Hyperreal: The next-level escape from the human condition

Last week our power went out during an overnight ice storm. For six hours, the house did not have warm air artificially pumped into it by the technology in our attic. I woke up to indoor air ten degrees below normal and working its way toward thermal equilibrium with the outdoors—about 24F.

I also had to deal with the fridge and freezer contents, which ironically would soon not be cold enough.

Technology creates false realities so we can live more comfortably than nature would have it. In my home, and probably yours, this ongoing effort includes three different carefully calibrated temperature zones: fridge, freezer, people.

Fortunately, the matrix of civilization flickered back to life soon enough for all three of our zones to return to unreality.

Cocoons

We’ve always woven mediating cocoons between ourselves and the human condition—first for survival, then to avoid pain, then to achieve comfort, then for pleasure. Wrapping ourselves in bearskins, planting crops, building a fire, a home, a city, a latrine. Air conditioning. Vaccines. We're forever dissatisfied with the conditions of our lease, so in the absence of a Building Superintendent, we kick the radiator ourselves, putting some technology into play on the bearskin-to-vaccine spectrum.

Access to the fancy end of that spectrum has always been unequal. Over 90 percent of households in the US and Japan have air conditioning, for example, while 8 percent of homes in India and 9 percent in tropical Indonesia do. Same for nearly everything else on the spectrum.

Those who have treasure will spend it first insulating themselves from the basic human condition—hunger, thirst, heat, cold, disease, violence, loneliness, mortality—with varying degrees of success. There is no reason to think this will end.

What will change, though—what is changing—is the nature and intensity of the things that need escaping.

The future of our escape

The impact of climate change will continue to be uneven along the income gradient. The rich will build themselves and their families an escape from it, whether in climate-controlled compounds or Arctic bunker-cities or an Elysium-like orbital paradise.

But this class-separation scenario barely scratches the surface of the cocoons that are coming.

One of the most under-discussed aspects of our current trajectory is the movement toward not just separate levels of protection from pain, but profoundly separate realities. The siloing of information has already created relatively distinct ecosystems of perceived facts. The next step, for those who can afford it (or have it afforded for them) is hyperreality—the creation of individualized bubbles of perception that complete our fragmentation into genuinely disconnected experiences of the world.

The French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) helped lay the groundwork for this conversation, including the dissolution of the distinction between the real and the artificial. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he outlined four stages through which a representation evolves:

1. Faithful representation: A faithful copy of reality, reflecting what is real.
2. Perversion of reality: The image begins to distort or exaggerate reality.
3. Pretending to represent reality: The image no longer reflects a real object but claims to do so.
4. Pure simulation: The image has no relation to reality, doesn't claim to, and becomes its own self-contained truth.

In the fourth stage, the simulation overtakes reality entirely, creating hyperreality. The boundary between the real and the simulated is gone, and simulations become more convincing or more desirable than the real thing.

Baudrillard cited Disneyland as a metaphor for hyperreality: it creates an idealized, fabricated version of reality so convincing that it distracts from the complexities of the real world. Las Vegas, shopping malls, social media, video game worlds, shows with laugh tracks, advertisements, online dating profiles, "reality" TV, sports arenas, pro wrestling—each in its own way creates a simulated reality somewhere in Baudrillard's four stages, mostly #2 or 3.

Toward pure simulation

Movement toward stage four hyperreality is likely to start with the increased use of generalized artificial environments—a world with layers of artifice so seamless, so vibrant, that distinguishing the simulated from the real is no longer a practical concern for most of us. It's just accepted. The representation of things becomes more compelling than the things themselves, and it permeates every facet of life. Reality is overshadowed by its enhanced double, a virtual landscape sculpted to captivate and satisfy in ways the tangible world never could.

Everything about marketing is already well on the way to this.

Then comes individualization. Augmented reality (AR) lenses overlay the mundane with the extraordinary. A simple street scene transforms into interactive canvases. Buildings shimmer with dynamic façades tailored to evoke nostalgia or excitement depending on your emotional state. Parks fill with virtual plants and animals that respond to your touch, while advertisements whisper your name, weaving themselves into your thoughts as if they originated from you.

Entertainment is no longer a collective experience but an intimate performance tailored for one. The algorithms we have now on Spotify and Netflix will be charming throwbacks by comparison. Films and shows adapt in real time to your preferences, altering plotlines, settings, and even characters to align with your mood and past viewing habits. You can even join the narrative as a protagonist, making every movie a VR gateway. Music is recomposed based on your changing neurological profile.

The concept of truth begins to warp. There is no longer any shared information ecosystem. Even the sub-communities of liberal and conservative silos cease to exist. News is tailored based on individual beliefs, presenting events in shades that confirm your worldview. Society fragments into countless micro-realities, each convincing in its authenticity.

Social interactions are invaded by pervasive simulation. Meticulous avatars replace physical appearances, allowing us to present idealized versions of ourselves—currently foreshadowed perfectly by beautifying filters on social media. Conversations occur in lush virtual settings where weather and ambiance shift to reflect each participant's emotional state. Relationships flourish in these hyper-real environments while becoming untethered from the physical world. The authenticity of a laugh, a touch, or a shared silence is subsumed by their algorithmic counterparts, like pseudo-corporeal emojis.

Other applications offer enormous benefits. Students learn in classrooms where historical events unfold around them. A lesson on ancient Rome takes place in a bustling Roman forum as students interact with AI-generated historical figures. Doctors use hyper-real simulations to diagnose and treat patients, navigating virtual models of organs and systems in real time. A child in a hospital bed explores distant galaxies. An elderly widow in a small apartment dances with her partner in the EDM club of their youth. All lovely.

But as hyperreality takes hold, both the natural and social worlds become distant and quaint. The constant immersion in idealized environments fosters dissatisfaction with reality and a sense of alienation from yourself. Spending so much time in spaces where every flaw is edited out leaves individuals to grapple with the weight of imperfection in their own lives. The carefully curated virtual self—always poised, always appealing—casts a long shadow over the vulnerable, messy reality of being human. The pressure to maintain these idealized personas can lead to a pervasive anxiety, a fear of falling short not just in the eyes of others but in one’s own.

Again, it's a straight line from the self-curated worlds of social media.

The stratification of reality

For the affluent, hyperreality becomes a playground of endless possibility, with premium experiences tailored to their every whim. They can afford access to the most advanced technologies, ensuring that their hyperreal worlds are richer, more immersive, and more exclusive. Hyperreal workspaces allow them to conduct business globally without leaving home, complete with hyper-accurate simulations of colleagues and clients—an easily imaginable step beyond the Zoom meeting. Above all, an armor of physical protection and denial floats between them and a worsening climate reality, preserving bubbles of ideal temperature and humidity regardless of the forecast.

The middle class might lease individual hyperreal experiences, or subscribe to tiers, even as their workplaces increasingly plunge them into virtual training and work environments. The working class is limited to generic rather than individualized hyperrealities, laced with ads, and mostly those meant to increase their productivity.

The lower socioeconomic classes and those in under-resourced countries will as usual be stuck with unmediated reality. Access to hyperreality becomes yet another marker of privilege, increasingly alienating and separating the unconnected from the rest of society, rendering them even more invisible.

There will be resistance movements—excluded groups advocating either for free access to hyperreality or for a full-stop return to the real world. These will go as well as such things tend to do.

The timeline and the downfall

Futurists studying our current high-speed slouching toward hyperreality see major aspects of it in place by 2045 as advancements in AI, augmented reality, and virtual reality achieve seamless personalization and immersion, cutting us off further and further from each others' perceptual worlds.

Like most tech, the transition to accepting hyperreal experiences over physical reality will be generational. People born into early versions of these technologies could push full integration into daily life by 2050.

Our collective comeuppance may be simple and swift. Hyperreality would rely on gargantuan computational power, energy, and infrastructure. Climate crises, attacks by hostile foreign entities, a nice coronal mass ejection, or even climate-induced global unrest could disrupt these systems, causing millions of bubbles to pop simultaneously, rudely dropping their occupants into an especially harsh reality.

And there's a good chance that the matrix supporting those lost unrealities would never flicker back to life.