During the sixth decade of the 20th century, a dazzling intellectual and political movement, the Situationist International, developed the idea that modern society was no more than a spectacle given to humans. In one of the movement’s landmark books, “The Society of the Spectacle”, Guy Debord wrote in 1967 that people look at “images” to console themselves for the poverty of their existence, “subjected to the routine demands of work and bourgeois life”. For him, consuming goods was simply a way of not really living, and contenting oneself with the spectacle of life: “Every commodity, be it a car or a trip or a visit to the museum,” he wrote, “promises a happy life and replaces the direct experience of reality”. And so developed the idea, so well developed later by Raoul Vaneigem and Jean Baudrillard, that our societies are nothing but places of spectacle, where we live a life of simulacra, channeled into the accumulation of objects, for the greatest benefit of the masters of capital alone, and in which all commodity consumption is nothing but a form of alienation.
These books, and the whole movement they embodied, had a profound influence on subsequent events the world over. They left deep traces in politics, education, journalism, architecture, urban planning, literature, advertising and cinema. The response these intellectuals proposed to escape this society of the spectacle (living in real situations, hence the name of the “situationist” movement) was echoed in those of many ecological movements, particularly in the call to flee big cities. Jean Baudrillard even went so far as to deny the very existence of the Iraq war, which was merely a spectacle and nothing more.
Today, this fertile intuition finds a new dimension in the addiction to social networks: it is no longer simply by accumulating things that we are content to experience the spectacle of the world, but literally by consuming images and making a spectacle of ourselves on these networks. Those who spend half their days and nights scrolling through images on their phones, and making a spectacle of themselves on them, receive in return only the perfunctory gratification of anonymous approval in the form of a heart or a thumbs-up. This is taking on an even greater dimension with technologies beyond those of social networks, those of artificial intelligence, which enable and will soon enable everyone to live more and more in conversations and relationships with artificial beings, who will have everything of the human, except that they won’t be. We will then have moved from a society of spectacle to a society of simulacra.
This will be even truer once we’ve understood that all these technologies are merely preparing the way for other, far more powerful and potentially formidably useful ones: simulation technologies.
From time immemorial, humans have simulated their decisions before making them, by evaluating what would happen under various hypotheses. We experience this ourselves several times a day. For at least three thousand years, military strategists have been simulating conflicts before launching their armies into battle. From time immemorial, people have built models of their boats, houses and machines, before actually building them. And from time immemorial, humans have simulated lives they don’t actually have: what child hasn’t played at war, or at motherhood, or at being a merchant? And simulation has always played an important role in sexuality and eroticism. For a century now, mathematical and econometric models of varying degrees of realism have been trying to simulate what happens if you make a particular decision in a company, or in a state.
All in all, we have always simulated instead of experiencing it, or in preparation for experiencing it.
Digital technologies, including AI, are providing these simulations with extraordinary new resources. Companies (some of the world’s best are French) have developed simulation techniques that save enormous amounts of time and money in many production processes. For example, digital mock-ups or digital twins can be made of buildings, stadiums, hospitals, neighborhoods, cities, freeway networks or urban roads, before they are even built or transformed. We also digitally simulate clothes, medicines, factories, airplanes and weapons.
Video games, by enabling everyone to simulate being a great soccer player or a great warrior, are helping to educate the new generations for a life in which we will have moved from spectacle to simulacra, and from simulacra to digital simulation.
This, I believe, is the way to understand the great mutation underway: just as computers were just a stage leading to Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence is just a stage leading to digital simulation. And I’m betting that the future of simulation companies is at least as bright as that of Artificial Intelligence companies.
The question will be whether these technologies will only enable us to simulate lives instead of living them, or on the contrary, to simulate choices before making them. It will be the role of education and politics to help turn these technologies into tools of freedom, rather than a new form of alienation.