Great delamination
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There was a point in the last decade when the online universe — the one you’re in now, dear reader, as you peer through crusted specs through this frame into our fully tractable simulacrum — and the real universe, out there, with trees and flowers and fotherington-tomas caring not a row of buttons about things, diverged — “delaminated” — having originally set off along their own independent, meandering but tangled and inter-dependent trajectories, finally lost contact and now bear absolutely no relation to each other.
Meaning that what was a simulacrum increasingly no longer is. There is danger in confusing the two.
Elemental manifestations: online discourse and discourse in real life are qualitatively different. Online discourse is deterministic, delineated, scaled, binary, digital, definitive, eliminative, final and binding. IRL discourse is graduated, ambiguous, deprecated, provisional, malleable, nuanced, forgiveable. Being human, it offers scope for redemption, reinvention, and reconfiguration. No-one is perfect —neither the judge or the judged —so we must make allowances for error, misunderstanding, misapprehension.
The JC dates that loss of contact to 2016 — specifically, 10 January 2016, or “BlackStar”. The “great delamination” at which the digital/analogue separation became irreversible, is a key inflexion point in the social history of the 21st century.