Baudrillard championed (among other things) the idea of hyperreality and post-truth.
As it is, Matrix is basically a Cave Allegory: the idea is that you have to reject the fake, go outside and touch grass to be real.
B. suggested that that is actually impossible, nowadays.
B. says that reality and fiction have become so extremely muddled (by propaganda, expert consensus, centralized media management etc.) that you cannot actually exit the cave. You wouldn’t be able to tell reality when you’re faced with it. You can’t tell fake from real news.
In how that relates to the Matrix, he disagreed with the idea that you can jack into and out of the matrix like a binary switch. That’s old thinking. If he’d have made it, it’d likely be sort of a wireless matrix by a chip in your head you can’t remove.
You can’t remove the chip. Maybe you can wake up, maybe your can suppress it, but you’d never be sure if the people you fight and kill are actually your friends with phantoms overlaid on them. That would be a Baudrillardian Matrix.
Now, how do you tackle this? Problem is, he *was* right. During the time that he wrote it, the diagnosis was correct. Media was centrally controlled and all-encompassing. Everyone got their news at the same source, which was easily controlled by the state and shunned any deviant.
CNN equalled truth. Whatever your personal experience or expert knowledge (deviating from their consensus) said was wrong when you or someone sharing your opinion was dragged in front of the nation in a 3 minute segment and roundly laughed at by everyone else on the show.
You could not get a word in edgewise because they controlled the frame. They were the glaziers of the Overton Window, and monopolists.
The truths about MK Ultra and so many other things your government did were in books, released and legible, but you never heard of the books.
There’s a reason why the first mass produced People’s Radios in Germany were nicknamed “Goebbles’ snout”. They set the frame for everyone to be remote controlled because they didn’t allow you to consider alternative approaches, ideas. Top down control. The medium is the message.
Now, you may have noticed that this doesn’t exactly apply anymore nowadays.
The smartphone, as shit as it is, broke the back of centralized media control.
The sheer incandescent hate that the media class has (and is actively stoking) for deviants is entirely caused by this.
Imagine growing up in a world where you, a member of the high salaried elite, can more or less dictate what the entire nation thinks.
B. successfully diagnosed that, in despair.
Then some tech nerd brings out the Nightmare Rectangle and the steering wheel you held onto snaps off.
There’s a reason why the media are in complete pandemonium and bleeding credibility, views and relation to reality like a stuck pig, and why this loss only makes them get angrier and lash out harder.
It’s not about truth, it never was. It was only about controlling the narrative.