Baudrillard is one of the worst philosophers in the world, who deliberately makes simple things confusing instead of making confusing things simple.
take this for example
>If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire, this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreads still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
>Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreads are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
The Borges tale refers to "On the Exactitude of Science", which is a (very) short story about someone making a map that's exactly the same thing as the real thing, which is useless, so they leave it in the desert.
en.wikipedia.org
In the first paragraph, if the map rotted in the desert after the actual fall of the empire, then it becomes a simulation that's as real as the real thing itself, even where the real thing no longer exists. This spelled, to Baudrillard, the modern age, when people tried to reproduce the experience of life.
The second paragraph describes a map that is not only better than a real, but has no original -- instead, the map is the original and the real follows the map. To Baudrillard, this is a postmodern age, where traditional structures break down. This analogy might be confusing, but it's useful to think of it as religious or liberal arts/English major ignoramuses interpreting science. The "real" to Baudrillard was not merely real things as normal people think of it, but what he thought was culturally real. Hence, this is not necessarily so much a metaphysical description, but a historical one. Over the years, Baudrillard observed existentialism and modern art espousing the authenticity of experience breakdown and get replaced by globalism, consumerism, mass production, copies that are as good as the real thing.
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