…right in the simulacra!

2015-05-14T23:53:00.002-04:00

“I will say for the record that (CityNews video) is a fake,” says Cain.
The Toronto Star, May 13

In the stupefying aftermath of the incident which took place outside of the TFC match this past weekend, while I was scanning news articles and Facebook comments, the way one does now, the partial quote above struck me as the only statement to truly bear on why the incident took place.

Why did the low level idiocy above, spoken by John Cain, the proud innovator of the phrase lately shouted at (or toward) on-camera reporters, strike me as so vital?

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.
From Wikipedia (requisite apologies) on Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

For people deeply immersed in our virtualized culture the world is covered with a veneer of unreality. The Cain quote (unwittingly) states that perfectly. Cain himself finds a virtual outlet for his "sense of humor" and purports to have won "a small [virtual] lottery" with his viral video series. One can safely assume that he has also found great virtual fame/notoriety (aside: these are now officially synonyms).

The video must be fake, because everything is fake.

And how could the men in Toronto have shouted such vulgarities? I have a feeling that the hardest part was having to briefly lower their iPhones.

Unto the Dogs

…right in the simulacra!