile or friendly to the evaluator. What makes a meme is that it can be mentioned and no explanation will be needed — a mere utterance will either produce an association in relation to its context, or an emotional response if there is no context to it. Memes are mental shortcuts that organics need in order to feel comfortable in digital spaces.
This statement becomes far more dramatic once the stakes are increased and the digital becomes synonymous with the hyperreal — all narratives previously present in coffee-break talks, radios, newspapers and such are now presented as interactable, genuinely space-like environments. The culture is now in the digital, and culture is what makes a person feel like themselves; that is where the concept of a person comes from. Real-life logic is now indistinguishable from online, as the mediums align and abstract thinking becomes inherently linked to connectivity, memefication and its consequences. The frantic and paranoid behavior now normalized and amplified in digital discourses is a symptom of humans losing their grip on a significant portion of themselves as they are plunged into something they didn't quite think through, or haven't adapted to yet. While flows of information consume us as we consume them, cognitive capacity is overloaded and challenged; however, the digital footprint remains, as does the impact on other people. Now, individual organisms are even less of a primary carrier for ideas, memories and other elements of culture — the very idea of cognitive substance is challenged, for it is as fluid as reactionary memefication is rigid.
Every day, more concrete concepts are coined that are nothing but the relation of a piece of information to everything else ever created. An example of this is "internet aesthetics," like steampunk, Frutiger Aero or dark academia. This should not be confused with literary genres, visual languages or art movements after which the aesthetics may be named — the aesthetic of cyberpunk, unlike the fiction genre or dystopia as a type, is a purely vibe-based connection that has no center, no clear border, and is so foreign to structure that it might as well have one and no one would care. The alleged pioneers of cyberpunk themselves, like William Gibson, would most likely need extra education to make a natural cyberpunk-themed Pinterest board, as it belongs to them even less than it did when the first discussions of the death of the author took place. Looking for "the first person to say something" right now is the same as trying to discern the spot in a pond first hit by a drop of water when the rain is already happening. If we try really hard, with the help of advanced tools, we might calculate the implication of a deformed, ripple-like structure on the water that collided with other theoretical ripples thousands of times, leaving us with a theoretical place where the process began.
How does one put up with a reality like that, when their thinking is individualist and their whole worldview depends on the validity of the author, on social gratitude, on pioneership? They kick and scream, proclaim that enough is enough, and start riding a dead horse by producing a simulation of what they thought they lived in. The masses start striving for an individualist extreme, one that hasn't been gaining as much attention as the rise of right-wing thinking, even though they stem from the same source, even if they don't quite go hand in hand. This is not meant to convey a "selfish turn" that's already well talked about, but rather the usage of persons as ultimate mediums and signifiers of ideas, packages that deliver information. Names of eccentrics are interchangeable with memes; they are brought up for humor's sake with no context, or to prove a wider point, like "Pete Hegseth is the American Prigozhin" or "this kid is the LeBron James of child labor." When describing ideas, they are often anthropomorphized with no practical reason for it — a tendency explicitly seen in the wider art community, where pretty much everyone engages in a relatively obsessive creation of original characters, or OCs for short. Oftentimes characters are the first thing to appear in a new proposed setting, even though the later, projected focus is on the universe itself. The pattern follows because a human form is familiar, and it grounds the observer's attention, which is deprived of humanity in the chronically online environment. For the same reasons, ideas and concepts are talked about as if they were people — like "AI is a guy who killed someone's dog." Actual blame is put on an inanimate or non-material thing, a bunch of circuits or ideas held accountable and put on trial. To achieve the same effect in a more sophisticated manner, affiliated people are connected to the product by the public or by themselves, sharing their humanity as a libido anchor for judgment to be passed. Elon Musk "is" Tesla, Janković "is" a Ljubljana parking-lot pay-and-display machine, Trump "is" MAGA, and so on. Their social body is extended toward a construct, thus literally making it a part of them in people's thinking.
When feelings start to arise toward something, it is anthropomorphized — it's a rule, and it will be achieved one way or another, either by brute force or subtly, by picking a responsible person. While the despotic projection of a ruler described by Deleuze and Guattari is supposed to be a way to create and channel power, this process is no longer a one-sided positive relationship — it has been appropriated by masses starved of humanity that look for it everywhere. Other illustrative examples can be found in new insults that expose the lack of one's humanity by getting lost in a cultural current, like the trend of calling people "performative" for seemingly showing off their affiliation with a certain virtue — reading feminist literature in public, for example. While there's a grain of truth in that, the trend has run its course, and the current overall consensus is that it went too far, with the critique now saying that "no one is allowed to be themselves anymore," somehow producing another example of what I'm describing.
Another fascinating trend is the evergreen Soyjak — a simplistic, traced caricature cartoonishly draped in as many signifiers as possible, displaying a person's lack of individuality by drowning them in symbolism: a face vomiting up "fell for it again" awards, wearing a MAGA cap, with a "taxpayer dollars wasted" graph in the background. Their face is deformed with the excitement of conforming to a trend, and their eyes are emotionless, because something else is there to feel for them. Soyjaks can be, and are, made to describe any archetype of a person the creator got mad at, with some going viral because of the sheer hyper-specific character of the target. It's mockery of an archetype and an accusation of anyone who might come off this way in any context — an attack against the very individuality they're allegedly supposed to cherish and preserve.
Motivated by this crusade against the loss of humanity, people unite into groups and connect their identities to them, fortifying them with memefied connections that are as intuitive as they are synonymous. One is all, all is one. To contradict the projection of a unified, antagonistic outside, they mirror this uncanny cohesion and create a body of their own — an organ in the body of culture that faces the world as one. Protected by this shell, they present themselves, augmented with cultural notions and constructs they've chosen to appropriate, applying the same despotic projection onto their own wide-spanning social avatar, which functions as a suit or a face. Internal cohesion grows, and so does the rejection of whatever is deemed negative within the spectrum of where the public imagines and positions itself. Admitting it will take forever, but the ideal of individual consistency or authority is now positioned within a framework that recognizes it in nothing but name. The same goes for obligation and entitlement, both of which are used as instruments to create performances of these virtues. Whenever someone claims to be entitled to something, they are "entitled as" XYZ — as a citizen, as a scholar, as an artist, as an ideal that lies outside of them, historically legitimized by terabytes of writing. Individuality is a lost cause, and whatever remains of it is confined to immediate physical reality and interpersonal relations within it, as both desire and culture have gained a channel that liberates them from organic supremacy.
To return to Baudrillard more specifically — mentions of his writing were explicitly meant as critiques of symptoms of the processes he described; basically, they were used negatively, essentially ascribing him a hatred of hyperreality. This can be attributed to the way the book was framed: despite the fact that he never really takes a clear moralizing stance and sticks to description, a large portion of Simulacra and Simulation is spent describing the ways in which hyperreality lacks reality in the political sphere, and how all attempts at re-establishing a stillborn "natural order" are doomed. The same absolutely goes for this talk, as I mostly yapped about the death throes of individuality in the digital age. The only thing we can really see from our current point of view is the reproduction of the past by the present, and its geocentric projection of the future as "the most obvious natural outcome that justifies my personal beliefs." Writing is therefore incentivized to reflect exactly that, and is then used conveniently some forty years later, when the author is (literally) dead and his age has become clearly defined fuel for the reproduction of simulation. Just like Baudrillard himself wrote, once information gets out it will be distributed everywhere — not by its own rules, but by those of the hyperreal currents, regardless of intention or alleged inherent meaning. Out of all the examples of viral books I listed, the usage of Simulacra and Simulation in discourse is only second to the Bible in its irony.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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