Introduction
I lived in L.A., the archetype of an image economy, for the better part of a decade. I participated fully in the spectacle. I embraced the neoliberal notion of the self as entrepreneur, and constructed the facade (persona) they call a "personal brand."
I posted daily on social media, it became almost second nature. In the process, I became a dopamine addict, fully dependent on social validation to function.
My life there was in no way unique or special, but it was symptomatic of deeper cultural and societal issues that I would like to discuss in this essay.
Dating in L.A.
L.A. is famous for beautiful women, and there is an almost unnatural concentration of them. For someone who had just moved there, it felt like heaven on earth.
At first, you navigate the dating scene the same way you always have, trying to balance authenticity with a persona you create and project. But you quickly learn the mediated nature of reality. It's all about the persona. Everything is filtered and staged. Performance wins. Authenticity doesn't matter in an image society.
Here is the part I found most interesting. Many girls in L.A. would not date someone without a social media account. An Instagram profile is treated as more representative than the person they meet in the real world.
Life in LA was consistent with what sociologists call "Platform Performativity." In such an environment, a person without a social media presence is socially indeterminate, almost untrustworthy. No feed, no discernible narrative about you.
The logic in the dating world becomes, "If I can’t see your image life, how do I really know who you are? How can I effectively judge you?"
Traditionally, social judgment follows physical interaction. You meet someone first, then you judge them. Modern dating inverts the sequence. You examine a person's online presence first before deciding if they're even worth meeting.
I'll expand on this later in this essay. But my experience perfectly exemplified Baudillard's notion of hyperreality, in which the image ceases to represent the real and instead stands in as its substitute.
I certainly wasn't shocked when I saw a dozen friends begin devoting themselves to curating their digital selves. Some treated it as a lifestyle. Some took on the title of influencer. None earned enough money from it to make it a legitimate livelihood. What they received instead was a kind of psychological wage: momentary validation, dopamine spikes, and fleeting flashes of confidence.
Living and dating in LA revealed a deeper cultural ailment. It signaled a collapse in the distinction between presentation and reality, and made me conscious of our new state of being: a world where images define worth, attraction, and what counts as “real.”
South Park’s “The Hobbit”
I’ve always looked at pop culture as a diagnostic tool. Just as myths and stories reveal society’s collective unconscious, films, TV, music, and digital media expose the ideological and psychological structures beneath the surface.
Not all media is equal. Some forms drift far from reality, while others offer sharp, masterful commentary – producing works that critique society with more clarity and precision than most academic analyses.
I love South Park. I love it because I enjoy shows that function as more than just mere entertainment – shows that highlight, expose, and interpret the cultural dynamics and absurdities shaping our lives.
I love it because I love satire. It weaponizes humor and bypasses defenses. Laughing at society shatters its aura of permanence. Satire, memes, and comedy expose hypocrisy, puncture shallowness, and disarm the fear that makes people compliant. Humor becomes a defense against the absurdity of the human condition. Historically, satire has revealed truths that societies prefer to ignore, and South Park amplifies this function beautifully.
I watched the South Park episode titled “The Hobbit” before I moved to LA (Season 17, Episode 10). In the episode, the girls of South Park Elementary present heavily photoshopped versions of themselves as their real selves. The boys take these fake images to represent reality.
They could see the girls standing right in front of them, but the images were more real to them than the actual person.
The boy's behavior reveals how, in the age of social media, male desire became structured by the simulation, reorganizing itself around digital artifacts. It’s a symptom of what has happened to our wider society: the hyperreal overtook the real, and the altered image became more ‘true’ than reality itself.
It’s a brilliant diagnosis of an image economy where hyperreal filters become normalized, and the unfiltered self becomes unacceptable. Memetic desire becomes especially contagious in this world. We learn desire from the simulation, not people. And the gap between real and ideal becomes traumatic.
Kanye appears in the episode as a critique of celebrity-constructed reality and the delusion required to maintain it. He insists that Kim Kardashian is not a hobbit and refuses to acknowledge that her photos are edited. He embodies how parasocial perception overrides physical truth. His entire narrative arc shows that fame partly depends on a willingness to inhabit a constructed world.
Both Kanye and the boys pretend the simulation is reality. The operative word here is “pretend,” so people are aware of it even if on a subconscious level.
Wendy is the last intellectual holdout in the episode – the one character who can see through the illusion and recognize the threat it poses to girls’ self-esteem.
In one scene, she sits Butters down and walks him step-by-step through the process of digitally transforming someone, expecting the transparency to dissolve the illusion.
But even after seeing exactly how fake it is, all he cares about is the final image. He is enamoured with the outcome, with the picture. He completely ignores the manipulation, the labour that went into it, the distortion, the dishonesty. His only concern is the final output. This is the moment the show makes its surreal point, when desire is structured by hyperrealism. Truth has no power.
Butter’s reaction crystallizes the core thesis of the episode: Even when people witness the construction of hyperrealism, they still prefer the illusion.
Wendy assumed people want the truth, she thought the truth is empowering, and that illusion breaks when the wires are exposed. She believed that exposure to the process equals awakening, and that seeing how fake the image is would lead to rejecting it (a classic enlightenment assumption). But she encountered a society in which illusion is preferred even when exposed as illusion.
Wendy’s general stance shows what happens to anyone who deviates from dominant norms. She’s cast out, shamed, pressured to conform, and her morality is dismissed as naive. When hyperrealism becomes normal, realism is treated as rebellion.
In traditional media literacy education, we assume that if people see behind-the-scenes, they’d reject the illusion. If they understand how false things are, they’ll desire the real again. South Park shows the opposite. People often see the exact mechanism of illusion and still prefer it.
This aligns perfectly with Baudrillard’s philosophy. And Zizek’s concept of ideology. In our image obsessed culture, fake doesn’t matter so long as it satisfies our desire. The position is bleak but accurate. Hyperreality is not shattered by truth, it devours it.
This connects to a concept from public choice theory: rational irrationality, Bryan Caplan’s idea that people often embrace biased or false beliefs not because they’re stupid, but because those beliefs are psychologically useful. Forming beliefs is a trade-off between truth and utility. If the personal cost of being wrong is low – and if the truth threatens comfort, identity, or social belonging – then it becomes rational to choose the illusion. In that sense, irrationality becomes the rational option.
Platform performativity created a hyperreal ideal that became socially compulsory. Every girl had to edit her photo to remain socially legible. To refuse the hyperreal aesthetic just makes you an outcast, a deviant. The episode is brilliant because it detects the pathology early. Social media filters were still emerging culturally when this aired.
South Park’s insight, which Mark Fisher would have appreciated, is that image doesn’t just distort desire, it organizes it. Men and women don’t simply prefer attractive people anymore. They prefer the version of attractiveness made legible by platforms, validated by likes, follower accounts, influencer archetype, and algorithmic approval.
The ending is deliberately hopeless. The real cannot win against the hyperreal. Authenticity has no defense against platform-mediated beauty.
We’ve entered the last stage
My experience of living in LA was symptomatic of the same deep cultural ailment described by South Park. Your image is now more real, more measurable, more socially useful, and more trusted than the actual human being that produced it. This shift, as we'll see later, is irreversible.
In the Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard describes a procession of stages in how images relate to reality: in the first it merely reflects reality. In the second it masks and distorts it. In the the third it conceals its absence. The fourth and final stage is pure simulacrum, the image becomes its own reality.
We’re living in the later stages of this evolution. I lived in a society where your social profile is not just a representation of someone; it's a new entity, separate from the actual person, and it becomes the basis of social judgment.
Just as you might be different with your family versus your friends, your public online persona has different traits, confidence, lifestyle, relationships, moods, and aesthetics than the actual you. It’s not a mask and it's not a lie; it's just a replacement of reality.
In LA, before you meet the person, you have to judge their online presence. And you judge their online presence to determine if they're worthy of meeting. That's the simulacrum. The copy determines the value of the original. The representation precedes the real. Reality becomes an afterthought, secondary to the image.
Now people outsource this judgment to algorithmic signals (follower counts, likes, engagement metrics, verified badges, algorithmic visibility). Who the platform performs for vs. oppresses? This is not symbolic. It's structural. People increasingly believe that if the algorithm elevates you, you matter, and if it ignores you, you don't. The algorithm became a meta-institution of social truth.
Baudrillard predicted the end of representation. A world where Reality becomes irrelevant, signs refer only to other signs, and values are determined inside the symbolic system. That's exactly what I experienced in LA. People no longer bother with who you really are. They look at how the algorithm treats you. The algorithm becomes more authoritative than the embodied self.
The experience reminded me of Foucault's “regimes of truth” - systems that determine what is true and what counts. In today's day and age, the algorithm is the dominant regime of truth for status, desirability, and credibility. People defer to it and accept high engagement as proof of importance, low visibility as a signal of irrelevance, algorithmic promotion as validation, and shadow banning as condemnation.
The algorithm became the arbiter of legitimacy.
Algorithmic Authority and the New Regime of Truth
Why do people defer to the algorithm?
Humans have always deferred to external authorities (priests, monarchs and heads of states, media and rating agencies). The algorithm is just the latest authority, but with a key twist: it's completely impersonal, opaque, and objective. people treat it like it knows everything, like it sees everything, and like it can't be wrong. This gives it moral authority. People also treat it the way peasants treated the weather - as a force that determines their fate. It has complete control over their livelihood, exposure, and identity, so they defer to it with reverence.
Algorithmic ranking collapses ambiguity. Real people are complex, but the algorithm is simple. It turns messy social evaluation into clear numerical hierarchy. You can simply judge a person now by looking at his followers and the amount of likes that he gets, and whether his profile is verified or not. It’s a heuristic that simplifies social judgment. And people love simplification.
People treat algorithmic outputs as socially real now, not as representations but as truths. The representation has ended. We've moved past it. Your status is not what people think of you, it's what the algorithm infers about you, and people accept that inference as superior to their own judgement.
We now have a society where people don't defer to other people. People defer to the algorithm's opinion of other people. This is the final stage for Baudrillard. The algorithmic simulacrum is now the basis of social reality. The map doesn't just replace the territory (referencing Borges’ map): it tells the territory where it's allowed to be.
It’s a historical shift, but it isn’t the first one. The rise of money as a universal medium of exchange produced a similar shift in social reality. It became a universal metric. Before widespread monetization, wealth was tied to land, obligations, kinship, and other forms of social relation. Money introduced an abstract, impersonal measure of value that made social worth quantifiable. People began deferring to money rather than social ties as the signal of a person’s status. Market logic displaced older moral logics. Money was the first algorithm, a reduction of all relations to a metric. It created a new simulacra: A world where prices were taken as the truth of value.
The Digital Panopticon: Self-Censorship and Fear
The systems we’ve built make the past ever-present. Almost everything we do, post, or share is preserved indefinitely. Life becomes one long job interview. Every message, photo, post, or mistake can be weaponized against you in the future. That threat forces people to self-regulate. It’s a digital panopticon. People reshape their behavior. They self-censor, become cautious, conform, and lose spontaneity. The psychological cost is enormous. Living in a state of constant anticipation and judgment erodes creativity and suppresses risk-taking.
It mirrors an Adam Curtis' observation about how opposition research made politics risk-averse. American politicians have long been shadowed by digital trackers, videographers hired by rival campaigns to record every public move. Everything they say is compared against past statements to find contradictions, which are leaked to the media as opposition research. This content surveillance forces politicians to repeat safe talking points, making them less conversational and predictable.
Its an idea that is perfectly highlighted in Veep when they send Richard with a camcorder to film Jonah's opponent – his former second-grade school teacher – only for Richard to fail because he didn't know how to work a camcorder properly.
This reminds me of the Racoon analogy, a version of Putin's rat analogy. If you back a Racoon into a corner it becomes vicious. Not because it's evil but because it fights to survive. The hunt for online contradiction and the shaming campaigns do the same. When every old tweet, old belief that has since evolved or past mistake is weaponized, people stop learning and instead become defensive, rigid, bitter and hostile.
The advent of opposition research made politicians boring and less adventurous, just like a smartphone in everyone's pocket made people self-regulate more. Everyone fears becoming an online Karen.
Conclusion
What I lived in L.A. wasn’t just a cultural quirk; it was a preview of a new human condition.
I watched people perform themselves into exhaustion, curate themselves into alienation, and sacrifice their real selves to maintain a fake version.
What South Park caricatured and Baudrillard theorized is now the operating system of everyday life: the persona precedes the person, the online self eclipses the physical one, and algorithms quietly decide who matters.
Everyone behaves accordingly – cautious, polished, predictable, terrified of contradiction. L.A. felt less like a city and more like a metaphor, a place where life becomes a performance in a theater with an invisible audience that never stops watching.
There’s no going back from this. We can’t escape hyperreality. But we can refuse to be wholly defined by it. We can revolt by reclaiming the parts of life that cannot be posted, measured, or optimized. Because the more we outsource judgment to a digital regime of truth, the more we allow machines to decide who we are – and the fight, if there is one, is simply to remain human in a world that rewards the opposite.