Sun-Sim (eng)

Recall a child drawing the sun for the first time. He does not consult astrophysical treatises or measure radiation spectra — he simply takes a yellow pencil and traces a circle with rays onto the paper. This sun is not an exact copy of the real celestial body. It is a sign, endowed with an ultimate, almost sacred simplicity. It is warm, kind, and lives in the sky. The child does not doubt its authenticity, for it so clearly conveys his inner feeling. Before us is the first, naïve simulacrum: not a reflection of reality, but its substitution, born from pure idea and direct embodiment. It does not deceive; it is the truth, until one day someone shows the child a photograph of the Sun taken through a telescope, and he sees, instead of a cozy face, a raging hell of thermonuclear reactions. Which of these realities is more authentic? The one that warms the soul, or the one that governs the world of physical laws?

This child's drawing becomes a gateway to the labyrinth erected by Jean Baudrillard. The simulacrum, in his understanding, is not merely a false copy. It is a copy that has erased the very memory of the original's existence. It is more real than reality itself. Our world, he argued, long ago transitioned from the production of the real to the production of the hyperreal, where the map precedes the territory and ultimately engenders it. We inhabit hyperreality — a space constructed from simulacra that refer only to one another, not to any fundamental authenticity. Look at Disneyland. Its castles, talking mice, grinning pirates — all of it is deliberately artificial, emphatically "unreal." But it is precisely this total, overt fakery that convinces us that beyond its borders lies some "real" world. Baudrillard, however, saw in Disneyland a subtle mechanism designed to conceal a bitter truth: all of America, indeed the entire Western world, is itself Disneyland. Reality has vanished, absorbed by its own flawless models.

How did we arrive at this point? To understand, it is worth stepping back into the quiet studies of German philosophers where phenomenology was born. Its founder, Edmund Husserl, looked with a scientist's frustration upon the growing chasm between the world as it is given to us in immediate experience, and the world as described by science. Science spoke of molecules, fields, neurons, but the lived experience itself — the beauty of a sunset, the bitterness of loss, the sweetness of a first kiss — was somehow being lost. "Back to the things themselves!" he proclaimed. He urged us to bracket all prejudices, scientific dogmas, and faith in the external world, to investigate pure consciousness and its contents. The main tool became intentionality — the cornerstone of phenomenology. This is not everyday intention, but a fundamental property of consciousness: to always be directed at something. We do not merely exist; we always love, hate, remember, imagine, see something. Consciousness is always consciousness of something.

Here I am, looking at a cup of coffee. A phenomenologist would say: I have no direct access to the "cup-in-itself." I am dealing with the phenomenon of the cup — a unity of visual perception, tactile sensations, smell, memory, and cultural codes. This entire totality is my reality. The intentionality of my consciousness "apprehends" this complex object, endowing it with meaning. This is a powerful, life-affirming gesture: the world is given to me not as a cold set of data, but as something meaningful, already permeated by the rays of my attention.

What connection could there possibly be between this rigorous analysis and Baudrillard's simulacra? The most direct one. Phenomenology, in striving to return to authentic experience, essentially declared that reality is constituted in the interaction between consciousness and the world. It built bridges between subject and object. But what happens when consciousness itself, this bastion of authenticity, begins to engage not with the world, but with its pre-constructed images? When intentionality is directed not at an apple, but at its glossy photograph in an advertisement, where the droplets of condensation are drawn by a digital artist? The intentional object is substituted, and with it, the very structure of our experience becomes distorted.

Martin Heidegger, Husserl's student, sensed this shift even before the internet era. He spoke of "Enframing" [Gestell], a stance towards the world in which all that exists — nature, people, ideas — is viewed as a resource, a "standing reserve," awaiting optimization and use. The forest ceases to be an abode of mystery and a home for spirits, becoming merely a source of timber and potential for the tourist industry. The river is not an embodiment of an elemental force, but a source of energy and a place for waste disposal. The Heideggerian "Enframing" is a philosophical harbinger of simulation. It is a world where things lose their selfhood, their "thingness," and become signs in a giant system of exchange, mere functions in a global machine.

Consider Andy Warhol with his Campbell's soup cans and silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe. Pop art became an artistic laboratory for the production of simulacra. Warhol did what Baudrillard would later articulate: he took not the thing itself, but its already-prepared, mass-media reproduced image. Warhol's Marilyn is not a portrait of the real Norma Jeane Baker. It is a portrait of her media image, her simulacrum. The artist copies not reality, but the copy, elevating it to the status of an icon. In this gesture lies both the triumph and the horror of hyperreality. The icon becomes more real than the original. No one knew the "real" Marilyn, but everyone recognized her mask, her simulacrum. It was more alive, more comprehensible, more convenient for consumption.

This principle finds its ultimate expression in social networks — the global Disneyland, a giant factory for the production and consumption of simulacra. We create not a reflection of our lives, but their ideal, edited model — a "profile." Our intentionality here becomes split. On one hand, we direct it towards constructing our own simulacrum; on the other, towards the simulacra of others. We engage in relationships not so much with people, as with their carefully constructed avatars. The gap between experience and its representation turns into an abyss. A delicious dinner hasn't truly occurred until its photograph is validated with likes. A journey acquires its final reality only in the form of a series of social media stories.

This is the triumph of hyperreality. News is not a report about an event, but a narrative constructed according to the laws of dramaturgy. A politician is not a person with certain qualities, but a brand, a set of slogans and images that refer only to other images. Even our own identity becomes a collage of borrowed simulacra: we try on styles, subcultures, life scenarios seen in films. The phenomenological question "Who am I?" is supplanted by the question "What image do I wish to project?"

And here arises the deepest and most troubling question: did that pure, Baudrillardian reality ever truly exist? Or is simulation an original, inherent property of human consciousness, inherently capable of operating with symbols? Plato, with his world of Ideas and the world of pale, shadowy copies, was essentially describing an ontological simulation. Religion, with its icons and rituals — what is it, if not a grand system of simulacra referring to a transcendent original? Perhaps Baudrillard was simply describing a new, digital stage of this ancient process. But there is a qualitative difference. Whereas before the simulacrum referred to something Vast, Absolute, even if invisible, today simulacra refer only to each other, in an infinite, self-sufficient play of signs. Ours is a closed universe, devoid of any exit.

What remains for the human, "thrown" into this hyperreality? Phenomenology, for all its critique, leaves us a loophole — intentionality. Perhaps salvation lies not in searching for a lost "objective" reality, but in a radical honesty towards our own perception. In the attempt, against all odds, to direct our consciousness towards the world, and not its media substitutes. To feel the texture of wood, not merely photograph it for Pinterest. To experience the taste of food, not instantly search for the perfect camera angle. To listen to another person, not calculate how to turn their words into a tweet.

This is a quiet, almost monastic practice of attention in a world that does everything to scatter that attention and turn it into a commodity. It is an attempt, following Husserl, to perform a phenomenological reduction in relation to the noise of simulacra — to bracket all the glamorous junk of hyperreality and see what remains. Perhaps what remains is that very child who draws the sun. Not because it is fashionable or expected, but because his consciousness, in its naïve and direct intentional act, still apprehends the idea of warmth and light, and he does not care whether it is a simulacrum or not. He feels warm. And this is the only reality that matters.

But here, too, a trap awaits us: the very gesture of "authentic experience" has long since become a commodity, part of the very same system. Yoga, meditation, mindfulness, downshifting, "living in the moment" — all have turned into markets, into simulacra of authenticity that we consume to convince ourselves we are not consuming. The labyrinth closes in. This realization — that even resistance is absorbed by the system — gives birth to a particular metaphysical melancholy. We are like prisoners who cannot find an exit from the prison, and who furthermore discover that the very idea of freedom was designed by the prison architect as part of the plan to manage their behavior.

Take a simple example: a craftsman creating pots on a wheel in his garage. He feels the clay, its pliability, its damp breath. It seems, here is a bastion of authenticity, a gesture untouched by simulation. But let us look closer. He displays his pots on online handmade marketplaces. Their value is determined not only by functionality or beauty, but by how successfully they fit into the "handmade" trend, the narrative of a "unique artifact" containing a "soul." The buyer acquires not just a pot; he buys a story about a master fighting a faceless machine civilization; he consumes a simulacrum of authenticity. The very gesture of resistance turns into a commodity, a sign within the system of exchange. The craftsman, unwittingly, becomes an actor in the play he hoped to exit.

This is the very "catastrophe of meaning" of which Baudrillard spoke. In traditional society, a thing possessed a clear symbolic exchange: it could be a gift, a sacrifice, a status symbol, but its meaning remained relatively stable and rooted in a cultural code. In the era of simulation, signs are devalued; they begin to circulate at a frantic pace, referring only to each other, generating an endless play of empty references. The internet meme is a perfect example of such a catastrophe. Its meaning is shallow and instantly recognizable, but just as instantly evaporates, replaced by the next. It is pure simulation without the slightest pretense of connection to any reality, except the reality of the media environment itself. The intentionality of consciousness, captured by this flow, fragments, becomes clip-like, devoid of stable direction. We do not immerse ourselves in meaning; we skim across its surface.

Phenomenology, in its classical understanding, seems powerless before this tsunami. Its method requires concentration, a deep listening to essences, while the modern world offers only a cacophony of simulacra. However, perhaps salvation lies not in ignoring hyperreality, but in its radical acceptance and in the use of its very tools. Artists following this logic work not with reality, but with its images, pushing the logic of simulation to the point of absurdity to expose its mechanics.

Imagine a digital artist who has never seen the sea. He paints it based on others' photographs, movie frames, descriptions in books. His sea is a simulacrum, assembled from fragments of other simulacra. But if he undertakes this project with a pedantic fanaticism, if he studies waves based on algorithms for their generation in graphics, selects shades of blue from digital palettes, cross-referencing them with colors from popular films — in the end, he will create a Hyper-sea. A perfect, flawless, utterly convincing model that will turn out to be "more sea-like" than any real sea with its unpredictability and randomness. His creation becomes an icon of hyperreality. And in this gesture, upon reflection, there is something divine: he creates not a copy, but a new essence, existing exclusively in the order of simulation. His intentionality is directed not at the sea, but at the very Idea of the Sea, drawn from the media ocean.

This returns us to Plato's cave, but in its postmodern version. The prisoners are chained not to shadows from a fire, but to giant screens onto which simulacra are projected, generated by other simulacra. And then one of the prisoners, a philosopher or artist, is freed. He turns and sees not the true source of light and real things, but only server racks, projectors, and programmers creating these simulacra. And behind them — other programmers creating simulacra for the programmers themselves. There is no exit. Only an infinite chain of mediations. What is he to do? Return to the other prisoners and try to explain that their reality is an illusion? But their reality is all they have. Its simulational nature does not make it any less real in its consequences.

And here, Western thought, having passed through the wilds of post-structuralism, unexpectedly finds a point of contact with Eastern philosophies, which have always been suspicious of the very idea of objective reality. The world as maya, illusion. However, if in Buddhism the exit is enlightenment, a departure from the play of forms, in hyperreality there is nowhere to go. The exit becomes not the destruction of the illusion, but a conscious, almost playful participation in it. Irony as a form of existence. The ironic subject does not believe in the simulacra, but acts as if he does. He buys a branded item, fully aware that he is paying not for quality, but for the logo, for access to a certain myth. He maintains social networks, understanding it is a carnival of masks. His intentionality becomes double: on the surface it is directed at the objects of simulation, but at a deeper level — at the very mechanics of simulation, which he studies and in which he participates with a detached smile. This is not cynicism, which denies everything, but a kind of committed skepticism. An attempt to preserve an inner space, an "internal emigration" within the labyrinth itself.

But this position, too, is vulnerable. The system has learned to simulate irony as well. Advertising has long used self-irony to appear honest and "in on the joke." Politicians may ironize over their own predictability to win trust. Irony becomes the next level of simulation — the simulation of freedom from simulation.

Where, then, can we find a point of support? Perhaps the last refuge is the simplest and most basic — the body. The body that ages, falls ill, feels pain and pleasure. The body that, as Merleau-Ponty wrote, is our "being-in-the-world." Hyperreality is virtual; it attacks sight and hearing, but it is powerless against a toothache, against the smell of rain on hot asphalt, against muscle fatigue after a long walk. The phenomenology of the body, its "flesh" — this is the foundation that does not yield to total simulation. One can simulate the image of a body, one can even simulate some sensations in virtual reality, but one cannot simulate the very fact that you are this body, that you are anchored in the material world through it.

It is in this, perhaps, that the final act of resistance lies. Not in the search for a lost reality "outside," but in delving deeper into the reality given to us directly — the reality of our own embodied existence. In the act of love, in physical labor, in overcoming oneself in sport, in the simple contemplation of a sunset not through a camera lens, but with all one's skin, one's entire being — in these moments, the intentionality of consciousness and the being of the body merge into one. This is an experience that is difficult to describe with signs, that eludes total commodification, for its essence lies in immediacy, not in representation.

Thus we return to the beginning, to the child with the drawing. But now this is not a naïve child, but one who has passed through all the circles of simulation. He still draws the sun with rays, not because he is unaware of thermonuclear reactions. He knows about them. And yet, he chooses to depict it precisely like this — as a sign of warmth, as the idea of light, as an act of pure, unmediated expression. His drawing is not a simulacrum that denies reality, nor is it its copy. It is a gesture. An act of faith that behind all the illusoriness and substitutions, there still exists something that makes the very gesture of drawing meaningful. Perhaps this is the very "thing-in-itself" about which we can know nothing, but which, in spite of everything, compels us to seek, to feel, and to create, even if the fruits of creation are immediately absorbed by the eternal carnival of simulacra.

This gesture is not an escape into naivety, but a conscious act of resistance based on the recognition of the system's total nature. However, this very "awareness" has become a powerful industry, a simulacrum of well-being. Meditation apps with their soothing voices and algorithmized sessions sell us the illusion of peace of mind. Fitness trackers turn running — an ancient, animal impulse — into data collection, a gamified race for achievements, yet another performance for social networks. Even our striving for "real" experience is packaged in commodity form. We buy tours "for adventurers," where risk is carefully measured and insured. We pay for an "authentic" dinner in an ethnic village built for tourists, where locals play themselves in a play of authenticity.

The system doesn't just allow us to resist — it sells us the tools for resistance, turning the very opposition into an engine of consumerism. This is the ultimate victory of hyperreality according to Baudrillard: when even the negation of the system becomes part of it, a sign that can be exchanged. There is no more "outside." No point of support. We are always already inside, and any attempt to break out only generates a new spiral of simulation.

What, then, remains? Perhaps the only consistent position is not resistance or irony, but something akin to a strategic acceptance, pushed to the extreme. If we are doomed to live in a world of simulacra, let us play this game with full commitment, but with a cold, almost scientific interest in its rules. Let us become not critics, but archaeologists of hyperreality, collecting its bizarre forms, cataloguing its logic. The artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, with his photographs of movie theaters where he used a long exposure to capture only the screen, turning the entire film into a dazzlingly white, mystical rectangle — here is an example of such an approach. He does not fight the simulacrum of cinema; he pushes it to its logical limit, to a state of pure, indistinguishable luminosity, where the content itself disappears, and only the carrier remains. This is a cruel and beautiful gesture: to destroy the simulacrum by executing its program to the very end.

A different, naively-primitive approach is demonstrated by an elderly person who opens a social media account and takes everything written there with absolute, literal seriousness. For him, every like is a sincere sign of approval, every angry comment a real threat, every advertising image a description of a real product. His intentionality, undistorted by irony or cynicism, collides head-on with the world of simulacra. The result is often tragicomic: he buys a "miracle cure" from an ad, believes fake news, sincerely worries about hate. But in his naivety there is a strange power. He makes the system work as it was designed, exposing its manipulative essence. He is the ideal consumer and simultaneously its victim, the living embodiment of how hyperreality devours undistorted perception. His misplaced seriousness becomes the most powerful form of criticism.

Perhaps the task of the contemporary thinker or artist is not to find an exit, but to meticulously map the labyrinth. To describe its nooks, traps, and mechanisms, without harboring illusions about salvation. This is sorrowful knowledge, a melancholic science. Phenomenology here could transform from a method of searching for essences into a method of describing how simulacra appear to us. How they affect our perception, what structures of experience they form. Our intentionality is no longer directed at the "tree-in-itself," but at the "tree-as-object-of-an-Instagram-photograph," and this, too, is a worthy phenomenological object for study.

In this context, the old concept of sublimation — the transformation of base drives into something sublime, culturally acceptable — acquires a new resonance. Hyperreality is a giant machine for the sublimation of reality itself. It turns our longing for the authentic, our pain, our fears and desires into safe, packaged, consumable forms. We do not experience tragedy; we watch a series about tragedy. We do not enter into dangerous relationships; we scroll through dating sites, reducing people to a set of characteristics and photographs. This is the sublimation of life into a sign about life.

And so the final question arises: what if this is not a dead end, but a natural, albeit monstrous, continuation of human culture? For culture, from the very beginning, was a system of signs referring to something else. Cave paintings were not the bison themselves, but their signs, endowed with magical power. Religious rituals were simulacra of connection with the divine. High art was a simulacrum of beauty and truth. Baudrillard simply stated that in our era, this symbolic system has finally broken away from any referents and become self-sufficient. We have moved from a theater that depicts life, to a theater that depicts itself.

Perhaps the genuine tragedy is not the disappearance of reality, but that we, Western people, raised on the ideals of the Enlightenment with its faith in Reason, Truth, and Progress, were unprepared for this. Our mental apparatus, our phenomenology, our intentionality — are still tuned to a world where sign and thing were inextricably linked. Hyperreality demands from us a new form of consciousness — more flexible, more ironic, perhaps more tragic. A consciousness capable of living without guarantees, without "ground beneath its feet," in an infinite sliding across surfaces.

And in this hopeless landscape, the contours of a new, strange beauty emerge. The beauty of a perfect model, impeccable code, a pure simulacrum that pretends to be nothing other than itself. This is the aesthetics of a Mirror reflecting another Mirror. Barren, sterile, but mesmerizing in its complexity and self-sufficiency. We are like astronauts, forever stranded in orbit, who, having relinquished all hope of returning to Earth, begin to perceive the icy, lifeless splendor of the starry sky as their new home. And in this acceptance lies its own, bitter freedom. Freedom from the longing for what, perhaps, never even existed.

This freedom gives birth to a new type of subjectivity — not so much homo sapiens or homo consumens, but homo simulans. His essence lies not in possessing truth or things, but in the masterful operation of signs, in a light, almost instinctive navigation of the ocean of simulacra. He is the product and the only possible inhabitant of hyperreality. His consciousness is plastic, his identity an assemblage, his morality situational. The phenomenology of his experience lacks its former depth; it is a phenomenology of the surface, of instant connection and disconnection, of constant channel-switching of reality.

Observe the aesthetics of modern open-world video games. These worlds are not an attempt to imitate reality, but a striving to create a hyperreality more saturated, convenient, and captivating than the real one. In such worlds, landscapes are too perfect, stories too epic, and freedom of action illusory, limited by code. The player is perfectly aware of this illusion, yet gladly immerses himself in it because the offered reality is better than his own. It is meaningful; it has clear goals, enemies, and rewards. The player's intentionality is directed not at defeating a real opponent, but at interacting with a system of rules and images, at performing a role prescribed by the algorithm. This is a pure, sterile simulation of heroism and discovery, and it satisfies an archaic need for meaning and adventure that our blurred, complex reality fails to fulfill.

But what happens to the body of homo simulans? It, the last bastion of a bygone era, is also gradually capitulating. Virtual reality offers haptic suits, promising the simulation of touch. Fitness trackers turn bodily rhythms into data, substituting the inner feeling of fatigue or vigor with digital metrics. We learn to trust a sleep graph more than our own sense of rest. Further still: transhumanism proposes the final escape from the "wet software" of the body into cybernetic immortality, into uploading consciousness into a digital medium. This is the apotheosis of simulation: not merely to live in hyperreality, but to become a digital entity oneself, a simulacrum of oneself, eternal and impervious to decay. Plato's dream of liberation from the prison of the body finds its technological, nightmarish embodiment.

From this perspective, even death, this last guarantor of ontological seriousness, loses its status. On social networks, the profiles of deceased people continue to exist, becoming digital mausoleums, simulacra of personality with which one can mentally hold a dialogue. Death is incorporated into the system of simulation, becomes part of it, a sign, a managed ritual. It is no longer the absolute limit, but just another element subject to digital curation.

What remains of phenomenology in this apocalyptic landscape? Perhaps its role shifts from the search for foundations to the meticulous description of the agony. It can become a phenomenology of decay, a fixation of how the very concept of the world's "givenness" disappears. If for Husserl the world was given directly in the acts of consciousness, for us the world is given as infinite mediation. We see not a tree, but its image, filtered through aesthetic trends, ecological narratives, and personal memories inspired by media. Our intentionality becomes reflexive, looped back onto itself: we are directed not at the world, but at our own perception of the world, which is already a product of simulation.

And here, in this dead end, an unexpected, paradoxical ray of light is born. If reality is unattainable and simulation is total, then perhaps the only authentic gesture becomes a radical, almost religious faith in the simulacrum itself. Not irony, not analysis, but faith. As a medieval monk believed in the real presence of Christ in the host — the bread that is merely a sign, but through which the divine essence itself manifests — so too could we try to see in the simulacrum not a deception, but the only possible form of the manifestation of reality available to us.

Let us return to our child. Now he has grown up. He is a digital artist creating perfect, hyper-realistic landscapes that do not exist. But one day, working on the texture of virtual moss, he suddenly, with absolute, stunning clarity, remembers the smell of real moss in the forest of his childhood. This memory breaks through all the layers of simulation, like a ray of light through the water's depth. It does not cancel hyperreality, but for a moment illuminates it from within. The artist understands that his simulacra are not an escape from reality. They are a longing for it. They are endless, desperate attempts to restore the lost paradise of immediate experience, to piece it together from what remains — from images, sounds, digital traces.

In this gesture lies a new, tragic intentionality. It is not a directedness towards the world (it is lost), nor a directedness towards the simulacrum (that is a dead end). It is a directedness towards the very chasm between them. Towards the impossibility of their connection. And in the awareness of this chasm, in the acceptance of this fundamental loss, a new, piercing sense of reality is born. Not reality as a given, but reality as loss, as absence, as an ever-elusive horizon.

Perhaps this, then, is the ultimate mission of Western thought, having traversed the path from naïve faith in reason to despair before simulation: not to return reality, but to mourn it. And in this mourning, in this constant, hopeless questioning about what was lost, to unexpectedly continue the life of that which seemed forever gone. Like an echo that sounds clearer the farther away the source of the sound is. We will never return to that naïve sun with rays. But, drawing ever more complex and accurate simulacra of it, we, without even knowing it, are erecting the most amazing and sorrowful monument to it. And this monument is our own, unyielding, longing consciousness, which even in the most perfect scenery of hyperreality continues to search for traces of what existed before all images.

This monument is not a static monolith, but a living, trembling process. It manifests in an obsessive, almost neurotic collection of "authentic" experiences, which immediately turn into their opposite upon being captured for social media. We go on a solitary hike to feel the primordial nature, but drag along portable chargers and satellite beacons, creating a digital double of our journey, which ultimately becomes the main result. We seek "real" emotions at a concert, but half the audience watches the event through smartphone screens, as if confirming: yes, this was real, because I have a recording. The simulacrum does not negate the experience; it becomes its necessary attribute, its certificate of authenticity, without which the experience itself seems incomplete, illegitimate.

This total mediation gives rise to a phenomenon one could call "nostalgia for the present moment." We are so absorbed in documenting and simulating life that the moment of genuine, unmediated presence becomes rare and precious. A paradox arises: to feel life, we must temporarily forget about its simulation, but the very thought — "I must be completely here and now" — is already a mental construct, a simulacrum of mindfulness. The pursuit of authenticity turns into its simulation. Herein lies the main trap: the system flexibly incorporates the very idea of an exit from the system.

What can oppose this all-consuming logic? Perhaps the answer lies not in a heroic breakthrough to some truth, but in tiny, almost unnoticeable acts of silent non-compliance. In tactical, not strategic, resistance. The French theorist Michel de Certeau spoke of the "tactics" of the weak, those who do not own space but use it in their own way, re-tuning imposed structures. A reader who buys a glossy magazine not to consume advertising images, but to cut out pictures for a collage, performs such a tactical gesture. He does not destroy the system of producing simulacra, but extracts from it raw material for his own, private meaning.

Such tactical resistance can be a conscious refusal to document. To live through a sunrise without taking a single photograph. To not check reviews of a restaurant before going, allowing oneself an immediate impression not predetermined by others' opinions. These are gestures of scarcity in an economy of excess, gestures of silence in the informational noise. They do not change the system, but they change the experience of a specific person, momentarily returning him to a state where the intentionality of consciousness is directed at the world, and not at its representation.

But here too we face the problem of scale. These tactics are the lot of individuals; they do not offer collective salvation. Baudrillard would be skeptical, calling them merely "simulacra of resistance" that the system readily incorporates, releasing, for example, apps for "digital detox" or opening resorts where smartphones are banned — that is, selling us the simulacrum of liberation from simulation.

Perhaps the only consistent non-ironic position in the era of hyperreality is the aesthetic one. Not the search for truth, but the creation of new worlds, new simulacra that would be so beautiful, complex, or, conversely, repulsively honest, that they would expose their own artificiality. If we are doomed to live in a world of signs, let us create signs that do not mask the void, but point to it. Art that does not pretend to be a window into reality, but is a self-reflexive object investigating its own nature as a simulacrum.

Imagine a sculptor who creates a perfect, hyper-realistic statue of a person from polymer clay. And then places it in a kiln, where it melts, deforms, exposing its artificial, material carrier. This act of destroying the perfect simulacrum is the act of creation, pointing to the chasm between image and matter. It is a gesture that says: "Look, this is just clay. But is that not the miracle itself?"

Philosophically, this brings us close to the later Heidegger, who sought salvation not in the technological "Enframing," but in a poetic thinking capable of "bringing being to word and manifesting truth." In the era of hyperreality, "manifesting truth" means not showing reality, but showing the manner of its concealment, its simulation. A poet describing not the forest, but the feeling of the loss of the forest, cut down for another hypermarket — this is the figure corresponding to our time. His intentionality is directed at the loss itself, and in this bitter act of recognition, a new, tragic knowledge is born.

In the final analysis, Western man finds himself before a choice that is not a choice in the classical sense. He cannot return to the bosom of a pre-simulational reality, for it, perhaps, never existed. Nor can he completely dissolve in the play of simulacra without losing something essentially human — that very longing for something greater that has driven all of Western metaphysics.

Perhaps our fate is a state of permanent ontological tension. To be simultaneously the child drawing the sun and the cynical philosopher who knows about thermonuclear reactions. To live in hyperreality, surrendering to its flow, but to preserve inside a quiet, inextinguishable memory of the gesture that preceded all depiction. Of the first, mute astonishment before the world that simply is. This astonishment cannot be simulated, for it is the beginning of all philosophy, all art, and, perhaps, of the human in man itself. And as long as it lives, even in the very heart of simulation, the ghostly possibility remains that somewhere beyond all the maps, mirrors, and reflections, there still exists an inexpressible territory of being.

And this ghostly possibility is not hope in the ordinary sense. It is more like a shadow cast by the very fact of our questioning. As Heidegger wrote, only a being for whom Being is a question can experience a longing for it. Our sense of loss, our longing for the "real" — this is the very symptom indicating that the inexpressible territory of being not only was, but continues to exert pressure on the boundaries of our simulational universe. It manifests itself not as a presence, but as an absence, not as a voice, but as a silence that becomes audible against the backdrop of the endless informational noise.

This tension between the cynical philosopher and the naïve child within us is not a pathology to be cured, but perhaps the only adequate form of existence in the era of late modernity. The child provides the energy of astonishment, that very phenomenological epoché — the suspension of judgment that allows the world to appear as a marvel. The philosopher provides the toolkit for analyzing the complex optical system through which this marvel reaches us — a system consisting of the lenses of ideology, the prisms of media, and the mirrors of simulacra. To deny one of these sides is to lapse either into infantile idealism or into barren nihilism.

Take, for instance, the naïve user who first encounters a deepfake — a video where the face of a known politician is skillfully grafted onto an actor's body delivering an absurd speech. The child in him may believe it for a moment, experience shock. The cynic-philosopher immediately explains the mechanics of creating such fakes. But their joint work begins afterwards, in the moment when they together contemplate the phenomenon itself: not the specific fake, but the very fact of its possibility. This contemplation gives birth not simply to knowledge, but to a special affective state — a tremor before a world in which truth itself becomes a technical effect that can be switched on and off. It is astonishment before the abyss, not before the sun.

In this state occurs what one might call a "breakthrough to reality through hyperreality." We do not break through the simulacra to something authentic standing behind them. No. We break through to the reality of the simulation itself. We suddenly, with stunning clarity, become aware of it as a fact, as a material force shaping our lives. And in this awareness there is its own, peculiar, almost uncanny authenticity. The authenticity of the labyrinth in which we are locked. To acknowledge this authenticity is not to surrender. It is to understand the rules of the game in order to find a gap within them.

Such a gap could be, paradoxically, humor. Not irony, which is passive and only states the gap between expectation and reality, but precisely humor — an active force that plays with this gap, makes it a source of creativity. A meme that ridicules the very meme format. A film that exposes cinematic clichés by using them. These are gestures that do not try to escape hyperreality, but force it to close in on itself, creating a short circuit in which a spark of awareness momentarily flashes.

Or another gap is fatigue. Informational satiation, existential fatigue from the endless game of simulacra can lead to a new kind of asceticism. Not a conscious refusal, but a spontaneous, almost physiological reaction of rejection. When a person, without even realizing it, stops reacting to bright advertising images, scrolls through a newsfeed with an indifferent face, turns off notifications not on principle, but because they have become mere background noise. This is passive resistance, born not from strength of spirit, but from the exhaustion of attentional resources. And in this passivity, too, there is potential — the potential for silence, from which, perhaps, a new word may one day be born.

What, then, do we ultimately arrive at? To the fact that the Western academic and artistic gaze, having passed through the crucible of deconstruction and simulation theory, offers us no comforting answers. It leaves us in a suspended state, in permanent questioning. But it is precisely in this suspension that its main achievement, perhaps, lies. It has un-taught us easy answers and faith in simple narratives. It has forced us to doubt the very foundations of our experience.

And in this doubt, in this endless, agonizing, yet fruitful tension between the child's "Wow!" and the philosopher's "Why?", the life of thought and feeling continues. We are doomed to draw our suns with rays, knowing they are simulacra. But in doing so, we are not merely participating in a deception. We are performing an act of faith that the very gesture of drawing, the very capacity for astonishment and questioning — this is that very indestructible, un-simulatable territory of being that makes us human even at the height of the era of total simulation. This is our existential note, which cannot be produced on any digital synthesizer, because its source is that very abyss between us and the world, which is the guarantee of our freedom.

And this freedom lies not in an escape from the labyrinth, but in a profound knowledge of its structure. Not in the possession of truth, but in fidelity to the search itself. Like the very child whose drawing of the sun we recalled at the beginning, we continue to create our symbols not because we are mistaken about their nature, but because the very act of creation turns out to be the last refuge of the human in a world where everything has become an exchange value. Our sun with rays is not a perceptual error. It is a choice. A conscious, tragic, and beautiful choice in favor of meaning in the face of its impossibility. And in this choice lies our final, unmediated answer to the challenge of non-being.