From Systems to Simulacra
How the real was replaced, and the work of reconstruction we must now all face.
I. Introduction: The Disembodied Story
Once, to tell a story was to share a room.
It happened across the firelight. In the space between breaths. In the flicker of expression, when the listener leaned in. Stories weren't content. They were encounters. They lived in bodies, in gestures, in the charged silence that lets a truth land.
That kind of storytelling still exists.
But it now exists alongside something very recent, recent in evolutionary terms, and structurally different in ways we are still coming to terms with.
These new storytelling systems don't just change the medium; they also transform the way we experience it. They change the geometry of communication. They allow the few to speak to the many, not in a shared relational field, but as signal sources broadcasting into flattened, disembodied space. What once required proximity and presence now scales instantly, and without the field dynamics of physical presence and embodiment.
This isn't storytelling in the traditional sense. It's asymmetric narrative projection.
And with that scale comes leverage:
Attention becomes capital
Influence becomes currency
Ideas that once required care to carry now spread at speed, detached from embodied context, decoupled from accountability, and increasingly protected by institutional power
The result is a new kind of narrative authority:
One that cosplays relational intimacy but commodifies communication.
One that appears meritocratic but is a closely guarded gate.
One that wears the garments of Eros but is an empty suit.
And the deeper result, the one we rarely name, is hunger.
A hunger for what these systems suppress: presence, congruence, the felt experience of truth being lived in real time.
Into that vacuum step prophets, influencers, and guru figures—
from Osho's sensual mysticism,
to Jordan Peterson's mythic psychoanalysis,
to Andrew Tate's performative masculinity,
to the Bronze Age Pervert's ironic vitalism,
to Gabor Maté's soft-spoken gospel of trauma,
to the algorithmic priestesses of wellness who blend breathwork, skincare, and cosmic archetypes into a single radiant feed.
Not all charlatans. Not all the time.
Many offer genuine insight.
But what unites them isn't necessarily truth.
It's embodied narrative authority.
They perform coherence in a way our institutions no longer can.
They simulate recursion—
when the world is caught in loopless mimicry.
What they offer is not coherence in the generative sense.
It is the simulation of coherence through embodied performance.
They feel grounded. They feel real.
They offer rhythm, certainty, and the aesthetics of conviction.
And in a world where institutional truth has lost its voice, and narrative is distributed without context, charisma becomes its own kind of verification.
II. From Embodiment to Performance
Oral storytelling is not just communication. It's co-regulation.
The speaker and the listener are in a real-time feedback loop. Meaning arises not just from content, but from embodied congruence: tone, pace, gaze, rhythm.
But with every media leap, we abstracted away from that field:
Print froze the voice.
Radio dislocated it.
Television offered a face, but no shared space.
Social media flattened presence into “content”.
First, we replaced presence with polish, then, unable to bear the absence of coherence, we trained actors to simulate it. We curated authenticity like an aesthetic. We didn't just perform ourselves—we performed the feeling of being real.
And so, we replaced something that was once known in our bodies with something legible to our minds.
This is how we arrive at simulated coherence: stylized narratives that travel well, feel urgent, but can no longer metabolize contradiction.
When feedback weakens, optics dominate. Coherence becomes something you perform, not something you build.
We don't fix institutions; we rebrand them.
We don't clarify values; we manage impressions.
We don't metabolize contradiction; we deflect it with vibes.
This isn’t “branding.” It’s a survival strategy in a world where a single contradiction can collapse years of carefully curated coherence.
Coherence takes time. It requires contradiction. It demands structure.
But time is expensive. Contradiction is risky. Structure is slow to scale.
So, we simulate.
This is how performance becomes the operating system.
In this system:
Universities perform expertise.
Governments perform decisiveness.
Media perform urgency.
Brands perform soul.
But under pressure, these simulations collapse because they are low-fidelity simulacra of things that were once real.
They don't evolve. They escalate. Because simulation cannot absorb contradiction—it can only route around it, suppress it, or punish it.
III. The Generative and the Performative
If simulation is the shortcut, what does it replace?
It replaces generativity—the slow, recursive, feedback-rich process by which coherence emerges through contradiction and its resolution, not despite it.
Performance is not inherently bad. Performance can stabilize and ritualize structure; it can bind people together in shared myths. But when performance becomes so dominant that it substitutes for generative structure, it produces a brittle form of coherence. One that appears aligned, but cannot maintain its shape under pressure.
This is what we are seeing, and once we look past the noise, we all know it.
Let's draw the distinction clearly:
Speed
Performative: Instant & Repetitive
Generative: Recursive & Emergent
Feedback
Performative: Suppressed or deflected
Generative: Integrated and metabolized
Appearance
Performative: Smooth, legible, closed
Generative: Often ambiguous, open-ended
Pressure Response
Performative: Collapses under contradiction
Generative: Strengthens through iteration
Source of Coherence
Performative: External approval
Generative: Internal structure + feedback
Goal
Performative: Resonance
Generative: Resolution
Performative coherence is designed to feel aligned. It is fluent, aesthetic, and emotionally resolved. However, it is fragile because it relies on suppressing contradictions. It cannot metabolize feedback without unraveling.
Generative coherence takes time. It tolerates friction. It absorbs feedback not as a threat, but as fuel. It builds alignment slowly through recursive loops, difficult conversations, broken expectations, and the emergence of trust.
We can see the difference in how institutions behave under pressure.
When Generative Order Holds
In 2023, Delta Air Lines faced a significant backlash after rolling out an overhaul of its elite loyalty program, which alienated its most loyal customers. The change was announced as a clean, legible upgrade—designed to simplify tiers and improve the experience. But the feedback was immediate, overwhelming, and clear: the new system destroyed perceived fairness.
Here's where it got interesting. Rather than doubling down or defending the change, Delta's CEO came out within days, admitted the mistake, used the backlash as design input, and reworked the system. The company didn't just perform an apology. It integrated the contradiction. The result wasn't perfect, but it was a generative one. Trust recovered.
When Performance Snaps
Compare this with the collapse of CNN+. Launched in 2022 with considerable fanfare and a substantial budget, it was billed as the future of streaming news. The branding was slick. The positioning was confident. Internally, however, teams were not aligned. No one had metabolized the fundamental questions: Who is this for? What unmet need does it serve?
It was all signal, no structure. Within a month, the platform shut down.
This wasn't a failure of content. It was a failure of performative coherence: a belief that fluency and brand polish could substitute for adaptive feedback. That aesthetics alone could generate loyalty. However, when the pressure mounted—cultural, financial, and internal—the simulation collapsed.
Both tell the same story: what happens when simulation meets pressure.
IV. When Symbol Outlives Structure
Jonathan Schwartz's Iron Law of Institutions puts it plainly:
"The people who control institutions care more about their power within them than the power of the institution itself."
This isn't cynicism. It's structure.
In systems dominated by performative logic, the performance itself becomes the point. Institutions mainly serve their purported functions on autopilot—their real job is to preserve status positions and sinecures. What survives isn't what works. It's what signals stability to the people inside.
And so we get:
Political parties that would rather lose elections than challenge internal hierarchies
Universities that suppress inquiry to protect administrative consensus
Media outlets that favor tribal affirmation over investigative risk
When these inconsistencies become too obvious to ignore, the media, itself part of this system, typically expresses surprise: “It was not supposed to work like that”. That may be what passes for truth inside the fabricated institutional web of narratives, but not in the real world.
For example. The fact that the democratic party gaslit the world by pretending that Joe Biden was not in dramatic physical and cognitive decline for most of his presidency is a classic example of this process in action. The reality was largely irrelevant to them; all that mattered was the optics, and trying to manage the optics to preserve internal institutional coherence, mutual obligations, and power structures. In the end, the Democrats ran two candidates, both of whom fell very short of where the bar needed to be to win, but both of them (Biden, and Harris) were acceptable to the internal balances of power and acceptable narratives within the Democratic Party.
Enter the Media: Each new case of “narrative over reality” is presented as a bug: a glitch in an otherwise smooth system. Of course, these are not bugs; these are features.
It's the system operating exactly as designed.
Once performance becomes the operating system, recursion becomes a threat. Dissent becomes disloyalty. Adaptation becomes instability. Even asking the wrong question triggers institutional immune responses.
So leaders stop metabolizing contradiction. They start suppressing it.
And what was once a generative field, a university, a newsroom, a court, a council, becomes a stage—a site for narrative containment.
This is why so many institutions feel both hyperactive and hollow. Everything is moving. But nothing can change.
They still look like they work.
They still perform legitimacy.
Under stress, they can't adapt.
They demonize feedback, and then they break.
They have confused optics with order and built systems that appear robust but are inherently fragile.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb warned in The Black Swan:
"The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know."
The systems collapse not from predictable failures, but from un-modeled ruptures that expose what was never there.
Harvard and the Four Stages of Simulation
French theorist Jean Baudrillard once mapped the stages by which a symbol loses touch with reality:
It reflects a fundamental reality
It masks and perverts that reality
It masks the absence of that reality
It bears no relation to reality at all—it becomes pure simulacrum
Many (most?) modern institutions have passed through all four stages.
Harvard offers a pristine case study and Solzhenitsyn for one, saw it immediately, and had the courage to call it by its name.
Stage One: Reflection of a Profound Reality
There was a time, however imperfect, when Harvard embodied a deep structure.
Its prestige reflected a genuine civilizational function: generative scholarship, intellectual rigor, and moral inquiry. It wasn't always right, but it metabolized contradiction.
It taught the feedback loop.
Stage Two: Masking and Perverting the Real
As prestige became the product, Harvard began performing seriousness while eroding the structures that sustained it. Admissions grew opaque. Inquiry grew filtered. Status management displaced recursion.
But the appearance remained: this was still the seat of merit, still the citadel of critical thought.
Stage Three: Masking the Absence of Reality
Before the crisis broke into public view, the breakdown had already happened: quietly, institutionally, symbolically.
Harvard had long since stopped metabolizing contradiction, but it hadn’t stopped performing coherence.
It still spoke the language of truth and merit, even as:
Admissions became opaque and politically gamified
Departments hollowed out into ideological fiefdoms
Research agendas calcified under the weight of institutional incentives
Bureaucratic expansion displaced inquiry with administration
DEI statements substituted for dialogue
The rituals continued.
The seals were polished.
The legacy donors still believed in “Veritas.”
But beneath it all, the structure had collapsed. The old ideals—intellectual rigor, open inquiry, recursive truth-seeking—were no longer enforced or even intelligible inside the logic of the system.
Yet the institution still behaved as if they were. This was not yet simulation in its purest form. This was anxious preservation—the maintenance of symbols after the death of substance.
The cathedral echoed.
But there was no choir inside.
Stage Four: Pure Simulacrum
Stage Four: Pure Simulacrum
Then came the Claudine Gay scandal.
Plagiarism—not once, but across multiple publications. Not incidental. Not arguable. Not minor. And yet the response revealed that the institution was no longer interested in resolving contradiction: contradiction itself had lost meaning.
Harvard didn’t metabolize the scandal. It didn’t investigate to preserve standards. It didn’t correct to restore trust. Instead, it mobilized a symbolic defense, not of truth, but of alignment.
Gay hadn’t violated the system. She had performed it. In postmodern academic culture, authorship is not about contribution. It is about echo. To repeat the right narrative is to amplify the cause. To lift up ones Comrades.
To attribute is to dilute the power of the movment. To borrow is not theft—it is liturgy. This is why the scholars she copied weren’t upset. They were part of the same symbolic economy. Ideas don’t belong to thinkers. They belong to movements. Harvard didn’t defend her as a scholar, it defended her as a node in a fragile performance stack.
The goal was not to restore coherence, it was to preserve alignment—to prevent the rupture of the symbolic shell. This was no longer a university in the classical sense. It had become a symbolic regulator of ideological mood; a prestige engine simulating coherence without structure.
Academic systems still existed—but mostly as legacy code: relic processes tolerated to keep the endowment flowing. Harvard no longer believes in truth, at least not in any sense that would be recognizable to its professors from fifty years ago.
It believes in narrative power.
It believes in optics.
It believes in protecting the vibe.
It no longer operates in crisis.
It operates in Stage Four.
Twitter under Musk - Another Stage Four Institution
Stage One: Twitter aspired to be a generative public square. Messy, but adaptive.
Stage Two: As polarization and advertising pressure grew, it began to perform neutrality while promoting outrage.
Stage Three: Musk promised free speech while banning critics and reshaping algorithms. The platform masked the absence of coherence by intensifying the branding of freedom.
Stage Four: Today, Twitter operates as a simulacrum of discourse—performing openness while being governed by caprice, vibe, and brand capture.
Neither Harvard nor Twitter is uniquely corrupt. They are both artifacts of the same structural collapse across our society.
Not high-fidelity simulation, but low-resolution simulacra—symbolic husks that retain power despite losing generative structure.
This is not a system glitch. This is the system.
Symbolic coherence substitutes for structural integrity.
Contradiction must be flattened to preserve the appearance of order.
The map no longer points to any terrain, and yet the map still rules.
This is the world that Adam Curtis warned us about a decade ago in “Hypernormalisation”. The difference is that where Curtis throws his hands up in despair, we see opportunity in the crisis. [Hypernormalisation is bleak but also mesmerizing; watch it, you won’t regret it].
Elite Overproduction and Generative Collapse
Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction offers one of the most important structural explanations for the civilizational instability we face today. When the number of elite aspirants—credentialed, ambitious, symbolically empowered—outpaces the number of available elite positions, intra-elite competition intensifies. Factions fracture. Institutions polarize. Trust evaporates. State legitimacy falters.
This is not a story of moral failure. It is a supply-side crisis in the architecture of power. Too many elites. Not enough slots.
In Turchin’s cyclical model, these pressures predictably precede unrest. But the depth and direction of the rupture depends on one critical variable:
What kind of symbolic infrastructure are the elites competing within?
If the expanded elite class is also expanding productivity—and more crucially, generativity—the pressure can be absorbed. If they are building new systems, new institutions, new forms of cultural coherence, then the surplus can be metabolized into transformation rather than collapse.
But that isn’t what we’re seeing.
What we’re seeing is performative alignment inside symbolic structures that no longer metabolize reality. Elites are not just competing for access. They are competing to perform coherence within architectures that no longer produce it.
And so the only moves left are:
Escalation
Purity signaling
Narrative warfare
Turchin helps us see the structural crowding of the elite class. But the crisis is more profound than crowding: it is ontological. There are too many elites chasing too little meaning.
And the architecture we’ve built to hold that meaning—schools, media, platforms, law—no longer connects symbol to substance.
What we’re facing isn’t just elite overproduction.
It’s generative underproduction.
Expanding the Generative Field: Historical Precedent
There is precedent for elite overproduction being absorbed without collapse.
In Never Waste a Good Crisis, we contrasted the revolutionary chaos of late 18th-century France with the more adaptive response of Britain during a parallel period of upheaval. France, burdened with credentialed elites and locked in brittle hierarchies, gave rise to ideological fragmentation and eventual rupture.
Britain, too, experienced elite expansion—a growing merchant class, university graduates, and ambitious professionals all seeking access to symbolic power.
But unlike France, Britain had the institutional elasticity and symbolic flexibility to absorb that surplus.
Rather than collapse, it expanded its generative surface area.
The empire—however morally fraught—created administrative and commercial pathways for elite energy. Industrial capitalism introduced scalable new forms of status. The civil service professionalized. The franchise widened incrementally through successive Reform Acts. Even the symbolic category of “gentleman” evolved, making space for wealth, merit, and bureaucratic function—not just bloodline.
The result wasn’t justice.
But it was coherence—just enough to metabolize contradiction without revolution.
Generative capacity outran elite overproduction.
And so collapse was postponed.
Not through repression.
But through recursion.
In our own time, elite overproduction becomes fatal only when it collides with generative underproduction.
If we expand the generative substrate—build systems that can metabolize more intelligence, more ambition, more contradiction—we can absorb the surplus.
This isn’t utopian. It has happened before.
The average middle-class person in a developed nation today lives with material comforts that would astonish a 16th-century monarch: clean water, electric light, global communication, medical care, flight, instantaneous knowledge retrieval.
We didn’t get here by culling the ambitious.
We got here by raising the floor of generativity—expanding the symbolic and material bandwidth of civilization so more people could contribute meaningfully to more complex systems.
What breaks us is not too much talent.
It’s too little capacity to make that talent matter.
This is the signal Balaji Srinivasan is trying to transmit through Exit. For all the hyperbole, libertarian overreach, or misplaced crypto theology, the gesture is clear: build new civic scaffolding. Encode recursion where stagnation rules. Restore coherence where simulation prevails.
We don’t have to agree with his economics to see the deeper impulse.
Exit is a search for new generative fields—for systems that don’t just preserve status, but metabolize energy into meaning.
That’s the task ahead. Not less opportunity for people to advance the material and spiritual conditions of their lives.
Stronger institutions.
Richer symbolic bandwidth.
More surface area for meaning to emerge.
We don’t need to suppress the signal.
We need to rebuild the receivers.
V. The Fatigue of the Infinite Self
What happens to a person raised inside simulation?
What happens when symbolic systems no longer metabolize reality, but still reward fluency, performance, and affect?
You end up carrying contradictions that were once held by institutions.
You carry them in your inbox.
In your self-presentation.
In your language, your body, your tone.
You're in a work meeting where no one believes the strategy, but everyone performs agreement, because to question it would break the ritual. You smile, nod, and mute. Later that night, you stare at the ceiling, wondering if you're the crazy one.
The contradiction doesn't go away. It just sits inside you, unresolved. This is not just social pressure. It's symbolic burden transfer.
When society no longer metabolizes contradiction, the individual becomes the holding tank.
This is what happened to Colonel Kurtz.
In Apocalypse Now, Kurtz is sent into the jungle with a mission. But with no structure to contain the contradictions he encounters, he internalizes them. He becomes the contradiction—cut off from feedback, coherence, and sanity. The system that sent him out was incapable of holding the complexity he absorbed. So he broke.
We are doing the same—at scale.
We become the place where coherence is faked, contradictions are contained, and trust is performed instead of felt.
You become the brand.
You become the content.
You become the surface.
But the self wasn’t built to be consumed. It was built to cohere—over time, through recursion, contradiction, feedback, and failure. Without that, it frays. The self expands but never roots. It reflects everything but metabolizes nothing. It becomes a loop of effortful visibility without resolution.
This is the fatigue so many feel now; not just burnout from doing too much, but exhaustion from being too many things at once.
Not too many responsibilities.
Too many versions of the self. The infinite self must always be updating. Always managing optics. Always fluent, always current, always prepared to collapse inward if coherence ever falters.
It’s not just stressful. It’s epistemically disorienting. When coherence collapses outside us, we try to manufacture it inside. We turn ourselves into adaptive filters: mirroring expectations, modeling trust, simulating stability.
But in doing so, we become fragile.
We begin to feel like projections of ourselves. Coherent in public, incoherent in private. Signaling alignment while carrying unresolved contradiction underneath.
A curated self, optimized for external legibility, becomes unable to metabolize contradiction internally.
Ambiguity triggers spirals.
Inconsistency feels like failure.
Rest becomes a threat to continuity.
You don’t rest.
You pause the feed.
VI. Exit the Mirror
We’ve been living in a world of mirrors.
Mirrors of performance.
Mirrors of consensus.
Mirrors of certainty—shattered and reassembled as optics.
When our institutions stopped metabolizing contradiction, we turned inward. We made ourselves reflective. Polished. Hollow. Flawless on the surface. No mass underneath. But a mirror only shows what it’s given.
It cannot hold.
It cannot transform.
It cannot heal.
To exit the mirror is not to reject aesthetics. It’s not even to reject performance. It’s to reconnect performance to structure—to recursion, feedback, and real coherence. It means building again from systems that hold complexity instead of flattening it.
It means:
Re-entering feedback loops
Metabolizing the world as experience
Practicing coherence instead of signaling it
To speak truth before it is beautiful.
To let contradiction linger.
To rediscover structure—not as hierarchy, but as rhythm. As yield. As return.
We don’t need new ideologies.
We need new symbolic metabolisms. New Systems:
That reward complexity, not certainty
That absorb contradiction instead of punishing it
That grow stronger from feedback, not brittle from performance
That hold the self, not as spectacle, but as signal processor
That rebuild trust, not from alignment, but from recursion
We don’t need to shatter the mirror. We just need to stop mistaking it for a window.
And begin again the long climb back towards becoming something that can hold what is real.
This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of generative systems that can metabolize complexity rather than merely performing alignment. For more on building beyond simulation, subscribe.
Some of the other essays mentioned in this piece. These expand on some of the ideas in this essay.
Gorgeously written, extreme insight that is obvious (after it is read and digested) and courageous to tackle such a big array of material! Thank you for putting words to something we all have sensed, but perhaps haven't taken the time to put such a beautiful framework to. Bravo. This needs to be shared far and wide!