What would Baudrillard say if he saw Bitcoin price?

Almost everybody has heard about simulacra and postmodernism. Here I will try to state my point of view on cryptocurrencies as a phenomenon of hyperreality and will explain why, from the point of view of postmodernists, our world has come to an end.

Simulacrum is the name that Jean Baudrillard gave to an image of absent validity, a copy without an original, a certain sign behind which there is no reality.

Explaining it in postmodernistic terms is quite difficult, it is much easier to do with examples.

Take, for example, Iphone 10. The value of this thing is defined not so much by the unique technical characteristics of the product, as by the meaning that the brand Apple conveys and the status which it lends to an owner of the brand thing in this coordinate system.

To be clear, I don’t have anything against Apple.

Any marketing expert will confirm that a brand is a thing for which people in the modern world are ready to pay and do pay. And if Jean Baudrillard thought of simulacra as something artificial, something abnormal, now it is an integral part of our reality.

Welcome to hyperreality!

Try explaining to a millennial that social networks are simulacra. No, he is sure to have heard something about simulacra and can tell much more about postmodernism than you, this is not the point. I mean for modern people, a social media account often means more than live communication. It is not a second life and not an alternative to reality, it is a part of this world and reality itself.

Modern people communicate, earn, spend money in “the virtual world”. It is what Baudrillard called “hyperreality”, substitution of the real world and the loss of contact with reality.

So it is possible to consider the appearance of cryptocurrencies the apogee of hyperreality. It must be said that the postmodern epoch (if we assume that it still goes on), has lasted more than 60 years and the occurrence of cryptocurrencies was preceded by some symbolic events.