I think it’s an unnecessarily confusing term in general. I think it makes sense when you’re specifically thinking of each level as a simulacrum of the one before, but the 2x2 grid version doesn’t feel that way to me – level 3 doesn’t (necessarily) feel like a distorted or reinforced version of level 2.
I think it’s useful to avoid unnecessary dependencies in jargon. The underlying concept here is something I’d want to be able to easily bring up in academic-twitter or whatever, and I don’t think there’s anything that complicated about it that requires explaining a whole background model, but I think framing it terms of simulacrum levels is opaque in a way that makes you open the box to understand how things connect.
I think mainstream intellectual circles basically understand some variation of “communication-as-politics/affiliation” (even if they mostly accuse other people of it most of the time), and the only really new thing the simulacrum frame adds in most conversations is that sometimes people are lying about affiliation vs doing so “honestly.”
I do still think the concept of simulacrum levels is useful, independent of the 2x2 grid, when you’re considering a domain where you specifically expect there to be a multiple-level-of-simulacrum mechanism for what’s going on, and it’s relevant to the discussion. Like, I ended up kinda re-deriving them in Recursive Middle Manager Hell, in a way that gave me more appreciation for the The Four Children of the Seder as the Simulacra Levels.
It seems that there is a tendency for discourses primarily operating at Level 1 to devolve into Level 2, and from Level 2 to Level 3, and from Level 3 to Level 4.
It seems maybe you don’t see the Level 2 to Level 3 connection. Well, here’s what I was thinking:
In discourses that are at level 1, people aren’t really forming into stable teams. Think: A bunch of students trying to solve a math problem sheet together, proposing and rejecting various lemmas or intuition pumps. But once the discourse is heavily at level 2, with lots of people thinking hard about how to convince other people of things—with lots of people arguing about some local thing like whether this particular intuition pump is reasonable by thinking about less-local things like whether it would support or undermine Lemma X and thereby support or undermine the strategy so-and-so has been undertaking—well, now it seems like conditions are ripe for teams to start to form. For people to be Team So-And-So’s Strategy. And with the formation of teams comes reporting which team you are on (level 3) and then eventually strategically signalling or shaping perceptions of which team you are on (level 4).
Huh, why? This is basically my summary of “Simulacrum levels” and matches how I’ve seen other people use those terms.
I think it’s an unnecessarily confusing term in general. I think it makes sense when you’re specifically thinking of each level as a simulacrum of the one before, but the 2x2 grid version doesn’t feel that way to me – level 3 doesn’t (necessarily) feel like a distorted or reinforced version of level 2.
I think it’s useful to avoid unnecessary dependencies in jargon. The underlying concept here is something I’d want to be able to easily bring up in academic-twitter or whatever, and I don’t think there’s anything that complicated about it that requires explaining a whole background model, but I think framing it terms of simulacrum levels is opaque in a way that makes you open the box to understand how things connect.
I think mainstream intellectual circles basically understand some variation of “communication-as-politics/affiliation” (even if they mostly accuse other people of it most of the time), and the only really new thing the simulacrum frame adds in most conversations is that sometimes people are lying about affiliation vs doing so “honestly.”
I do still think the concept of simulacrum levels is useful, independent of the 2x2 grid, when you’re considering a domain where you specifically expect there to be a multiple-level-of-simulacrum mechanism for what’s going on, and it’s relevant to the discussion. Like, I ended up kinda re-deriving them in Recursive Middle Manager Hell, in a way that gave me more appreciation for the The Four Children of the Seder as the Simulacra Levels.
I didn’t elaborate, but I did say:
It seems maybe you don’t see the Level 2 to Level 3 connection. Well, here’s what I was thinking:
In discourses that are at level 1, people aren’t really forming into stable teams. Think: A bunch of students trying to solve a math problem sheet together, proposing and rejecting various lemmas or intuition pumps. But once the discourse is heavily at level 2, with lots of people thinking hard about how to convince other people of things—with lots of people arguing about some local thing like whether this particular intuition pump is reasonable by thinking about less-local things like whether it would support or undermine Lemma X and thereby support or undermine the strategy so-and-so has been undertaking—well, now it seems like conditions are ripe for teams to start to form. For people to be Team So-And-So’s Strategy. And with the formation of teams comes reporting which team you are on (level 3) and then eventually strategically signalling or shaping perceptions of which team you are on (level 4).