$imulating Intercours€
of milk cows, magic cucumbers, and the collective and cumulative costs of our societal preference for simulation
In this series of posts I’ve been exploring simulation: its pervasion of reality, over time, its eventual-possible takeover and replacement of ‘reality’. By 2025, it seems simulation may actually be the Great Replacement of reality; but simulation may not be a great replacement for reality.
What if we traded the milk cow of materiality for the magic cucumber of simulation? As in: what if this has already happened, and the cow is gone? How then shall we deal with where we find ourselves; how then shall we live together, somehow?
In speaking of the Ordinary Person’s Defacto Nonchoice (OPDNC) of messaging apps, part of what I was opening to thinking was the idea that, by 2025, the apps have become an almost unavoidable simulation of ‘community’ and ‘group’. One can choose or refuse Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and Meta’s platforms (and, like, probably you should, although most still do not). But for most people, there’s almost no way around obligatory inclusion in-on some family-community-work group combination of WhatsApp, Signal and/or Telegram. One of the perverse ironies of a terminally individualistic society and its anomie is that things have never been more oriented around the group, and groups, and groupthink, and the petty tyrannies of its inherent echo chambers. To Noahpinion’s “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens”, in this great piece on the Signal-to-Yemen bombing we should add: group chats are now where everything unimportant and uninteresting and obligatory interminably happens – family, work, and community groups. By 2025, group chat turns out to be that which we cannot not want, and cannot fucking remove ourselves from. Somehow, a simulation as hard to love as it is to extricate oneself from (ie, a very very hard simulation) has become a planetary OPDNC. ‘Oh well’.
Alongside the sad fate of joyless parasocial obligation for which such groups are both avatar and vortex, there is also a pervasive societal desire and preference for simulation. We can see it in how advertising addresses us, enjoining us to mum-nipulate the algorithm, coaxing us to milk it milk it milk it milk it. Somehow, everything trends toward being a silicone nipple’s pixelated simulation, calling us to another rubber nipple to simulate pixelation. The dummy1 is the universal gesture of our wanting.
This is a complex of our cultures; these on-screen promises of latex nipples, they’re the junk in our culture’s trunk. One would need to do an exhaustive comparative study, but my sense is that most human cultures across most of our species’ history have lived in and had a preference for reality, over and against pixelated renditions of rubber nipples. Until the Axial Age; until the monotheisms; until commodity exchange came to dominate the various modes of symbolic exchange that had been the true glubricant of human society until then. This becomes clearer to me returning to Mauss’ Gift, and how it stands behind Baudrillard and Bataille. Here’s one simulation ‘we’ made earlier.
Many and growing numbers of people love and prefer the simulation of the thing to the thing itself. Why hand ‘solo’ when you can do it online, or into the new latex bot you share your apartment with? We might notice a fate of humanity in where the fap has gone: where our ancestors made do with hands and imaginations, now, capitalism delivers the buzz. As Tony Tula explores so beautifully in the ‘Ahegao’ story suite in Rejection, this can lead people into the crazy dead end of needing some kind of anatomically impossible, coercive, cruel and boring Urotsukidoji-like scenarios just to maintain arousal. In 2025, the simulations of Onan have become many wanded ways of fucking ourselves – above all, for anything resembling ordinary human intimacy and relationship.
Leaving aside the simulation of intercourse, we can see the perversion that attends pervasion in our fetishes for digital things evacuated of use value: why trade in material commodities like grain and oil when you can speculate on simulated currencies like BitCoin; why play plastic Lego (20C) and kill real indigenous people (19C) when you can do both digitally inside Minecraft (21C); why write a real essay for your assessment when you can have Chat GPT simulate one for you (and then have your assessors simulate feedback in response)? This all happened in 2021, the moment that the NFT of a Colnago road bike sold for two thousand dollars more…. than the rideable version of same. Why have a bike you can ride, when you can ‘own’ the picture of one you can’t? There is even a simulation in which this all makes perfect sense right now; it’s called the stock market.
With Minecraft and gaming in mind, I tried to indicate that the deepest appeals of simulation are to do with death, judgment, and enjoyment. Firstly, one can kill and die without the irreversible mess and destruction of actual-real killing and dying. Simulated death and killing is so much neater than the real thing, and when you’re through, you can reverse what transpired – and enjoy it again, and again. Gaming is one space of play where, thanks to simulation, we can flirt with killing and death, while indulging a gratifying repetition compulsion, and no one dies, and you don’t get to ‘kill kill kill’ only once2.
Secondly, one can explore power and danger (which are always seductive) by enacting one’s fantasies of killing and dying, shielded from judgment. This is the thymotic nub of the whole shebang. The ressentiment-fuelled doxings of Gamergate, like the rare instances of incel killing sprees, show us to the central place of humiliation and shame at the core of what happens to some people when their enjoyment is stolen by the pricking judgment and ridicule of the scolding and contemptuous Other.
In so many contexts, being caught in flagrante delicto, being suddenly re-exposed and judged in the middle of one’s obscenely enjoyable simulation, triggers a detonative wish for revenge. It’s the fuel that powered Trump in 2016, and in 2025. When the judging Other steals your enjoyment, you want to destroy them – with interest. This too can be a form of enjoyment, and in some cases appears to be what happens when a person marinating in simulation no longer parses the difference between killing in Doom and killing IRL (and, above all, having killing undertaken on our behalf, from a safe distance, like Iraq 2003, like Iran 2025). What’s unusual about inidividuals who actually kill is that they see their fantasy through; they’re unusually thorough. There is a wobbling path through simulation to mass killing without compunction. This is not about gaming; it can happen when you’re a settler and cheer the deaths of your Arab Israeli neighbours. 82% of Israelis favour expulsion. Not coincidentally – because any fascist death cult is also a simulation – nearly all the Haredi want to dodge the draft and have someone else to do this dirty work for them.
Sufficed to say: there probably exists in all of us a deep wish to get our jollies without ‘it’ or ‘them’ judging us for wanting-and-doing ‘that’. Via the power of thymos and ressentiment, I believe this is a large and under-noticed factor in play in the apparent 3SD of the geopolitical binfire of 2025. Look closely: so much of the world’s current garbage conflicts are fueled by the perceived theft of enjoyment and the promise of revenge. In such (ob)scenes, simulation permits us – to do what it is impossible for most to do IRL. Simulation opens a place of Adidas and Nike, ie, where ‘impossible is nothing’, and you can ‘just do it’ – without consequence IRL (or: consequences only for them, your group just gets to watch it from a safe distance). Threaten to scold that enjoyment away from nearly any group identity (whether incels or settlers or football fans), and they are ecstatic in seeing the scolding enjoyment thief spectacularly destroyed.
Like so many facets of this debounded community of fate we share, and the piped societies in which we live, this is ‘okay3’ at an individual level? We all have our internal death metal parts; most of us keep it to ourselves and keep it online. These crannies, those parts, that’s okay? Arguably, we either have our fantasies, or they have us – better that be by simulation? My ex friend, who used to play shooters as a way of getting through his depressions, was probably doing the world a favour by enacting his usually repressed sense of hostility and shame-in-powerlessness in these ‘harmless’ ways. Aggression and abjection do need places to go, and one can even explore these corners of ourselves reflexively, as well as with consenting others. Although it’s too literal and camp, Scandinavian black metal does at least have an intellectual honesty in its fulsome exploration of these dark parts4.
The trouble is scale, and how the stake in simulation’s pervasion is raised when we shift to the cumulative-collective.
Like so many facets of this debounded community of fate we share, and the piped societies in which we live, our pervasive indulgence of the kinds of violent, sexual, and sexually violent simulations we go for is maybe not ‘okay’ at the collective and cumulative level, actually. It’s not that I want to enter here as the moralising wowser or censor (don’t worry, I’m not here to steal your enjoyment). It’s that, when nearly a whole culture loses itself in its enacted desire and preference for simulation, we not only face a collective loss of world and solidarity, but also the eventual general disorientation of no longer knowing how to parse a given reality from its simulation, and the moral indifference at realising all-too-late that reality has been completely evacuated and annulled, and that this really mattered, was what really was what mattered, all along.
By 2025, after living, thinking and feeling this thought through for four decades, I now say all this with a fair degree of confidence. All this porn and gaming, all these head-shredding scroll holes, all the 8 hours a day we do on our phones for the corporations: it matters, and it’s wrecked a lot of us a lot. After decades of indulging it, it turns out that our preference and desire for simulation might be among the main reasons we now cannot face our real problems (and start feeling we don’t have to, as well as ‘can’t even’): climate change, institutional corruption, societal involution. We’re too busy fapping at, shooting at, gawking at pixels. Simulation is what subs in for life now, so simulation is what we’re dommed by.
This also of course matters very much because the material world is spinning and ramping, it is the steel boomerang of Mad Max Two. In the famous scene, that early 80s idiot made the mistake of trying to catch the dang thing. In a 2025 world of pervasive simulation, we would be so busy gaming, scrolling, or double screening, we wouldn’t even clock it swooping for the back of our exposed necks (for some, the threat of that happening would be the fantasy they were preoccupied by, that their simulation allowed them to indulge). In worrying about AGI, we forget about climate change. In obsessing over Trump, Musk, BitCoin, and Open AI vs Deepseek, we forget about fibre optic cables (can be cut!), containerised shipping (is fragile!), gas, oil, and (eg) mass extinction events caused by algal blooms caused by unseasonably warm ocean temperatures. The world is all happening; we’re missing the world happening, but we don’t miss the world, because we’re preoccupied with simulations. We are a species that worries about the flying killer robots we nonetheless try so desperately to invent, while something as prosaic as an algae or virus unfolds its microscopic doom in bloom – for all of us.
Do you agree?
Well, you could start by getting off the apps.
– but will you?
In the Australian sense of the term, ie: a pacifier. But also, a dummy, as in like Schaufensterpuppe, ie show room dummy, sex dummy; vapes are dummies too; so are sippy cups.
Consider, by contrast, that even the most prolific serial killer struggles to crack three digits. Stephen Paddock ‘only’ managed 60 as a mass shooter.
But is it really okay?
I have an anti interest in watching horror films or reading ero guro manga, but these also provide honourable places for this part of the human spectrum.