The world we inhabit exists as a reality built on signs – a hyperreality. We rarely experience the world immediately and directly anymore, but rather through the filter of mediating channels. The world isn’t what it is, but what we’re shown it to be. Our grasp of the relationship between world and signs slowly slips away. I’m not claiming it has vanished entirely – but when Trump declares that immigrants are kidnapping pets for consumption, and then floods social media with images of frightened cats alongside his devoted following, this narrative becomes living truth for his believers. Never mind that there isn’t a single documented case of Latino immigrants consuming cats or dogs. He said it, he wrote it, thus it exists. It becomes social truth. (The name of his network can hardly be coincidental.)

This phenomenon itself isn’t new. Its scale, however, is. Wherever we look, reality as we once knew it is in retreat. It’s being replaced by a fabricated hyperreality where signs substitute experience, overwrite facts, and where we ultimately accept the mediated as reality. We take signs for truth because signs, powered by digital technologies, now dominate our lives and have superseded personal experience as our means of accessing the world. Our experience has become mere user experience.

We needn’t even look to the evil Trump (at least in my hyperreality, he’s evil) to see this at work. We need only dissect our daily lives. What is an Instagram channel or Snapchat account if not reality enhanced to make our digital and real relationships „believe“ that things are as we present them there? Our appearance in the world through social media is nothing but a small self-created hyperreality bubble, sketching us into the world as we wish to be seen. When I come home in the evening, having viewed my wife’s Instagram story on the way, I enter our house expecting to step into the world I’ve just witnessed there. And often enough, I’m disappointed. Not by my wife. But by reality. Yet all those who never, or rarely, enter our house will never experience this dis-illusionment. For them, our days are peaceful, our garden well-tended, our meals healthy. We are what we show, and for others, what they see (online).

This condition is further intensified by capitalism-friendly personalization of the user experience. Everyone receives what suits them and the world they (think they) deserve. We’ve replaced consensus reality with personalized, algorithm- and interest-driven realities. Here too, my family serves as an example. My wife and I have largely different interests, we follow different accounts, listen to different podcasts, and so „How come you don’t know about him/her/that, they’re so…“ has become part of our daily conversational choreography. But at least we have these conversations, the attention, the desire to explain or learn. And physical proximity. Where goodwill and geographical commonalities are absent, the world falls apart, creating the „Hyperverse of Madness,“ where parallel hyperrealities develop without points of contact. In old-fashioned terms: The commonwealth shatters, combat commences.

Capitalism isn’t solely to blame. Of course, it feeds on transforming community into competing subjects. The only form of community it values is the cross-cohort shopping frenzy on Black Friday. The hyper- – yes, again – individualization and resulting isolation is certainly also the outcome of our supposedly alternative-less economic system. However, more crucial than the system itself are the products through which it currently creates value. For 30 years now, world-fabrication technologies – the Internet, social media, the iPhone, VR, AI, those wonderful goods of digital transformation – have been at the center of our economy. And perhaps it seems odd to cast not the system but its products as the villain. Yet I doubt that a capitalism driven by the endless pursuit of ever-faster horses, thicker books, or more environmentally friendly hairbrushes would have led to a comparable world. Whether and to what extent systemic factors (the joy of low marginal costs) or even the human condition (the pleasure in stories) have made us so keen on digital world-creating gadgets is beside the point for now. For the moment and as a framework for these observations, this diagnosis suffices: The state and course of our world into hyperreality is determined by the primacy of the digital.

Therefore – and due to my own inclination and expertise – I intend to conduct the following considerations of this project through technology clusters and along their use cases. Their aim is a comprehensive, though not necessarily scientifically or philosophically coherent, critique of hyperreality. Here, „critique“ will mostly mean „examining assessment“ rather than disapproval, except where I deem the latter appropriate. For even though the state of our hyperreal world gives far more cause for concern than joy, I believe it’s not the nature of technology that has brought this about, but rather how we offer, use, and (fail to) regulate it. Changing this remains fundamentally within our power – and nurturing the desire for such change is this project’s aim.