Baudrillard Goes to the Space Station

    Facebook is simulacral. Obvious, and not very interesting. More interesting? This little gem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
    That’s right. An astronaut. Singing “Space Oddity.” In space. The map has become the territory, and Baudrillard, if not delighted, is at least a bit self-satisfied. The proliferation of the video is fascinating. It seems that we, as participants in mass media dialogues, love to see actions accept constructed frameworks. Human beings standing by statues will stand like statues and everyone has walked across a crosswalk like the Beatles at some point in their life. The map is not laid over the territory. The map is made to structure interaction, and then experience is laid down across it, trying to stay within its boundaries.
    There seem to be two explanations for this. The first is stability which is really immortality. If an astronaut sings “Space Oddity” in space, then all is as it should be, a reflection of an image. And if a human being is only another frame in a precession of simulacra, that person is, effectively, static and undying, a participant in an infinite regress of images. Mass media is built upon the conviction that human beings do not want to deal with objectivity, and this desire for precession can be exploited. That is, like Disneyland, structures of simulacra are commodified and sold.
    Second, if the real problem with the postmodern condition is not the absence of absolutes by the infinite subdivision of time, a re-ordering of both time and space that reflects the basic human desire to be God, then an Astronaut playing “Space Oddity” in a space shuttle is useful because even events--like three-minute songs--do not exist in time in a simulacrum. It is a data bit shattering across nodular space. This is hyperreality: the creation of absurd events to stabilize society by offering the promise of comprehensible, sound-byte experiences that are totally under human control. Only, they are not under human control, and a person watching the video of the astronaut becomes implicated in the simulacrum, and therefore absorbed by postmodern motricity. The video is viral. This does not mean it is popular. It is instead moving itself around the internet.
    Fascinating.