Reality and Digital Culture
The Time and Realiity Series
Perception as The Simulation of Reality
I don’t believe being follows perception, but rather being exists apart from perception, and we learn what it means to be a human being through experience and the process of understanding what we have experienced. To separate analytical reasoning from experience is to reduce our understanding of what is real to that which can only be captured in words.
In doing so, we learn that there is no single reality that we all share, but rather billions of perceptions of reality competing against one another for prominence and power. As a result, the simulation that is the product of digital culture makes perfect sense. Along as we accept digital culture as the reality above all realities.
The result is a self-centered core with reality defined by what I desire it to be. This reality goes by many names. God, the Universe, Consciousness, and any number of ideas that serve as a way to define the world where benefits accrue and responsibilities fade to the individual.
I don’t come at these questions from an analytical or theoretical starting point. It all comes to me as I observe the world, and I ask questions of my observations. I see patterns of behavior that transcend all the divisions that exist in society. In this respect, humanity is a singularity. At our core, we are all the same.
Alienation Through Digital Culture
The social culture of our lives today is a digital structure. We connect with people through our phones and Zoom calls on our computers. Technology is the medium of our relationships. We are now in touch with so many people because the smartphone makes it possible.
What is the character of these relationships? Are they even relationships in the traditional sense? Does calling them connections make any sense? What does it mean to be connected?
Most of these relationships tend to be one-dimensional. Virtually (pardon the pun) every interaction represents the appearance of a relationship. There is an exchange from sleight momentary attention. Genuine relationships are based in respect seeking to establish trust and mutual accountability.
As I have learned through hosting and producing The Eddy Network Podcast, relationships of this type are quite difficult to create. There must be something tangible at stake that gives the relationship immediacy. Without this, the relationship is impossible to sustain.
Many relationships share these qualities, but lack regular interaction and proximity to each other. Relationships like this demonstrate what Mark Granovetter describes as “the strength of weak ties.” Our relationships matter, but within a very narrow range. My relationship with my podcast guests tends to be this way.
The Eddy Network Podcast intentionally seeks to establish personal rapport through what one guest described as “an unscripted conversation.” He was precisely correct.
The beauty of an unscripted conversation is that we are not following an algorithm or a programmed discussion. I ask the questions based on my curiosity in learning about my guest. Sometimes the guest will ask their own questions of me. This is how two curious people interact. We are not alien to one another. We are simply exploring interests and experiences that we might share in common.
Let’s ask more difficult questions.
How can we be conscious of what is real if we live in a simulated world of abstract identity?
The question really isn’t whether we are consciously or not, but what we are conscious of?
From this question, I look at the writers on consciousness like Marilyn Monk and Iain McGilchrist defining first principles.* They are laying the ground, the framework, for us to wrestle with the reality of living in the context of a world that is beyond us.
This is a question that is far too easily ignored because it does not fit into a perception is reality mindset. That mindset, from my perspective, begins first with the human being as the knowing person and second with what is known. We return to Descartes’ I think, therefore I am.
The reality that I see is that what we come to know already exists. It was knowable before we were conscious of it. To place our knowing as primary is to close off avenues of understanding that are available to us.
So, we ask the question,
What are we conscious of, if that which we are conscious of existed before our awareness of it?
How, then, does a GenZ or GenAlpha young person form the perceptions that become their reality?
They are trapped by the perceptions of reality that are have been programmed by older generations. The Spectacle of the Real has been transformed from a spectacle of news and entertainment into a hyperreal culture of sexual fandom and ideological alienation. Their perception of reality has been programmed for them. Modern media culture is the world that my generation and ones that followed have bequeathed to our grandchildren.
The trap of the perception is reality is that we simultaneously celebrate humanity’s freedom of choice while denying its responsibility. This brokenness in the human psyche separates us from the reality that is beyond our awareness. It is impossible to begin to know oneself, if you begin with perception as reality. The tragedies and hardship in life do not make sense as a result.
How can we face disappointment and emotional trauma if all reality is mere perception?
Trauma is not simply an emotional injury, but an embodied experience that may be passed from generation to generation. I wonder about the people that Mark Laita interviews on his YouTube channel, Soft White Underbelly, who tell of the brokenness of their birth families that led them into drug abuse, sex work, and criminal activity.
We cannot simultaneously claim to establish reality and deny that we are responsible for it.
It is illogical and mentally destructive.
Based on our attitude that perception is reality, do we believe that we control reality? Are our dreams of success genuine perceptions of human potential or projections of desire without basis?
We create systems and structures to model our perception of the world. We do so because we perceive reality both as hostile and opportunistic. It is not a peaceful world, but a deadly competitive one, where power is the pinnacle of perception.
It is from this context that I am asking the question about our perception of the social. What do we mean by the social? If we use my application of Marshal McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message, from my post The Medium is the Perception, we should ask,
“What is the medium of the social that we need to discover or create to accomplish the restoration of community, personally, locally, and globally?”
Advanced technology is a limiting factor in human experience. What good is saving time if the time that is saved is without effect?
Social media is based on social influencers influencing consumer and cultural choices.
I am not anti-technology. I have more technology than anyone in my family. However, social media is not a thing, but a medium, an environment, an ethos, a context that separates people from the reality of the physical world.
We have created a context of awareness that is not based on the reality that exists apart from us. Instead, we are presented a hyperreal world of simulation. This is a reality of appearance, existing in images intended to represent a new or different reality. Is it any wonder that political ideology and sexual pornography has found a fertile ground in the social media context? Our consciousness derived from social media is not even ours. It is a program with a message. Simulations have become the social medium of relationships.
We are now addressing a fundamental question of human experience? Am I conscious of what is real or am I only aware of the simulations that influence my perception of reality?
Jean Baudrillard perceived this reality as the act of murdering reality. He called it The Perfect Crime.
“For reality is but a concept, or a principle, and by reality I mean the whole system of values connected with this principle. The Real as such implies an origin, an end, a past and a future, a chain of causes and effects, a continuity and a rationality. No real with these elements, without an objective configuration of discourse.”
We can see this as I describe in my short book, Where Did Trust Go? Restoring Authority and Accountability in Organizations. The lack of accountability illustrates the separation of authority from accountability, or benefits from responsibility. This is where our construction of the principle of perception is reality has led us.
Without accountability, or the reality that we are responsible for pain, suffering, and trauma in the world, we can never know ourselves. Success is not a good measure of self-awareness. Trouble and difficulty are the hard teachers of wisdom.
The question about reality is whether it is simply a mental construct that we perceive to explain the world we want, or it is something beyond our perception.
In his essay, Forget Foucault, critiquing Michel Foucault’s The Will To Knowledge, Jean Baudrillard shows how reality has been reduced to an exchange between the political and sexuality.
“… what if Foucault spoke to us so well of sexuality … only because its form, this great production … of our culture, was, like that of power, in the process of disappearing? … We have at this point reached the metalanguage of desire in a discourse on sex that has outreached itself by redoubling the signs of sex so as to mask an indeterminancy and a profound disinvestment - the dominant catchword sexual is now equivalent to an inert sexual milieu. It is the same with sex as with politics: “Remember in ‘68 how many strikes, barricades, speeches and cobblestones it took for people to begin to accept that everything is political. Pornography, as it proliferates and is censured only to come back stronger, will let them see that everything is sexuality” … There is a double absurdity here (everything is political, everything is sexuality), a parallel absurdity in these two catchwords at the very moment when politics collapses and when sex itself becomes involuted and disappears as a strong referent in the hyperreality of “liberated sexuality. “
In my essay, The Spectacle of the Real, I wrote Guy Debord about the image-based nature of the spectacle.
French Marxist philosopher Guy Debord in his book, Society of the Spectacle, was one of the first to explore the spectacle nature of the modern world.
"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. ...
The concept of "spectacle" … are appearances of a socially organized appearance … (the) affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible."
This is what I see in the way perception as reality defines what the phenomena of life is. It is not enough to be for consciousness, a phenomenological perspective, or a life of being a person of impact. Without a clear understanding of the distinction between our perception of reality and reality itself, we cannot understand the diverse dimensions of human existence.
Applied to a current controversy, we can never know the underlying reality of Epstein’s politics and how sexuality fits into it. We are only playing with the appearance of what has transpired, rather than the reality of what did. When we begin to address the underlying reality of human existence, we can see how the situation that we find ourselves in is a hyperreal exchange between politics and sex.
The Inherent Conflict with Perception as Reality
My experience of reality presents to me perceptions that I must critically consider. I ask.
Are my perceptions of reality accurate?
What am I missing in what I see?
Does my perception of reality limit my life?
I live in an urban neighborhood that is gentrifying, not fast enough in my mind.
Two days ago, I got up from bed, walked through my house, and found two people sleeping on the porch of the house next door. The guy looked up at me, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
Daily, I see men and women, Black and White, young, middle-aged, and elderly, wandering the streets where I live. Many are drug-addled, jobless, homeless, and dependent upon a failing system of government and community organizations that support them.
Forty years ago, I began my ministerial work as an urban community minister. I saw then, what I see now in my neighborhood. I ask.
How did the age of human flourishing, the promise of the age of Enlightenment, Science and Industry, and the historic Advancement to a Utopian future miss them?
I know that my perception has been formed by my faith. It is a social context for me. The words of Paul to the church in Corinth resonate within me as to what the defining character of a society should be. He uses the metaphor of the body to describe what their responsibility as a church should be.
“On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect, whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:22-26.)
What do you think the perception of reality of the leaders of the body is? Are people who are perceived to be weaker, less honorable, or less respectable allowed to have a perception of reality that is their own? Did they plan to be what they have become?
“I'm going to be a drug addict, a sex worker, dependent on the drug gangs and cartels for my livelihood, and spend my nights homeless, squatting in houses and on porches?”
I don’t believe that this is what they want.
They wanted to be happy and free of trauma.
Here in America, we have been sold on the idea of the American dream of prosperity.
If the American Dream is for everyone, what explains the poverty and dissolution of the good life for so many people?
The reality that we live with is this.
The American dream is a simulation of reality.
The idea of perception as reality is its sales pitch.
Name it and claim it.
Believe it and it is yours.
Your desires are within your reach.
You manifest your own reality.
These are the simulated realities that are sold to us as true representations of reality.
Let me ask this question:
If perception is reality, whose perception believes that war, global pandemics, and economic contraction are the realities that we want?
If perception of reality produces reality, then there are people who believe this.
Do you believe this?
Is this the perception of reality that you operate from?
I didn’t think so.
The world we live in is organized, structured, managed, and programmed as a grand simulation of reality. This is what I first presented in my essay, The Spectacle of the Real. At that point in time, I thought this was just a manifestation of mainstream media’s need to control the economics of news and entertainment.
Now I see that it is how the modern world works.
Twenty five years ago, The Matrix debuted with the choice between the red pill and the blue pill. The blue pill you remain in the Matrix, in the simulation. Choose the red pill and you leave the Matrix to see what reality is. This is the simple choice offered to us.
Reality is much more complicated.
Both the red and blue pills are simulations of The Matrix. They both are products of its self-contained reality. One simulation is of a beautiful reality and the other simulation is of an apocalyptic reality. Both are reductions of the perception of reality.
Reality is not an object.
It is not my perception, conception or formulation.
Reality is the environment in which all things exist.
It is not like air or water. There is no reality and non-reality. There is only reality.
We come to understand reality as an order that has its own rules.
We can talk about the order of reality or the laws of nature.
We may see this order as a moral one because it ultimately defines how we are to behave as human beings in relationship to other human beings and the world we share.
The beauty of physics is that it is able to capture conceptually, in part, what this order is like. The work of philosophy is to describe the moral order of reality. The challenge of religion is to see beyond the scientific and moral order to see some transcendent purpose to reality.
When we say perception is reality, we are not making a statement about the totality of reality. Rather we are making a statement of our very limited observations and experience with reality.
*See Perception of Consciousness, The Future of Leadership by Ed Brenegar, August 3, 2025.
Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, p 63.
Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, pp. 31-32