There are two aspects of this post worth reviewing: as an experiment in a different mode of discourse, and as a description of the procession of simulacra, a schema originally advanced by Baudrillard. As an experiment in a diffferent mode of discourse, I think this was a success on its own terms, and a challenge to the idea that we should be looking for the best blog posts rather than the behavior patterns that lead to the best overall discourse. The development of the concept occurred over email quite naturally without forceful effort. I would have written this post much later, and possibly never, had I held it to the standard of "written specifically as a blog post." I have many unfinished drafts. emails, tweets, that might have advanced the discourse had I compiled them into rough blog posts like this. The description was sufficiently clear and compelling that others, including my future self, were motivated to elaborate on it later with posts drafted as such. I and my friends have found this schema - especially as we've continued to refine it - a very helpful compression of social reality allowing us to compare different modes of speech and action. As a description of the procession of simulacra it differs from both Baudrillard's description, and from the later refinement of the schema among people using it actively to navigate the world.  I think that it would be very useful to have a clear description of the updated schema from my circle somewhere to point to, and of some historical interest for this description to clearly describe deviations from Baudrillard's account. I might get around to trying to draft the former sometime, but the latter seems likely to take more time than I'm willing to spend reading and empathizing with Baudrillard. Over time it's become clear that the distinction between stages 1 and 2 is not very interesting compared with the distinction between 1&2, 3, and 4, and a mature naming convention would probably give these more natural

This came out in April 2019, and bore a lot of fruit especially in 2020. Without it, I wouldn't have thought about the simulacra concept and developed the ideas, and without those ideas, I don't think I would have made anything like as much progress understanding 2020 and its events, or how things work in general.  I don't think this was an ideal introduction to the topic, but it was highly motivating regarding the topic, and also it's a very hard topic to introduce or grok, and this was the first attempt that allowed later attempts. I think we should reward all of that.