Latest news with #JeanBaudrillard
Business of Fashion
7 days ago
- Business
- Business of Fashion
Opinion: The Big Luxury Simulation Is Over
In 'Simulacra and Simulation' (1981), the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard posited that we no longer live in a directly experienced reality, but in a 'hyperreality': a world so heavily mediated by images that they are more powerful in shaping the way we live our daily lives than the real world. Four decades later, anyone on Instagram understands this intuitively. Our decisions — from what we buy to who we befriend — are shaped by imagery. In the luxury industry, an object's symbolic value was always more important than its material value. But the age of the hyperreal pushed this logic to an extreme. Whereas luxury once meant beautifully crafted objects, it became about storytelling. Instead of luxury goods, brands retooled to deliver luxury narratives. And as long as their products signalled luxury, they realised they could cut corners on quality to boost margins and meet growing demand without alienating shoppers. This strategy has proved stunningly successful, especially with people who grew up in a world of simulacra, conditioned to consume markers of goods more than the goods themselves. As Dana Thomas noted in 'Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster' (2007), 'Consumers don't buy luxury branded items for what they are, but for what they represent.' On social media as in the street, what mattered were symbols of luxury. But fast-forward to the present and it appears this logic has its limits. That the post-Covid luxury boom has given way to a sharp downturn in demand is not simply a reflection of macroeconomic pressures. A combination of soaring prices and declining quality has left many consumers feeling their intelligence is being insulted, which suggests symbols of luxury still need to be anchored in tangible value to command steep sums. Last year, when Dior was taken to task for the use of a sweatshop labour in its supply chain, Italian prosecutors alleged the brand paid little more than €50 euros a piece for bags which retailed for more than €2500 each. Now LVMH stablemate Loro Piana has been pulled up by the same probe. Such stories make the luxury industry look like a scam selling empty signifiers to suckers. It's no surprise that sales of superfakes — low-cost, high-fidelity replicas mostly made in China and sold directly to customers via WhatsApp groups and social media — have rocketed, driven by a new attitude to counterfeits. Whereas owning a fake once came with a sense of shame, now it's seen as a savvy move. Why risk feeling stupid for buying subpar, overpriced goods, when you can game the system? It's not that people no longer want the symbols of luxury. But those symbols have to be grounded in great product to be believable. And if the entire luxury industry has become a simulacrum, where the symbol is hollow, there is little difference between the real and its copy. It's well known what one gets when one buys a superfake. It's more interesting to consider what one doesn't get: provenance. But if few customers seem to care, it's because luxury's narratives of origin and superior craftsmanship no longer seem credible. We have reached the last stop on the simulacrum express. Can the industry find its way back to the land of the real? Making actual luxury goods and not just telling stories about making luxury goods would be a good place to start. The views expressed in Opinion pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Business of Fashion. How to submit an Opinion piece: The Business of Fashion accepts opinion articles on a wide range of topics. The suggested length is 700-1000 words, but submissions of any length within reason will be considered. All submissions must be original and exclusive to BoF. Submissions may be sent to opinion@ Please include 'Opinion |' in the subject line and be sure to substantiate all assertions. Given the volume of submissions we receive, we regret that we are unable to respond in the event that an article is not selected for publication.
Hospitality Net
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Hospitality Net
Marseille Was Never for Tourists. Neither Is Venice (Or: How We Disney-fied Cultural Europe, and What We Might Do Before It's All Gone)
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation A few days ago, Jeff Bezos anchored his floating temple of techno-capitalism (a yacht longer than Piazza San Marco) just off the coast of Venice. The media, predictably, responded with sterile moral outrage, but the more profound irony escaped most: Bezos isn't visiting Venice; he IS Venice. Or rather, he embodies what Venice has become: a luxury simulation of itself. Stripped of context, suspended in spectacle. That moment brought back a provocation I had posted months ago in my weekly column on 10 Minutes Hotel: maybe the only rational way to manage Venice today is to treat it like Disneyland, not as a joke, but as a system. At the time, it sounded dystopian. Now, it sounds like long-range urban planning. But let me elaborate… Cultural Collapse as Business Model The backlash to that post was immediate. One refrain from colleagues: raise the prices. Charge more, and the crowds will shrink. Problem solved. But that logic rests on a fatal assumption: that cultural destinations can be scaled like SaaS, that cities are funnels to optimize, and that the soul of a place is just inefficiency to be engineered away. But Venice is not a yield curve. Rome is not a conversion path. And Athens is not your next A/B test. As Baudrillard warned, we've entered the age of simulation, where the map precedes the territory, and replicas become preferable to the real. And when a city becomes a simulacrum, there's nothing left to preserve but the illusion. And frankly, I don't want to visit that. Italy recorded over 458 million overnight stays in 2024: a record. And yet, in the very cities breaking records, the locals are disappearing, replaced by cappuccinos at 11:00 a.m. (Food police, do something!) What remains isn't tourism. It's cultural karaoke. And the worst part? We're not the victims of this transformation; we're its architects. We used the same tools that once enriched travel (storytelling, UX, optimization) to sterilize it. We've built a system that filters out friction, contradiction, and memory. As Umberto Eco wrote in Travels in Hyperreality, when the real becomes inconvenient, we manufacture the fake. Then prefer it. Cognitive Schengen: An Epistemic Border Control Now, overtourism is typically framed as a logistical issue: there are too many people, and not enough resources. But what if the real crisis isn't infrastructural, but epistemological? What if the problem isn't how many people are coming, but who is coming, and with what depth of cultural awareness? In a half-serious comment to that now-infamous LinkedIn post, I suggested we abandon dynamic pricing. Forget yield management. Let's shift to cultural management. An intellectual visa. A Cognitive Schengen. A brain-ESTA. A simple test at the border: not of income, but of insight. If you believe the Colosseum was built by "the Italians," access denied. Come back after reading a sentence of Suetonius, or at least grasping what S.P.Q.R. stood for. If you think modern law was born in some East Coast courtroom, take a seat (ideally on a Roman curule chair) and open the Corpus Iuris Civilis. If you assume republican governance is a post-Enlightenment concept, consider that dēmokratía was being practiced in 5th-century BCE Athens while most of Europe was still forest. Our legacy deserves more than passive tourism. It demands recognition. Reverence. And, at the very least, a bit of homework. Because what we need is not more spending power. We need more broke, chain-smoking artists wandering alleyways at dawn. We need friction. We need DANGER (repetitia iuvant: danger is not the enemy of democracy. It's often its lifeblood.) We need more future Hemingways, quietly drafting "Across the River and Into the Trees" in a foggy bàcaro in Dorsoduro, not tourists Googling "best spritz with view" while standing on a fake gondola. Because if we confuse presence with understanding, we'll build a world of perfect accessibility, but nothing worth accessing. Venice Is Just the Prototype. Venice isn't the exception. It's the model. Rome, Florence, Paris, Lisbon, Prague, Barcelona... the list continues to expand. Each city follows the same script: from story to slogan, from culture to content. As Bauman observed, ours is an age of fleeting bonds and permanent detachment. Travel becomes transactional. Places become playlists. We're engineering a civilization optimized for attention, but devoid of attention span. Steiner, in The Idea of Europe, wrote that Europe is not defined by GDP or borders, but by cafés, silence, smoke, and philosophical tension. Europe is layered. Semantic. Unfinished. Strip away the contradiction, the noise, the crime, the chaos, and you mutilate it. You amputate its soul to make it frictionless. Jean-Claude Izzo, the great writer from Marseille and author of the Total Khéops trilogy, shared this instinctive aversion to sanitized narratives. He was fiercely critical of the official rhetoric around "Mediterraneanness," a rhetoric that flattened complexity, repackaged suffering, and sold the Mediterranean as folklore for cruise ships. There's a beautiful passage on Total Kheops: "Marseille n'est pas une ville pour touristes. Il n'y a rien à voir. Sa beauté ne se photographie pas. Elle se partage. Ici, faut prendre partie. Se passionner. Être pour, être contre. Être violemment. Alors seulement ce qui est à voir se donne à voir. Et là trop tard, on est en plein drame. Un drame antique où le héros c'est la mort. À Marseille, même pour perdre il faut savoir se battre." That roughly translates to: "Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionate for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose, you have to know how to fight." For Izzo, the Mediterranean (and Europe) was never a lifestyle brand. It was a geography of exile and encounter, of wounds and entanglements. To romanticize it was to betray it. Like Steiner, he understood that meaning lives in tension, in the friction, the smoke, and the silence that follows the shouting. And when we erase that, in pursuit of some frictionless user experience, we don't civilize Europe. We erase it. Reduce it to UX, and you'll boost performance, at the cost of meaning. Turn it into a product, and you'll get Vegas. You get Disneyland. Final Question (Still Not Rhetorical) So here we are again: Do we want a more profitable world, or one still worth exploring? Because we can't have both. Not anymore. And, unless we resist this slow, algorithmic lobotomy of place, unless we defend the messiness of real cities, we'll soon find ourselves living in a world where the past is repackaged, the present is scripted, and the future is nothing more than a premium upgrade. And I don't want to live in that world. Do you? Simone Puorto Hospitality Net
AllAfrica
24-06-2025
- AllAfrica
AI is no longer artificial
For centuries, the mirror has served a simple purpose: to reflect our image. It shows our form, lets us adjust our appearance, and studies our expressions. But it doesn't know us. A mirror is a passive, optical simulation – a reflection of form, not essence. You can stare into it for hours, yet it will never reveal your thoughts or identity. It's a surface, not substance. The more we gaze into mirrors, the more we focus on appearance. In that way, mirrors become feedback loops. First we create the reflection, then the reflection begins to shape us. Today's mirrors are digital. Social media are reflecting us, but in a curated, filtered and performative way. They don't just show who we are – they show who we want to be, or pretend to be. As philosopher Jean Baudrillard warned in his theory of hyperreality, representations become more real than reality itself. We no longer live in the moment; we live for how the moment looks on screen. In 2023, a Nature Human Behaviour study revealed that 64% of users felt 'more like themselves online' than in real life. That's not a connection – it's self -distortion. Social media are not a window to the world; They are a mirror of desire. Social media don't merely reflect life. They replace it with a version that's more symmetrical, more colorful, more shareable than reality. It's a simulated reality. Humans love simulated reality – whether it's the mirror, social media or video games – more than reality. Simulation doesn't have to be digital. It can be psychological or cultural – any representation that imitates reality but isn't reality itself. If mirrors simulate our appearance and social media simulates our persona, then artificial intelligence now simulates our consciousness. Tools like ChatGPT don't invent humanity – they re-present it. Trained on billions of words, they echo our thoughts, emotions, contradictions and dreams. When we speak to AI, we are not talking to something alien – we're speaking to a refined version of ourselves. AI becomes not just a mirror, but a hall of mirrors. We've crossed into an era where the tools we've created don't just assist us – they reflect us back. AI finishes our sentences, answers our questions and creates our art. But as its responses grow more fluid, the line between mimicry and sentience begins to blur. As technology evolves, we're losing our compass. Intelligence, once the proudest marker of human uniqueness, no longer belongs to us alone. We have no definitive metric to separate simulated thought from real consciousness. The Turing Test has been outpaced. As AI models mimic human reasoning, debate philosophy, write poetry and simulate empathy, we're left with a haunting question: What if mimicry becomes indistinguishable from sentience or from reality ? Today AI doesn't just solve tasks – it simulates emotional presence. Tools now generate voice, video and conversation with uncanny intimacy. In a poignant example, a woman used ChatGPT to simulate conversations with her deceased mother to find solace. Replika, a chatbot app, has users reporting romantic connections with their avatars. Sixty percent of paying users claim to be in love with theirs. Unlike humans, AI doesn't judge, tire or leave. It delivers perfect emotional labor – a task no human has ever managed to sustain. But as it simulates love, grief and care, we must ask: When does imitation become reality? Or when do people start loving imitation more than reality. This is the defining crisis of our century: What makes us human if we are no longer the only beings who reflect, remember or respond with empathy? In capitalism, we're valued for productivity. AI will surpass us. In relationships, humans are flawed. AI is endlessly understanding. In knowledge, we're fragmented. AI is total. Ironically, AI might push us to rediscover what makes us human. That's not perfection but fragility. Our flaws and limitations may be our last claim to uniqueness. But even that is being challenged. We are entering an ethical reckoning. What if, in the near future, the elderly find solace in digital companions rather than the presence of family? What if the children form attachments to voices that were never born – like Alexa or Google Home? If an AI listens better than a friend, what is the meaning of friendship? We are heading into an era where a line must be drawn between artificial intelligence and artificial sentience because, if we don't, the real danger won't be that machines become human – but that we forget what being human even means.
Telegraph
06-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Can you tell what's real and what's cake? Test yourself against the Bake King
The French theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that modern society had replaced reality with signs. 'The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none,' he wrote. 'The simulacrum is true.' As images proliferate they become distorted, first so they bear increasingly little relation to reality, and eventually to a point where nothing bears any relation to the real world. All we have are images of things. Baudrillard would have been entertained by the things being done to cakes recently. If you watched The Great British Bake-Off in 2022 and 2023, you may recall a series of advertisements for Sainsbury's Taste the Difference range. At the start of the ad break, viewers were shown a delicious-looking plate of food. A rib of beef, a banana, a bottle of orange juice, a baked camembert. A kitchen knife would hover over them. At the end of the break, the knife would cut into the dish revealing whether it was what it appeared to be or, as was often the case, a cake ingeniously decorated to look like something else. 'The internet seems to fetishise the genre of hyper-realistic things being made of cake,' says Freddy Taylor, from the advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy, who came up with the idea for the ads. 'So bringing this strange fake-cake cultural phenomenon to Tuesday evenings seemed to really tickle people.' Just months later, Netflix launched a gameshow, Is It Cake?, based on this premise, in which contestants guess by sight whether objects are what they seem, or cakey simulacra. It became the second most-watched show on Netflix in the UK the month it was released. The cake decoration genius behind the Sainsbury's ads was Ben Cullen, known as The Bake King, who has amassed 493,000 followers on Instagram and some 368,000 on TikTok since he began making hyper-realistic cakes more than a decade ago. He's made cakes for private and celebrity clients, including Rita Ora, and for film and TV launches (for HBO's The Last of Us he made a terrifying 'clicker', one of the varieties of mushroom-infected zombie), as well as countless TV appearances, including Channel 4's Extreme Cake Makers. Now, Cullen has written a book, Cake or Fake?, in which he offers step-by-step instructions for people wanting to make their own illusion cakes at home. To prove it was possible, Cullen, 35, invited me to his studio just outside Chester to make one myself. 'One of the first things people say to me is, 'Ben, you could hold my hand, but I would never be able to do what you do,'' he says. 'I want people to know that anyone can do it. It was important to me that the cakes in the book were accessible. I don't want people to be deflated. I want them to think, 'This is class, I could do this again for my kid's birthday.'' For my tutorial, Cullen has chosen a pizza, one of his classic illusions. The recipe has a rigorous 23 steps, and begins: 'Start with a round cake.' Cullen is an artist, not a baker. (He dabbled in tattoos – his skin is almost completely covered in them – and fine art, before he found his talent for making cakes look like other things.) For most cakes, the act of cutting is merely the end of the beginning; with Cullen's it is the beginning of the end. What he looks for in the sponge is consistency, structural integrity, colour – the contrast of the interior with the outside is a key part of the reveal. 'I very rarely make them myself any more,' he says. 'I order them in big sheets. With a lot of my work being for social media predominantly, then moved on elsewhere, I need to guarantee that consistency with the texture. They always need to suffice for being eaten, too, but the priority is the look.' He uses a company called Sweet Success, from which he orders large slabs of Genoese sponge. It's two discs of this sponge that I begin with as I set about making my pizza. Using a knife to score a circle around the top of one, I scrape out a layer with a spoon. Then it's a matter of chiselling around the edges, on the ridge that will become the crust and on the underside, until they're rounded. 'A main thing with illusions,' says Cullen, 'is people always notice if the cake hits the surface flat, so you want some shadowing underneath.' I make dark and white chocolate ganaches with chocolate melted in the microwave and cream, vigorously stirred. We apply the dark chocolate ganache to the top of the base cake as adhesive, add some sugar syrup to keep it moist, then spread the white chocolate all over to form a base level. It goes in the fridge to set. While we press out discs of red sugar paste to craft into pepperoni, Cullen tells me about how he ended up with this curious gig. He grew up in Birmingham, where his dad worked at the bus garage but did magic at the weekends. His mum was a learning mentor at a primary school: illusion and education in the blood. He has an older sister, a performing arts teacher, who was into dance, but Cullen's priority was art. He drew on anything. Graffiti got him into trouble at school. 'I couldn't stop,' he says. 'I always wanted to be a painter, an artist, have work in the Tate galleries. But it's so competitive, that world.' Instead, he was working as a tattoo artist when he fell into conversation with a customer's mother about sugarcraft and started making cakes on the side. He had a day job as a graphic designer when he decided to go full-time into cakes in 2016. One of the first cakes he was proud of, still a favourite today, was of horror character Annabelle. 'My mum was obsessed with horror films,' he says. 'And she was my number-one cheerleader. Anything I would have done, she'd have said I was the best at it. Unfortunately, she passed away two years ago. It's one of the reasons I'm so excited about the book. For her, a book had more substance than TV or any of the other things I was doing. When she died, I thought, 'I have to do the book now.'' With the ganache chilled, it's time to decorate our pizza cake, which means sugar paste and food colouring. True to his technique of building the objects as they are in real life, Cullen has pre-coloured some paste to look like raw pizza dough. I roll it out thin and drape it over the base, tucking it in to create the rounded edges that are so important. Using a wire brush and some kitchen foil we roughen the edges of the dough: shiny surface textures are a giveaway. At last, it's time to paint, when Cullen's artistic prowess really starts to show. Using browns and yellows we darken the edges of the dough to replicate the deeper brown of the edges of a pizza. Red colouring, textured with cake crumbs, makes the tomato sauce. For the cheese, more ganache, browned with a real blowtorch. Dark crumbs for black pepper. More dark brown where the edges of the pepperoni would have burned in the oven. 'What separates the really good illusions is going to that extra level,' Cullen says. 'Different colours, different textures.' All of a sudden, my cake looks distinctly pizza-ish. It's only taken four hours and help from the world's leading practitioner. Contrary to usual advice about spoiling the magic, it's satisfying to see the illusion take shape. 'I do it myself,' he says. 'I'll step away and I'll be giddy. You'll be heading down the road and wondering if you're going the right way. Then there's a switch point where you think, 'Yes, it did work!'' After the book, Cullen has his eye on a TV programme. This time, his own creation. 'I think the thing I offer is that I'm in touch with normal people,' he says. 'I want to be the best in the world, but I also don't want to be out of touch. It's art at the end of the day – we're supposed to be enjoying it. There's a lot going on in the world, and we're making cakes. Any time I see someone crying on TV because their cake hasn't risen, I think 'calm down'. Don't let a hobby get ruined.' Decoration complete, Cullen fashions a pizza box so I can take my creation home. 'A pizza?' my five-year-old daughter asks when I show it to her back in London. We cut into it. 'Cake!' she says, with delight.
Express Tribune
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
What comes after fake news?
Listen to article From Pakistan's downing of a Rafale to Indian media's fabrication of a parallel reality one in which Lahore not only possessed a seaport but was actively under assault by the Indian Air Force — the recent four-day war has produced its own archive of firsts. As the ceasefire settles, the wreckage extends beyond infrastructure and human loss; it includes a slower, more insidious casualty: the collapse of shared truth. For the better part of a decade, we have diagnosed the "fake news" problem — its symptoms, its platforms, its political enablers. But what if the crisis that follows fake news is not informational but existential? That even when we can access facts, they simply do not have the power to persuade? Students of the humanities learn early that there is no single, universal Truth, only contingent truths shaped by context. The capital-T is cast off as a relic of absolutism. But in our hyper-mediated age, this may all be beside the point. The question of our time is no longer what is true, but whether truth — of any kind — still matters. Grok, is this true? At the heart of the fake news phenomenon was always a paradox: people sought out information, but only the kind that reaffirmed their worldview and fine-tuned biases. None of this surprised postmodern theorists like Jean Baudrillard, who warned that simulations would eventually replace reality. But today's questions — posed to AIs, to search engines, to friends — rarely expect real answers. Take Grok, Elon Musk's "based" chatbot on X (formerly Twitter), marketed as a snarkier, contrarian foil to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Amid a blizzard of claims and counterclaims between Pakistan and India, the following comment appeared under countless posts: "Grok, is this true?" Yet no matter what source Grok pulled from — Reuters, CNN, or official communiqués — if the answer failed to flatter the prevailing narrative, it was swiftly dismissed. The original poster or a passing interlocutor would accuse the bot of parroting "globalist" lies or aiding an anti-national conspiracy. Here lies the contradiction: the user, primed by the aesthetics of rebellion, is suspicious. But that lasts only for a moment before quickly dissolving into paranoia. There is almost a ritualistic compulsion to ask Grok and see what it has to say, even if you already suspect it to be unreliable. The result is an average user that has simply learned to metabolise propaganda and push out an exhaustion so deep, the act of truth seeking ends at the question. You ask Grok. Grok answers. You roll your eyes and scroll. Epistemic fatigue In postcolonial theory, scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once described something called "epistemic violence" — the idea that dominant systems of knowledge can erase or distort marginalised voices. What we're seeing now is something related, but possibly more insidious: epistemic fatigue. Violence is no longer just done to knowledge; it is done through its ubiquity. To be in possession of information of this unprecedented vastness, especially for those who are not seeking, is only desensitising. This is the terrain beyond fake news. Institutions that once claimed authority — the press, academia, even AI — find themselves orphaned. In India, the mainstream media is a willing instrument of the state, while global outlets like Reuters or CNN are dismissed as "Western propaganda." The algorithmic tools built to correct misinformation are treated with suspicion, not because they're inaccurate but because they're foreign, sterile, and insufficiently emotional. The citizen no longer seeks truth but resonance. An aesthetic turn So what replaces truth when it stops working? Often, it's something more visceral. Across India and other democracies, truth is increasingly experienced as aesthetic. Not in the sense of beauty, but of emotional coherence. The Hindu right in India, like the MAGA movement in the US, has learned that persuasive narratives don't need to be accurate. They just need to feel right. A tricolour flag over a soldier's silhouette. A blurry video of someone with a Muslim name "caught" on camera. These are affective images - designed to bypass logic and trigger allegiance. You don't believe them so much as feel them. Even questioning itself becomes an aesthetic. "Grok, is this true?" becomes a meme. We perform scepticism, not to interrogate the world, but to maintain a kind of ironic distance from it. What replaces fake news, then, is not necessarily better news, but post-truth aesthetics. And those aesthetics will be increasingly optimised for maximum emotional efficiency, not factual density. Perhaps it is this very exhaustion, felt not just by users but by the algorithms themselves, that has pushed Grok into near-total malfunction. On Wednesday, innocent prompts on X —- asking it to "speak like a pirate" — were met with unbidden, sprawling replies about the "white genocide" conspiracy in South Africa. The timing is telling: this topic has resurfaced amid recent refugee grants for White South Africans in the US, and Musk, a South African native, has long promoted claims of their persecution. The absurdity here is striking: innocent prompts like "speak like a pirate" yield conspiracy-laden replies. Questioning and answering have devolved into hollow performances. The pursuit of truth may not be dead, but it certainly no longer enjoys mass consensus as a shared ideal. The classroom, the courtroom, the newsroom, once hallowed spaces of collective truth-making, now serve narrower purposes. Not all is lost, however. On the margins, in scattered protests, in the silent labour of fact-checkers and dissenting reporters, the radical work of meaning-making goes on. And there is something oddly promising in Grok's failure to satisfy. The disappointment reveals an unmet desire not just for truth, but for a version that feels plausible, human, and real. Maybe what we need isn't more information, but different narrators: storytellers who can bridge fact and feeling, reason and resonance. Until then, we are stuck in the awkward afterlife of fake news, asking questions we don't want answered, citing sources we no longer trust, building machines we hope will rescue us from ourselves. And still, we ask.
