Marian Donner: ‘We live in a world of appearances’

At the third edition of Media for Democracy, writer Marian Donner delivered a column before an audience of 130 representatives from the media sector. Her full contribution can be read below.

Text: Marian Donner

This may come as a surprise, but I will simply say it as it is: none of this is real. Not this gathering, not the way we are sitting here at lunch, not the workshops you attended this morning… all of it is fake. We live in a world of appearances. Or, as the French philosopher Baudrillard called it: in a hyperreality. Think of the Matrix film series, for example, to get a picture. It is no coincidence that Baudrillard was the greatest source of inspiration for the Wachowski sisters, the creators and makers of the Matrix.

And his idea was this: the images that are poured over us daily via television, advertising, newspapers, the internet, and social media are no longer a reflection of reality, but simulacra: copies without an origin or original that are endlessly reproduced. The images only refer to themselves, generating their own context and meaning, and thus also evoking simulated experiences and feelings. Simulated experiences and feelings that, moreover, are considered by many people to be more real than directly lived experience.

I will give you an example. Young women who, in daily life, try to look like the photoshopped images of botoxed film stars who look 31 but are 53. Young men who mirror themselves after the performed luxury lives of braggarts in the manosphere. Baudrillard himself gave the example of Hollywood disaster movies that are endlessly digitally edited to make the image look ‘as real as possible.’ Anyone who actually ends up in a hurricane or earthquake might just be disappointed by the lack of spectacle. It is technology that, as Baudrillard says, can give us ‘more reality than nature itself’.

Or let me take an example closer to home today. A politician makes a bold statement on social media, an outcry ensues, hordes of journalists crowd around to get an explanation, a debate is requested in the House of Representatives, fellow politicians express their horror in that debate, only to then share the footage of that horror on social media again, and in the evening everyone is sitting at the talk show tables. The outrage machine rages on, and the copy of the copy of the copy is endlessly reproduced: that is hyperreality.

But the best example is, of course, former Prime Minister Dick Schoof, who defended ‘the strictest asylum policy ever’ by referring to a ‘perceived asylum crisis’ of ‘the common man’.

Baudrillard already described the existence of this hyperreality in 1981, in his book Simulacra and Simulation. Long before the rise of the internet and social media, then, not to mention AI, with which truly new, fake realities can be created. And yet Baudrillard foresaw what was to come. Not because he was a fortune teller, I assume, or had a crystal ball, but because he extended the existing tendencies of his own time into the future.

Which is to say: new technologies never come out of nowhere, nor are they neutral. Everything is always a creation, a continuation, of a world that already exists.

And what prevails in that world—even then, but it has only grown worse since—is, in my opinion, a sense of alienation, of division. There is a discrepancy between tangible reality and the representation of it on our screens. In Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the uncanny feeling that something is not right is constantly lurking. On our screens, life nowadays has color; there is always commotion, distraction, outcry, but meanwhile, the world around us is increasingly decaying into a polluted and wasteland area built up with warehouses, data centers, and power plants. Think again of The Matrix, and Neo, lying naked in his pod. Online, plugged in, he eats steak instead.

And this is a brief tangent, but the funny thing is that you also see that alienation or division reflected in science. Whether it is in physics, astronomy, or philosophy, serious theories constantly appear in serious journals about how this world we live in is not the only world, and certainly not the original. Because we live in a hologram, for example. Or in a parallel universe. Or because a whole mirror universe was created at the Big Bang, exactly opposite to ours, because time has no direction. Even down to quantum mechanics, that most prominent science of all, which literally states that our reality does not consist of matter—not of tables and chairs and bodies—but of relationships.

Which is to say: not only are new technologies an outgrowth of a world that already exists, the same applies to the direction of scientific thinking.

But back to the alienation, that uncanny feeling that something is not right, the idea that the reality we see and hear is not the real reality, but a simulacrum, a copy of a copy of a copy. Anyone who pays attention sees the effects of this everywhere. People no longer believe politicians, no longer believe journalists; they sometimes no longer even believe their own ears and eyes: in the enormous number of videos of dead Palestinian children, they see only actors.

There are people who claim that, like Neo, they have taken the red pill and now see reality for what it truly is, like all those losers like Andrew Tate in the manosphere. There are people who withdraw: they no longer follow the news, no longer follow current events; they go offline, seek contact with nature, with animals, and each other. They start a commune in Portugal or Paraguay. Or they dedicate themselves to food forests, the darkness of the night, or try to communicate with the sea.

What they all have in common is that these people, more and more people, are looking for something real, something tangible. Something that breaks through this hyperreality, this continuous storm of images.

And sometimes, very occasionally, that succeeds. A crack is indeed made. About two weeks ago, I saw it happen myself, on Nieuwsuur. The item was about a woman who had bought a piece of forest, solely to then close that forest off, even to herself, so that no human could ever go there again.

The cameraman interviewing her could hardly seem to believe it. ‘And who does the forest belong to then?’ he asked for the umpteenth time. ‘To itself,’ the woman kept repeating. Back to the studio, where Jeroen Wollaarts could no longer suppress his laughter; he apparently found this idea so ridiculous.

But this is precisely the essence. Because, of course, a reality still exists outside of hyperreality and all those images and AI copies on our screens. And okay, of course this gathering is also real, this day is real, but the question is: who or what is directing our thoughts today, our conversations—from what perspective are we looking, listening, and thinking? Are we occupied with a copy of a copy of a copy, the latest outcry, or do we manage to break through it?

These are the questions that matter.

• To whom does the forest belong, to whom our tangible environment, to whom the land, the water, the earth?
• To whom do our desires belong, our fears, our words; to whom the screens we stare at, to whom our attention?
• And above all: how do we get it all back?

Thank you.