• Moss [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    59·
    11 days ago

    I was offlije for 12 hours and apparently every single American has lost their minds over garbage bags and squirrels. What in the actual fuck is happening

  • Lussy [any, hy/hym]@hexbear.netEnglish
    30·
    11 days ago

    The simulacra reaches the end of its cycle, ceasing its relationship to anything that came before, becoming an entirely new image, both, at the same time, devoid of meaning and full of it, like some binary unit.

  • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    28·
    11 days ago

    We ain’t reached stage 4 yet. This is just stage 3 or maybe even 2. Stage 4 is when alt righters will adopt squirrels as their symbol and some years down the line no one will even remember why. You will have memes using squirrels and grifters selling merch because that’s just a thing now. It will be like pepe the frog.

    • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      11 days ago

      Isn’t pepe at stage 3? Frog -> Comic with frog -> Comic frog recontextualized

      I guess you could say it’s gone Frog -> Comic frog -> 4chan comic frog -> Alt-right symbol?
      But I feel like it’s too close to step 3 then. Wouldn’t step 4 be when pepe stops being a comic frog and enters a different shape or medium? Like they now adopt frogs as pets or it’s no longer pepe

      • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        3·
        10 days ago

        As far as I can understand, the stages are

        1. The sign is considered to bear a close resemblance to its refferant
        2. The sign is considered to be a distorted image of the thing being referred to
        3. There is an absence of the referred to object. Sometimes we might question whether or not it even existed, but we know what is being refered to, even if we know nothing about the referred to object.
        4. The sign has no relation to the original referred to object. It just is, and few/no one knows or bothers to find out the original context.

        An example that I found online:

        Stage 1: You have a word processor that saves the paper you wrote to a floppy disk with a button. The button has an icon that looks like a floppy disk.

        The sign (floppy disk button) directly refers to the action of saving on an actual floppy disk.

        Stage 2: Your word processor saves the paper you wrote to somewhere on your computer. You can choose to save to a floppy disk with it, or to your hard drive, or perhaps some other location. The button has an icon of a floppy disk, as that is what save buttons do.

        The floppy disk icon is misleading, as you don’t have to save on a floppy disk. But you can still save on a floppy disk if you want.

        Stage 3: You have a word processor that saves your paper to someplace, perhaps your hard drive, perhaps one of these newfangled CDs. The save icon retains the image of a floppy disk.

        *The floppy disk is gone, but you still remember it. *

        Stage 4: You write your paper in google docs, you click the save icon and it is saved to the cloud. You know it’s the save icon because it’s the save icon everywhere. You don’t know what it depicts; you were born in 2005 and have never heard of a “floppy disk”

        In the case of pepe the frog, it is an alt right symbol. Why? I don’t know and most people don’t know. It just is. For the squirrel/garbage image, we know what is being referred to since it happened very recently, so at most it is stage 3. The symbol is also still referring to the original stories of PNUT and Biden’s “garbage” comment. So it is actually stage 2. I wouldn’t call it stage 1 because the symbol is combining 2 stories that had no original relation and creating new meaning out of it. There is a distortion of the original.

        • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          10 days ago

          Yeah I follow what you mean, I guess I’m just arguing that we’re still at step 3, because it’s still “Pepe the frog” and not just frogs as a general concept or a wide variety of frogs or just “the frog” or whatever. The sign itself hasn’t changed since leaving the webcomic, only the context in which it exists. The sign itself also undergoes a transformation, as far as I understand it. Pepe is as much at stage 3 as the squirrel thing is, is what I’m saying.

          If you wanna be real pedantic/nitpicky/“having an interesting convo” (the latter is how this interaction feels for me, hopefully it does for you too <3) you could also argue wether the comic is step 1 or 2.

          • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
            2·
            10 days ago

            Well, as far as I am aware, the distinction between stage 3 and 4 is not a hard line and kind of blurry.

            the latter is how this interaction feels for me, hopefully it does for you too <3)

            I feel that way too

  • Red_Sunshine_Over_Florida [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    17·
    11 days ago

    It is a coworker story because I’ve heard this exact same story from the chuds I work with, except it was about an alligator. It would be the only thing that punctuates his thoughts before he goes back to talking about crimes.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    11 days ago

    If I Drej post enough in the Drej Tank, it’s possible that the Drej as a concept will gradually fade as the villains of a 2000 Don Bluth animated movie and be more associated with awful things on the internet and shooting energy beams on them.

    Triumph the Insult Comic Dog might even be seen as the Drej Queen’s always-there-but-never-explained associate to herald the orbital strikes on internet clownfuckery.

    That would destroy the original context. One must imagine the Drej Queen happy, though.

  • umbrellaEnglish
    6·
    11 days ago

    where is this quote from?

    ive read it before, on a book about symbols and language i think?

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      11 days ago

      Google with double quotes is your friend - https://www.google.com/search?q="fourth+stage+is+pure+simulacrum"

      Simulacra and Simulation

      Simulacra and Simulation (French: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard…

      Stages

      Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages:

      1. The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where people believe, and may even be correct to believe, that a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality” (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called “the sacramental order”.

      2. The second stage is perversion of reality, where people come to believe that the sign is an unfaithful copy, which “masks and denatures” reality as an “evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence”. Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.

      3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the “order of sorcery”, a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.

      4. The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers’ lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, “hyperreal” terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.