Comment by achierius
5 days ago
Baudrillard just gets more relevant every day. Honestly I find it hard to imagine how someone could have media literacy in the modern day without coming to an intuitive understanding of semiotics, whether they know it or not!
I called myself a Semiotics Engineer for 4 years, but the title didn't catch. I did domain analysis, logical model creation, concrete model creation in XML/OWL/KML, model review and improvement, semantic reasoning-based system design/implementation, and message system design/implementation. This was before the rise of ML.
What's your take on LLMs ? I ask you to comment on any aspect, whatever you think is the most interesting from a semiotician's perspective.
Everyone who is familiar with Baudrillard goes "simulacrum!" whenever they encounter LLM output. LLM output is after all a pure chain of symbols that is extremely far removed from a connection with ground truth reality.
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That collection of skills is still valuable.
Him and also Marshal McLuhan. McLuhan realized all the way back in the 60s that computer technology (like all technology) in some sense wants things and manipulates the user to get it. The 'electric' technologies have their own logic and are not neutral on questions of humanity, politics, nature, etc.
Yes, the 21st century is the age of simulacra and simulation. Post-truth society.
I'm pretty sure this was set in motion in the 20th century. This century is only about refining and monetizing it to the nth power.
OP here -- I like Baudrillard and McLuhan but the media theorist who best captures the present IMO is Flusser: https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/the-discourse-is-the-cybe...
Heh, I wonder if (hope that ?) Discord and WhatsApp are the equivalent of railroad's robber barons : they brought world-changing technology, but at the cost of tyrannical greed, before their abuses being reigned in by regulations.
Though now that I think of it, didn't that only happen when their power was on the way out, replaced by trucks and container ships ?
I find the ideas of Baudrillard really accurate in describing some parts of modern life, but to be honest I feel like he just saying random stuff when I tried to read one of his book. It's so metaphorical and abstract it's very difficult to understand what exactly he is saying.
My best experience reading Baudrillard was out loud with a group. Some passages spoke to some but not others, but most generated discussion. Some are also obvious to us now in the TikTok age - uncannily so.
Definitely when I read his works even though I didn't understand some of his writings it made me think about it.
He's not "just saying random stuff", he was a very serious thinker. Unlike Derrida he wasn't much of a joker.
Perhaps language is fundamentally metaphorical, and perhaps reality is actually abstract.
That's just what I feel I didn't claim that it actually is just random stuff. But I value clarity and Baudrillard doesn't seem to try to be. However, as I said I do find his general points very valuable just his style is not my cup of tea.
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