Book Recommendation: Simulacra and Simulation

Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et Simulation) is Jean Baudrillard's best-known work, he is also the author of The Consumer Society, The Transparency of Evil, Symbolic Exchange, and Death, which has been influential in wide circles since it was written in 1981. Baudrillard (1929-2007) is known for his work on poststructuralist, postmodern philosophy and media cultures, mass media, and opposing all ideological currents. The author and the founder of Simulation Theory, examines reality or reality within the framework of the concepts of simulacrum, to simulate and simulation. The definitions of key concepts are as follows:

Simulacrum: The appearance that wants to be perceived as a reality.
Simulate: To present something that is not real as if it were real, to try to show it.
Simulation: The artificial reproduction of a device, a machine, a system, a phenomenon, by means of a model or a computer program, for the purpose of examining, demonstrating or explaining.

Baudrillard claims that the truth has disappeared from our lives and that it has been replaced by simulacra, which a copy and imitation of reality. In this simulation universe we live in, nothing presented to us as truth is real. Even the army is tied up with simulators. Simulacrums (images that replace reality) have been replaced by simulators against the reality of the traditional military system. Today, the fact that Ramses' mummy is in Paris means that France has exhumed it "as if it were something from its own past" and caused it to perish. Baudrillard explains it this way: “Thus it would have been enough to exhume Ramses to ensure his extermination by museumification. Because mummies don't rot from worms: they die from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic, master over putrefaction and death, to an order of history, science, and museums, our order, which no longer masters anything, which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and subsequently to try to revive it with science. Irreparable violence toward all secrets, the violence of a civilization without secrets, hatred of a whole civilization for its own foundation.”

The work, such as the Ramses example, explains the loss of reality through examples such as the Holocaust series, the movie Apocalypse Now, holograms, and tribes. The book Simulacra and Simulation, a postmodern philosophy book, is among the basic books that should be read by those who are interested in the subject, in today's digital society, when the concept of post-truth is on the rise.