How simulation replaced reality, how everyday life became a performance, and why artificial intelligence has arrived at precisely the wrong (or right) moment
Postmodernity is often treated as a doctrine, a mood, or a style. It is better understood as an atmosphere in which life now unfolds.
It appears when old sources of orientation lose authority. Tradition weakens. Religion recedes. Nation, duty, progress and class cease to hold experience together as they once did. Reflective judgement is then asked to carry too much. It must provide meaning, identity and direction without the background that once made those tasks bearable.
The result is saturation.
Images multiply. Interpretations proliferate. Identity becomes editable. Choice expands while orientation grows fragile. The modern subject moves through signs, screens, metrics and performances, trying to recover a centre already beginning to dissolve.
When the Map Replaces the World
Representation, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued, has begun to precede and produce reality.
A shop sign once pointed beyond itself. A painted boot meant there was a cobbler inside. A carved loaf meant bread, flour, hands, heat, work. The sign referred to a world behind it.
Now think of an influencer profile selling a lifestyle. The image points to no stable craft, place or practice. The image becomes the product. What is consumed is a recognisable arrangement of signs.
The postmodern condition begins when the sign overtakes the world.
Baudrillard called this simulation. A copy can circulate without an original. The image becomes its own reality. The distinction between real and fake fades because the system can function without it.
Politics becomes performance. Scandal becomes theatre. Institutions preserve the appearance of authority. Media offers a formatted reality, already arranged for attention.
Even authenticity becomes staged. The public self is composed, edited and circulated. The person becomes a profile. Action becomes content. Suffering becomes a clip. Morality becomes a visible posture.
A Life Assembled from Signs
This transformation reaches daily life through the language of lifestyle.
In industrial modernity, work gave people a place in the world. The miner, the shipbuilder, the mill worker and the craftsperson did more than earn wages. They inherited roles, rhythms, loyalties and forms of recognition. Identity was tied to locality, labour and continuity.
As industrial labour collapsed, outsourced and fragmented, those older structures weakened. Occupation lost its force as destiny. Classes became harder to read. The workplace lost its power as a source of collective memory.
Identity became something assembled. Clothes, food, travel, fitness, politics, interiors, music and leisure became signs through which the person declared belonging and distinction. The shopping centre became a moral theatre. The supermarket became a cathedral of choice. Organic labels, minimalist packaging, curated diets and ethical branding transformed ordinary goods into statements of selfhood.
The object matters less than the lifestyle it signifies. You are now buying more than food; you are buying a story of purity, discipline, compassion or taste.
This applies to the body too. The body becomes a project, a surface, a market asset. Cosmetic surgery, fitness regimes, dietary optimisation, wearable devices and biohacking practices belong to a culture in which embodiment is treated as unfinished material. The body must be managed, improved, displayed and defended against decline.
Health becomes visible discipline. Appearance becomes evidence. The self is expected to look properly governed.
The Body Becomes Data
Digital devices translate bodily life into numbers. Steps, calories, sleep scores, heart-rate variability, body-fat percentages and productivity dashboards all promise access to truth. The body speaks through data, and sensation begins to lose authority when it conflicts with the observable, flashing metric on the display.
A person may wake feeling rested, then grow anxious because a sleep tracker reports poor recovery. Another may override fatigue because a device reports insufficient activity. The number claims authority over the lived body.
This is a reorganisation of bodily experience around external standards of comparison and performance. The body becomes readable, measurable and ranked. What cannot be counted loses standing.
Fatigue becomes failure. Hunger becomes data. Rest becomes inefficiency. Ageing becomes poor maintenance.
There is moral layer at work here. Thin is read against fat. Active against lazy. Optimised against undisciplined. Normal against pathological. The contained body appears virtuous. The uncontained body becomes an object of pity, ridicule or suspicion.
This is structural self-objectification. The person sees the body constantly and feels it less. The body becomes something to be managed from outside, even by the one who inhabits it.
Performance Without a Stage
Postmodern subjects live under the rule of performance.
Performance once belonged to theatre or art. It now organises ordinary social life. A job interview is a performance of competence. A dating profile is a performance of desirability. A LinkedIn page is a performance of professional coherence. A social media post is a performance of taste, conviction, grief, humour or outrage.
This does not necessarily mean crude falseness. People are not always pretending. The boundary between being and acting has become unstable. One becomes recognisable through performance. Identity is enacted under observation.
The audience may be present or imagined. It may be a manager, a lover, an algorithm, a future employer, or a crowd of strangers. The subject learns to adjust tone, posture, vocabulary, emotion and self-description according to the scene.
Different platforms reward different selves. The same person may become efficient at work, ironic online, wounded in private messages, morally urgent in public, detached in professional spaces. These shifts are often experienced as competence.
Continuity matters less than legibility. The person must remain editable.
Media and the Erosion of Feeling
What about media saturation?
Events arrive already formatted for visibility. War, scandal, disaster, comedy, advertising and confession circulate through the same channels. A battlefield clip sits beside a fitness routine. A massacre appears beneath a joke. A child’s suffering becomes a thumbnail, a soundtrack, a caption, a lifespan.
The effect is affective overload. People are exposed to more moral claims than they can absorb. Each image demands feeling. Each catastrophe asks for recognition. Each cause asks for response. Attention thins under the weight of repeated summons.
Outrage becomes brief. Grief becomes performative. Solidarity becomes a gesture competing with the next event.
Repeated exposure to suffering can dull moral response. Without narrative, context or action, spectatorship begins to replace ethical engagement. The viewer is moved, emptied, and moved again.
Reason Under the Command of Performance
Postmodernity also changes reason itself.
Computer-mediated systems increasingly value language according to effect. A message succeeds when it triggers action, improves efficiency, produces compliance, or advances a process. Communication becomes operational. Its value lies in output.
An office email demanding figures by tomorrow is not an argument. It does not seek understanding. It coordinates behaviour. Language becomes a tool of execution.
Knowledge follows the same path. It is judged by speed, prediction, efficiency, optimisation and measurable impact. Truth gives way to output. Meaning gives way to function. The old question of why is displaced by the procedural demand of how fast and how well.
Rationality intensifies in a narrower form. More things are measured, ranked, automated and predicted. Yet orientation weakens. The system becomes more efficient while the human subject becomes less certain what efficiency is for.
AI and the Second Abstraction of Meaning
Artificial Intelligence enters this landscape at a decisive moment.
It arrives after the erosion of shared foundations. Truth is already contested. Identity is already performed. Language is already operational. Judgement is already weakened by speed, visibility and metrics.
AI accelerates the postmodern condition.
Large language models work through patterns extracted from vast fields of language already detached from their original situations. They approximate fluency through repetition, correlation and scale.
This gives them power in a culture already trained to accept performance as evidence. A fluent answer appears authoritative. A synthetic response appears thoughtful. A machine-generated judgement arrives already shaped as conclusion.
The danger is not a machine suddenly becoming human, rather is the human subject gradually treating judgement as unnecessary.
Reflection slows. Validation replaces thinking. Doubt becomes friction. The answer arrives before the person has fully formed the question.
AI becomes more than a tool. It becomes an environment that frames what appears relevant, likely, urgent, desirable and true. It operates at the level of interface and infrastructure. It speaks to users, ranks possibilities, filters attention, predicts behaviour and modulates what appears before deliberation begins.
The Sensorial Nexus
At this threshold, a new anthropological figure begins to appear.
I call this configuration the Sensorial Nexus: a programmed sensitivity in which instinct is shaped less by character, experience or inner coherence than by algorithmic influence, ambient signals and systemic feedback.
The person experiences this as intuition. It feels private. It feels spontaneous.
A trend appears. A notification arrives. A crowd reacts. A metric falls. A feed adjusts. A mood spreads. The body responds before judgement gathers itself.
The algorithm becomes that gut feeling mistaken for one’s own.
In this condition, the social mask of earlier postmodern performance is absorbed. It melts into the skin. What once appeared as performance now appears as personality. What once appeared as external pressure now appears as preference.
This is why the condition is difficult to resist. Coercion can be named. A command can be refused. A visible mask can be removed. A reflex trained through ambient systems is harder to detect.
The postmodern subject once performed the self before a world of signs. The generated subject begins to synchronise with systems that shape the conditions of response.
The danger is subtle. People may still speak of choice, authenticity, instinct and freedom. Yet the space in which those words have meaning has changed. The self feels immediate while being mediated. It feels expressive while being formatted. It feels intuitive while being calibrated.
This is the technological afterlife of postmodernity.
Essay adapted from my book Instinct, Reason and the Self in the Aftermath of Postmodernity: Beyond Reason
More writing at leandroloriga.com