French social theorist Jean Baudrillard has this concept called the hyperreality . It’s rooted in simulacrum (Latin for “copying shit”) and follows this rule: the “faker” something seems, the more “real” everything else around it seems to be in comparison, even if this perception is a false one.

Baudrillard suggests that in order to deal with our postmodern times (aka the Horrors,) individuals employ a fatal strategy (aka a coping mechanism) that he refers to as the fractal self , which involves the self disintegrating and “becoming a proliferating fractal of objects and simulations, leading to the collapse of the subject-object... See more