Hyperreality: When Copies Replace Reality and Why They Feel Truer
From Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern vision to the Upanishadic wisdom of māyā, hyperreality reveals how signs and simulations often eclipse the real itself.
Author credentials:
Karan Bir Singh Sidhu is a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the Punjab cadre and former Special Chief Secretary. An alumnus of the University of Manchester, UK, with a Master’s degree in Economics, he writes at the intersection of virtual reality in the AI age, ancient Indian scriptures, and postmodern theories of hyperreality.
What Do We Mean by “Reality”?
Begin with the ordinary sense of reality: the unmediated world of things and events. A river chills your ankles; bread smells nutty; a friend’s laugh trembles the air. This immediate, resistant world—what philosophers sometimes call the “given”—set the historical measure of what counts as real. For millennia, such contact anchored judgement, language, and common sense.
From Representation to Simulation
Humans quickly layered representations over that baseline: stories, paintings, maps, equations. At first they were plainly second-order—no one mistook a map for a valley. The camera, cinema, broadcast media and now networks of feeds multiplied the reach and vividness of signs. Gradually the sign stopped patiently pointing outward and began looping back: seeding desires, scripting expectations, and pre-shaping experience. We learned to meet the world through its representations first.
Baudrillard’s Provocation
Jean Baudrillard called this condition hyperreality: a cultural state in which models, codes and images no longer refer to a stable outside but help generate what we treat as real. The copy outruns the original; sometimes there never was an original. His lapidary formula—“a real without origin”—is not mysticism but sociology: institutions, markets, and everyday habits increasingly run on simulations that are operationally sufficient, emotionally saturating, and commercially profitable.
The Four Orders of Simulacra
Baudrillard sketches a progression. First, images reflect a profound reality (the portrait resembles its sitter). Second, they mask and deform reality (the flattering portrait). Third, they mask the absence of a reality (a staged portrait of someone who never sat). Fourth, images relate to no reality at all: pure simulacra, self-referential signs whose currency is circulation and click-through rather than correspondence. Our mediasphere mingles all four, but the gravitational pull is toward the fourth.
Theme Parks and the Safety of the Fake
Theme parks and “heritage villages” reveal the logic. They promise authenticity while delivering permanent sunshine, cleanliness, narrative clarity and curated delight. Everything is brighter than life; queues marshal attention; soundtracks choreograph emotion. The paradox is that visitors can feel more fully alive inside the scripted environment than outside. The fake is not simply the opposite of the real; it is a rival technology for manufacturing felt reality—safe, intensified, purchasable.
Social Media and the Branded Self
Platforms train us to fabricate hyperreal personae. A life becomes an editorial calendar; a face, a filter stack; a mood, a colour grade. The feed does not merely report experience—it optimises it for legibility and reward. Over time, metrics colonise intention: we do in order to post. The profile acquires more social weight than the messy human who tends it. Employers, dates, and even old friends often meet the page of signs before the person. The self, once an unfolding project, becomes a franchise.
Markets, Metrics, and the Victory of Signs
Consumer culture translates goods into meanings. Trainers signal discipline or rebellion; coffee telegraphs lifestyle; a phone brand declares tribe. Financial markets price expectations more than fields and factories. Dashboards bring the same substitution into schools and hospitals, where numerical proxies stand in for learning and care. Because numbers are sortable and defensible, we mistake them for the thing itself. The proxy becomes the product; the indicator, the objective.
Upanishadic Interlude: ‘Neti, Neti’—Against the Sufficiency of Names
A restrained echo sounds in ancient Indian thought. The Upanishads teach an apophatic discipline—neti, neti (“not this, not this”)—stripping away name and form in pursuit of Brahman, the ground beyond description. Where hyperreality multiplies names until names become habitat, the Upanishadic move is subtractive: a scepticism toward the sufficiency of any appearance. Both diagnose the enchantment of signs; one counsels seeing through them, the other shows what happens when we do not.
News and the Spectacle
Public life increasingly arrives as theatre. Campaigns turn into brands; crises become programming; the pundit’s “take” competes with the event it interprets. In such a setting, truth is not what corresponds but what trends. The danger is less simple falsehood than saturation. When everything is framed, captioned and dramatised, attention becomes the scarce resource—and the loudest simulation wins. A story that fits an existing narrative outpaces a correction that does not.
The Digital Turn: AI, VR, and Synthetic Companions
New tools make hyperreality ambient. Virtual and augmented reality overlay space with rentable worlds. Generative models produce text, images and voices with no external referent. Synthetic influencers attract followings, sell products, and never age. None of this is “fake” in the sense of useless; it works, persuades and earns. The question shifts from “Is it real?” to “Is it effective?” As interfaces thicken, the felt difference between talking with a person and with a convincing artefact narrows.
Second Echo from the Upanishads: Māyā and Discernment
Vedāntic thought names māyā—not mere deception, but the world’s dazzling power to present the manifold as complete. Hyperreality is a technological māyā: not a lie, but a splendour that tempts us to stop asking what more there is. The Upanishadic remedy is viveka (discernment): not withdrawal from signs, but clarity about their status. That older wisdom pairs well with digital hygiene.
Costs: When the Map Eats the Territory
Hyperreality has uses—comfort, safety, scalability, creativity. But the social and moral costs are real. First, it flattens difficulty: tidy narratives displace stubborn particulars, making us impatient with slow, local repair. Second, it erodes trust: once every surface can be manufactured, we begin to suspect all surfaces. Third, it de-skills perception: accustomed to curated awe, we find unscripted nature too quiet and unscripted people too awkward. Finally, it hollows institutions as targets replace purposes; what is measured eclipses what matters.
Practices for Living with Simulacra
There is no going “back” behind mediation, but we can diversify our diets of reality. Seek friction: cook from raw ingredients; mend what breaks; learn a craft that pushes back. Cultivate slow attention: long walks without earbuds, books without alerts. Audit proxies: which metrics miss the core of the thing? Ask of images: who benefits from this framing? Mix first-hand and second-hand knowledge—visit the place the brochure promises; speak to the person behind the profile. Design media sabbaths. And in speech and policy, reward candour over polish.
A Final Perspective
Baudrillard does not command us to reject images; he unmasks our situation. We inhabit systems where appearance is not merely decoration but production—of value, feeling, identity and power. To notice this is not to despair. It is to gain leverage: to choose when to accept the hyperreal as a tool, when to puncture it with the stubby facts of bodies and weather, and when to let an older wisdom whisper, not this, not this. The task is not to flee the copy, but to remember—persistently—what it cannot replace.