This interview with me was just published in the Italian culture and philosophy journal “Pandora Rivista,” under the title “Dopo e con Baudrillard: una lettura del reale come costruzione finzionale, e viceversa.”

Dopo e con Baudrillard: una lettura del reale come costruzione finzionale, e viceversa. Intervista ad Alan N. Shapiro

The interview was conducted by Enrico Miglioli.

Here is the English translation.

Alan N. Shapiro è teorico dei media e della cultura digitale, autore di numerosi volumi, tra cui: Star Trek. Technologies of Disappearance (AVINUS Press 2004) e Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction (Transcript Verlag 2024). Il suo libro più recente è Venice in Las Vegas. An American and European Auto-Socio-Biography (Peter Lang Publishing House 2025), è stato definito una narrazione controculturale nella tradizione del giornalismo gonzo di Hunter S. Thompson.

We live in a time when reality feels less solid than it once did: it bends, multiplies, and allows itself to be rewritten by screens, algorithms, and digital imaginaries. We no longer know whether what we see is a reflection, a copy, or yet another possible version of the world. It is in this suspended space, where the true and the plausible constantly trade places, that Alan Shapiro’s thinking moves.

With him, we set out on a journey through simulacra, autonomous fictions, and narratives that no longer represent reality but generate it. This interview seeks to explore precisely that: how is reality created today? Who produces it? And what does it mean to find our bearings in a universe where stories, images, and codes seem to have a life of their own?

Rather than searching for definitive answers, we will try to open small windows, to observe these new forms of world-making as they emerge, shift, blur. Perhaps, in doing so, reveal something about ourselves.

I. Theoretical Foundations

Introductory question: How would you define Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum and the notion of truth in the postmodern context? Additionally, what does it mean today to speak of the digital age and the post-human?

Baudrillard is a major influence on my work, alongside Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Claude Lefort, Guy Debord, Albert Camus, and Star Trek. His concepts of the simulacrum and hyperreality are starting points for me. I think with and after Baudrillard, rather than merely commenting academically on his oeuvre.

Trump is America and the world’s nightmare, but he and his critics also provide an excellent context for explaining the crisis of truth in postmodernism and beyond. Trump lies constantly, but what he says becomes “true” for his cult followers. The lie is more powerful than the truth because rhetoric becomes more powerful than the “referent” about which the speaker is speaking. The visual image becomes more powerful than what it allegedly represents. Simulation supersedes representation. The (now formerly) liberal media, such as CNN and the Washington Post, ignorant of French theory, believed in the “epistemology of true and false” and fought back against Trump by keeping a list of his twenty thousand lies. This proved ineffective. The American intellectual left, exemplified by Noam Chomsky, also advocates fighting media propaganda by “pointing out the truth” in every political and foreign policy situation. This is noble and necessary, but only half of what needs to be done.

I think Baudrillard is closer to Plato than the former would like to admit. Plato saw the homology between the dangerous powers of discourses and visual images, and he called that rhetoric or the simulacrum. Baudrillard’s writings on hyperreality shed deep light on the historical roots of Trump in post-World War II media and consumer culture, including TV, blockbuster cinema, advertising, and shopping malls. Post-truth did not start yesterday. All the contentious controversy around Baudrillard stemmed from his claim that “everything is simulation.” It is crucial to understand what he meant by that and its consequences.

Media theorists like Baudrillard, Marshall McLuhan, Debord, and Michel Foucault developed their systems of thought before the digital age, but their ideas are more relevant today than ever because digitalization greatly intensifies the cultural tendencies they already wrote about.

One way to think about the mess we are in today is to consider that computer science was originally formulated as a strictly technical discipline. The techno-scientists did not foresee that we would end up living in an informatic society. Cybernetics foresaw this, but that more collaborative movement of ideas unfortunately became marginalized. Post-humanism, for me, redefines informatics as transdisciplinary, recognizing that technology is not a tool but an environment in which we are immersed. Our attitude towards both nature and technology can go beyond anthropocentrism to “recognition of the otherness of the other.” We are surrounded today by pernicious superficially optimistic transhumanism, but posthuman philosophy is the authentic hope.   

II. Technologies of the Simulacrum

If digital simulacra generate autonomous realities, can we still speak of truth, or only of algorithmic plausibility?

The answer to this question is paradoxical. It can be addressed either from the standpoint of traditional critical theory or from the ironic, performative vista that Baudrillard calls “fatal theory.” The critical commentator on post-truth invokes “the truth,” believing to have thus established an “outside” position to simulation, an exempted location from which to observe it. Baudrillard’s strategy takes as given the more sophisticated epistemology of quantum physics where the “observer” is understood as being entangled in the system observed. Fatal theory challenges the system by pushing to extremes the system’s internal contradictions.

Empirically, there is increasingly less truth and progressively more algorithmic operationality in technological social networks. One could claim that this is only a tendency. Yet it is a self-enclosed, totalitarian system. The possibility of a classically scientific “truth-seeking,” moral, or humanist “outside” becomes impossible, since we are all part of “the simulation.” The postulate that “everything is simulation” is a prerequisite to addressing the vitally important question of how to conceptualize potential challenges to simulation and virtuality systems. It is only by acknowledging the simulacrum, facing it head-on, beyond the logic of inside and outside, that one can theorize about new forms of resistance and social change. Stopping to speak about “truth” does not make one a relativist. It makes one a trickster cyborg, as Haraway puts it.

Follow-up: Does truth become a function of code? Has engagement replaced truth as a metric?

Yes, this accurately describes the Deep Learning AI-driven algorithmic capitalism of social media platforms. Their business model, which is built on “personalized advertising” and the “attention economy,” has infiltrated and undermined the fabric and coherence of political society. Emotions and titillation rule the day. The user lives in an echo chamber. They are shown only more narratives that reinforce what they already believe, trapping them in an ideological filter bubble. There is no framework, contextual information, or alerts about fake or hateful content. The expansion of knowledge and curiosity about different viewpoints, which were some of the original goals of the 1990s World Wide Web hypertext, is absent. The user’s addiction is the very goal of the owners of these systems. They seek profit and give no thought to the world they are blindly shaping.

III. Science Fiction as an Epistemology

In what way does science fiction operate as a protocol for understanding simulacra and their cultural implications?

My writing and teaching focus on how cultural and media theory intersect with science fiction and vice versa. The thesis of my book, Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction, is that the academic field of science fiction studies should move beyond interpreting novels, films, and TV series to develop an epistemology and worldview. We are living in science fiction. Many of the technologies and totalitarian social conditions depicted in past science fiction narratives have been realized by now. When analyzing the “real world,” we should ask, “What is the effect of digital media technologies on society and our lives?” This critical-thinking and creative skill for everyday life can be developed through engagement with science fiction, which explores the cultural implications of simulacra. Philip K. Dick’s novels and stories were all about simulacra. His major work, Ubik, presents a scenario in which the “science fiction world” becomes everything, leaving the “safe confines” of a clearly defined literary space, the novel.

Follow-up: Is sci-fi still anticipatory or now descriptive? Examples of authors are welcome.

It is more descriptive of the present than it was, but it might be best to move beyond this binary opposition because it is still also anticipatory. Thinking from the future gives insight into the present. Charlie Brooker defined Black Mirror as “ten minutes into the future.” It is a brilliant TV series that, through creative, semi-futuristic scenarios, raises critical and disturbing questions about today’s digital media technologies. Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, and Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem revolve around AI as a companion species and Virtual Reality, both technological phenomena prevalent in the present. The Truman Show commented on the conditions of surveillance and the “faking of the real” in our “Reality TV” culture. The Matrix presented the idea of “hackers” as a form of resistance to the AI and VR system. Ex Machina showed the close relationship between the “performance of the female” and the “performance of the human.”

IV. From Postmodern to Post-human

Does the simulacrum undergo a mutation when the sign becomes an autonomous agent? Is this a continuity of postmodernity or a radical rupture?

In terms of the successive paradigms of cultural history, we are living simultaneously in modernism, postmodernism, and hyper-modernism. What appears to be an epistemological break later turns out to be better understood as continuity. I think it’s helpful to transfer what Baudrillard wrote about the four orders of simulacra to the successive paradigms of computer science or the writing of code. We must reach the level of computation itself, as Kittler suggested. It is not well known, but much of Baudrillard’s later work, such as Seduction and Impossible Exchange, was about seeking the “secret” reversibility of simulacra that appears within the most advanced simulacra. He even attempted a radical practice of technological reversal through his photography, or the “writing of light.” Baudrillard’s stages of simulacra were about images. That is now obsolete, and the mutation of “the sign” is from image to code. We should seek a pragmatic-utopian challenge to simulacra in “creative coding.”    

Follow-up: ethical and ontological implications.

The ethical and ontological implications of the paradigm shift from rule-based, combinatorial software development, where a programmer sends instructions to a processor, to neural network, pattern-based AI are massive. There is also a movement towards neuro-symbolic AI, which seeks to combine the strengths of the two (structured code-writing and statistical data science) paradigms. Little thought has been given (by philosophers or anyone else) to these implications so far, since the AI industries are driven by money, the engineering mindset, and the simplistic narrative of the coming “singularity” or “superintelligence.”

Ethical regulation of AI, such as what Europe tries to do, but which the Silicon Valley techno-fascists want Trump to pressure Europe to stop, is very important. But ethics needs to be embedded more deeply in technology’s infrastructure. It must be included in the Big Data fed to the LLM. More generally, we need a “Dialogical Artificial Intelligence” of a partnership between humans and AI. Democratic socialist ideas for building a better society could allay the apprehension about dictatorial USSR-style “socialism from above” if the socialist vision included delegating some political power from humans to a carefully monitored AI we can trust. This sounds like what people fear, as in the warning of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but we must work on the design of AI rather than being reduced to simply accepting or rejecting big corporation capitalism’s version of it.   

In the context of AI and computer science, the term ontology has taken on a different meaning from its philosophical one. In philosophy, I think Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology is an interesting contribution, as are the works of the Italians Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando. We are moving away from everything subject-centered. Classical code-writing was very much about the programmer-subject dominating the “inert” machine-object. Posthumanism is a shift in what we understand as being. Plants, animals, and the ecosystem are alive. Software is semi-alive. This assertion is what attracted me to Gianna Maria Gatti’s Italian-language book on new media art, The Technological Herbarium, which I translated into English (and helped with the German edition), and to Pier Luigi Capucci’s books and his landmark Noema Lab website.

V. Truth as Narrative

If narrative is the most human way of understanding the world, how can we avoid losing ourselves in the narrative overproduction enabled by the internet and AI?

One way in which Friedrich Kittler was a posthuman media theorist is his contention that we should view history and narrative not only from the human perspective but also as an autonomous history of media and technology. Maybe something different from “narratives for humans” is happening, and we can try to understand what it is and learn from it. But within the vocabulary of your question, I would say the situation is indeed catastrophic, and we are in the process of “losing ourselves.” Why write a story if AI can write one? Why do research if AI can do it for me? Human narratives are in deep trouble.

But there is a secret hope. What’s left for us to do is to become AI ourselves: think, speak, and act like AI. Then we are not only offloading our intelligence and creativity to AI; we are learning from the patterns of that “other” or “alien” intelligence to which we have unburdened the weight of thinking and knowing. By meeting the AI in the middle and mimicking it as we now do, we participate in the co-creation of a hybrid expressivity or computational aesthetics. As a prelude to that shared project, as an individual, one can choose to deploy the Internet and AI carefully, in part, rather than surrender to them.

We need to carry out this collective endeavor of “becoming-AI” with awareness. If we do it non-consciously, then the default will be a vicious circle system where the AI outputs flood the Internet with non-human-generated content that, in turn, becomes the inputs to the AIs.   

Follow-up: Do generative narratives strengthen or weaken our capacity for orientation?

They certainly weaken our capacity for orientation and for many other human things. But it is not a hopeless situation if we act with awareness. As with all addictions, I might have to save myself by “going cold turkey.” Or I might be able to break free from the addiction by getting control over when I use the addictive substance or not. I can reach a plateau of emancipation if I can say to myself: I could either do this compulsion or dependency or not do it today, in this moment, this time around, and it does not matter whether I do or do not. Then I am free. I have grown spiritually to a sovereign “choice.”

VI. Simulacrum and Political Power

What risks emerge from the fact that digital simulacra not only replace reality but govern it through platform logics?

The funny thing is that I am old enough to remember a time when, in North America and Western Europe, there was a vibrant social life in the physical world. I am sure Italians are very familiar with this. Then I remember a time when consumerism and media killed that social life. There was little left of it. Then Myspace and Facebook developed the brilliant idea of reviving the lost social life through a kind of simulated, virtual reappearance.

But one must be careful with such nostalgic retro-narratives, as with the very term “reality.” There is no reality. The idea of reality was already a cultural construction – a construction of Western civilization. Our notion of “the real” was always already a simulacrum. This is what makes the operation of “the virtual” possible. “Reality” in our culture was always an illusion. This chimera was maintained for a while by the clearly demarcated difference between “the real” and its representation. As online culture pushes the simulacrum into its next phase, the distinction between reality and image breaks down. That’s our crisis. That’s the essence of Baudrillard.

The governance of platform or surveillance capitalism logistics is how power and control are exercised at the micro-level in the hypermodern media-technological society through code. It’s brutal, but it also secretly opens up more existential choices. The poles of power relationships in our times are less literally identifiable in human agents and more virtual, thus reversible. This was Baudrillard’s critique of Foucault. The Machiavellian secret of power is that “power does not exist.” It’s like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who whispered that the secret of God is that God does not exist.

Follow-up: opaque algorithms, possibilities of resistance, and the role of art and philosophy.

I will first offer a practical answer about resistance, then a philosophical one. The two levels are connected. Millions of people across Europe (especially young people) interact daily with social media platforms via their smartphones and tablets. These online simulated communities were not designed and built in Europe. They do not reflect, protect, or promote European values such as reasonable discussion, human equality, education, knowledge, empathy, and morality. They were developed principally in “Silicon Valley” in the United States and in China. They come from contexts of Chinese semi-totalitarianism and the “wild west” capitalism of an American economic system ruled by billionaire oligarchs. Europe must develop its own social media platforms to protect its way of life. We need to elaborate on the principles for designing better social media platforms in Europe. Better alternative platforms cannot abandon the thrills of the “attention economy,” but they must also become responsible and participatory spaces for communication and holding the social fabric together.

Yes, the algorithms are opaque. That is one example of an area that needs redesign. There is no transparency. There is essentially no way to know the criteria used to determine what is shown to me. There is little disclosure about why content is removed or gets moderated. Knowing how the algorithms work and options to modify them should be prominent in the interface. Currently, there is widespread use of “dark patterns,” which employ psychological tricks to get users to act as the powerholders wish.

I cannot tell artists and philosophers what they should do. Every creative person and thinker has their own ideas and projects. I hope artists step outside the sphere of art that capitalism has designated as the space where creativity is allowed to take place and “crossover” more into activism and engagement with everyday life and institutions. This is the influence of the Situationists on me. This also relates to Steve Valk’s “social choreography,” about which I wrote in my book Transdisciplinary Design. I hope philosophers become more transdisciplinary. I think it is better to develop a shared vocabulary across knowledge fields than to practice academic philosophy as a mono-discipline in a hermetic way.

The better alternative social networking platform will have to conceptually transcend the “epistemology of true and false.” It will have to recognize that there is no “objective reality” and that we live in hyperreality. It will have to provide an architecture with several layers of “reality.” It will also have to include mechanisms for teleporting (as in a game, virtual world, or Star Trek) between these levels.

VII. Future Perspectives

What do you see as the next stage of the simulacrum? A generative hyper-reality or a return to materiality as antidote?

As a professor of transdisciplinary design and future research, I was often asked to make predictions. The future is likely to be very bleak! We are now in the hands of greedy capitalism and even fascism, all supported by advanced technology. There is little I can do about that. However, much of my work is utopian, or what I call pragmatic-utopian. I have always made a clear distinction between what is likely to happen and what I advocate or propose that well-intentioned and creative people might choose to work on. But perhaps the next stage of the simulacrum invites the tearing down of that binary opposition.

The next stage of the simulacrum is well past the genealogical shift of the simulacrum from visual images to the hybrid of writing and code. At the birth of computer science in the 1930s, digital logic (which later evolved into programming logic) seemed the complete antithesis of human language. Human language is resonant, ambivalent, poetic, subjectively expressive, cultural, semiotic, textual, and grammatological. Software code followed “discrete logic.” Each line of code was entirely unambiguous. The code embodied the idea of pure mathematical formal language. Each line of code was a precise unambivalent instruction.

What is happening now, in the age of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, is that a new language of intelligent machines is emerging. Human language is also evolving into a mimicry of that language (René Girard). This is not the hyperreal image of the Oasis in Ready Player One, nor is it the hyperreality of Trump’s “more true than true” True Lies.

As a university lecturer and seminar teacher, I recently noticed that the quality of the essays that students write has taken a quantum leap forward. Obviously, it’s because they are using AI research and writing tools. One could knee-jerk and say that this is bad, that students are offloading their thinking and creativity to a “machine.” But it’s not bad. It’s the beginning of a meeting in the middle between posthumans and post-machines. This isn’t just happening at the user level. It’s a new phase of computer science. It’s a big improvement compared to what computer science was. It largely replaces the original binary logic of identity and difference on all levels. It will penetrate computing architecture. It will potentially spread throughout society.

VIII. Final Question – Creative Coding

How can creative coding, as explored in your work, become a critical language for resisting or reinterpreting digital simulacra?

From the 1960s through about 2010, there was an intensive production of new media art across many genres (robotics, Virtual Reality, telepresence, net art, digital art, Bio Art, electronic art, sound art, ecosystems art, etc.), informed by transdisciplinary knowledge from the humanities and natural sciences. This is well documented and supported philosophically, for example, in Gianna Maria Gatti’s book, The Technological Herbarium. Artists created artworks that explored the possibilities of technology and/or modified media to communicate aesthetic and political concerns.

Creative coding followed new media art. It developed somewhat independently at art and design universities. Creative coding is a movement of artists and creative people who aim to create art installations and design projects that use computer technology. Artists and designers have become increasingly interested in learning to write software code.

So far, artists have rarely questioned the conventional understanding of computer programming. It has been taken for granted that programming is what it is and that creative coding is merely an expansion of the list of categories of people who should learn how to program. A whole new category of students will acquire the same skills as students at engineering schools. The idea that those involved in the humanities, design, art, and cultural studies will change the nature of programming is only now emerging. The aim is to create a hybrid discipline merging technology and the humanities.

Software programming is practiced across a range of subcultural activities: live visuals, interactive exhibitions, choreographed dance, real-time performances, product design prototypes, 3D printing, and hybrid design-and-technical code experimentation in Maker Labs, demo scenes, and hackerspaces. These pursuits resist and transform simulacra, functioning as activism. The theory is a meeting halfway between posthumans and AI.

In creative coding, the provinces and features of human languages increasingly reappear within code. Human language characteristics extend and redefine what code is. In the “codework” software poetry of Alan Sondheim, for example, code and language interpenetrate.

Creative coding can change computer science itself – in its core concepts, applications, educational curriculum, and in the definition and profile of who is a programmer. Informatics expands from a technical engineering discipline into a transdisciplinary field.

Flusser understood that software code is related to the history and future of writing. This is creative coding, Phase Two. Creative coding has a strong conceptual premise in cultural theories and poststructuralist thinking about the radical uncertainties and ambiguities of human language.

An effective movement for digital transformation must be very thoughtful on two levels: application and code. It must change things on the user level while also getting to the heart of the matter.