partners in the perfect crime: love and simulacra in a digital age
the map precedes the territory + RIP to the days of love letters and roses.
Prologue
A1: The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
B: A perfect crime is not in the act, but in the absence of detection — a theatrics of obscurity. Its origins are not unknown because they are erased, but because there is no origin to find.
A: The simulacrum is true.
B: The perfect crime is the proof2.
Introduction
Today we enter the desert of the real in terms of human relationships and connection. Everyone knows relationships (and I mean friendships, familial relationships, romantic relationships — all sorts and everything) require time and effort. These are things we give unto others. But they also require reciprocity. I usually joke about being excellent at forming parasocial relationships, but that’s usually confined to the case of communing with dead philosophers, writers, and thinkers. That level of insanity, if I may be permitted to declare, is acceptable.
However it has become increasingly easy for all of us (even us who don’t descend into madness waving their fists at a dead thinker at 3am at night) to enter freely and sometimes unknowingly into parasocial relationships, mistaking them for genuine ones.
And thus begins this analysis: welcome to the age of parasocial relationships.
As someone who grew up writing birthday cards, letters, poems even; and whose top love languages includes Words (literally language is a carrier of love), I have always had a strange love-hate relationship with technology. I have also been re-reading Simulation and Simulacra (it is a text I return to from time to time, and a very sobering one at that), so you can probably guess where this is going, dear reader.
On Curation and Its Resultant Fragmentation
We curate ourselves so neatly these days. We have Facebooks and Instagrams and Tiktoks and LinkedIns and Twitters. Often we project different sides of ourselves depending on each platform (I know I do — I don’t post pictures of my deranged Mysterious soft toys on LinkedIn.)
Firstly, we must choose our identities on each, according to the platform’s audience. Sounds a bit like a marketing job, doesn’t it? Where the product is none other than ourselves. So suffice to say, I too am playing the game but it doesn't mean I particularly enjoy it. It's a fun game to play at times, but don’t you find it exhausting? It’s also no wonder we have come to see ourselves and others as commodities (which we will explore a little later).
Secondly, this fragmentation of Self is celebrated. It is purportedly necessary. Sure, attribute it to postmodernist multiplicity or what-have-you, this rhizomatic3 existence is not itself the most heinous cardinal sin. There is a tension between multiplicity and centricity in terms of how we view ourselves. We are more than a label. I have this habit of asking people what they do and then catch myself and then ask, “What would you like to be known for doing?”. The former is merely a query on an individual’s occupation. The latter allows them room to define how they would like to be known, and often offers space for them to share what they enjoy. Are you a salesman? That is not who you are entirely. You are a father, a brother, a husband, your dog’s best friend. There is a freedom in that, and we understandably present differently to different people depending on comfort and/or familiarity.
And yet this fragmentation is a thrilling phenomenon I continue to interrogate, though perhaps in more detail in future essays. We oscillate between embracing the multiplicity, the intersectionality, and still search for a core identity. It is Identity that often fuels the self-help industry that keeps asking us to “find ourselves”. To which I must ask: How is it possible for one to lose a Self? Can a Self be lost? And so we are sold concepts — methods, like meditation, reflection, tapping into ‘shadow selves’, etc, and systems for the ‘betterment’ of the Self (Selves?) we find and develop, like how to be productive, how to maximise our time, how to self-care, how to be authentic even4, etc etc.
In this digital metamodern age, the issues of connection lie with the implications that follow, that teach us how to view ourselves, and by extension, ourselves with others in this world.
Love has become fragmented and hyperreal, where the image of a person often takes precedence over their full reality. This is where Baudrillard’s brilliant analogy of maps comes in.
(…) the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
And so Baudrillard may argue that we are falling in love with simulacra — highly curated representations of people, rather than with people themselves. I find that a very amusing yet terrifying concept.
On Commodity
We have commodified love. A friend remarked the other day how it is not possible to use dating apps without actually not caring. She said investing too much in them sets us up for disappointment. And honestly, I fully understand that. The online dating sphere is a place where we reduce people to profiles; we see others products that we swipe through based on quick, shallow judgments.
Getting to know someone turns into yet another act of consumerism: we shop for the best match (product) based on bios (product descriptions) people have uploaded. Needless to say, most dating apps tend to emphasise appearances. This is a manufactured approach — the app’s interface encourages us to swipe right based on satisfactory product photography photographs that show potential matches at their best. This would explain why we tend to see relationships as transactional. The world we live in manufactures us more than we realise. Or are comfortable with realising.
I know we live in a highly consumerist world but if there is one thing worth keeping sanctified from all of it, it's our relationships we have with the people in our lives.
Is there a difference these days, being on a shopping app and a dating site? On both, we are ‘given’ consumer ‘power’. We are presented with the illusory empowerment of making choices about what we want in our lives, from products to people.
The question is: should we get to decide to this extent? It prevents us from meeting people with new or alternate perspectives. It hones in on us meeting people who share the exact same values and perspectives as we do. Our circles become a silly little echo chamber. We forget what it means to listen without trying to convince another person of our own perspective, we forget that there is a world and there are experiences that exist outside our own. And in this way, we stunt our own growth.
If we are wreaking havoc on ourselves and the world, and if our best intentions lead to paradoxical outcomes, it is because we have become mesmerised by a mechanistic, reductionist way of thinking, the product of a brain system which evolved not to help us understand, but merely to manipulate the world: that of the left hemisphere. We have become blind to what the subtler, more intelligent and more perceptive right hemisphere sees.
Consequently we no longer seem to have the faintest idea who we are, what the world is, or how we relate to it. Indeed there is a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all, but exist in a simulacrum of our own making.
— lain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
On Giving Freely
We have forgotten how to give. I’m never quite sure how I feel about people tending to weigh what they are getting versus what they are giving. Sure, for some people we can really only give as much as we get, and it is understandable that this mentality is reserved for acquaintances. We only have so much time and energy, and some people have to be prioritised over others. It’s just that this cannot apply to everyone.
We simply cannot keep keeping tabs. It becomes a job, using the language of economics as an approach to relationships. So many relationship advice content creators talk about using some kind of cost-benefit analysis, the need to understand a relationship’s return on investment, etc etc.
As someone who particularly enjoys over-intellectualising everything out of proportion, I find this interesting and highly amusing. But how are we supposed to forge genuine and sincere relationships with those around us like this? Go set up spreadsheets for every person we meet that track everything they have done for and against us.
This can be seen as a symptom of the capitalist age in which we live, where even emotions and relationships are treated as commodities with value. Instead of seeking love and relationships as experiences of authenticity or deep connection, love is now something to be earned, and connection something to be optimised as a means to meet certain social or personal needs.
It has made us inauthentic, and our interactions deeply insincere. Haven’t we all found it hard most times to engage in human relationships these days? It always feels like there is some unspoken social protocol we am unaware about, and need to adhere to.
We cannot call people these days without checking, planning. We hurl our phones away whenever an unknown number calls (hey, it could be a scam). We are terrified of talking with people over the phone.
I find myself terrified of sending lengthy walls of texts, and coming off a little too enthusiastic it would scare people away. Terrified of sending too many texts after those walls of texts. I don't expect immediate replies, but I've always seen text spaces as places in which two people can drop things in. Like a little postbox, for the other to come to when they find pockets of time, to find things I sent simply because I thought of them. Does the other person feel the same? And how many times can you think of someone in a day without it getting creepy, or risking giving someone the wrong idea? And so I hold back. My notes app sometimes contains a slew of links I want to send my friends but must hold off sending it to them lest I come across as too clingy or needy. I want to text someone and hear about their day because it would be lovely to, but I am afraid I'm asking too many personal questions and besides, are we even friends and can I simply ask how they’re doing? Overthinking eats at the insides of my brain, devours it faster than Hannibal Lecter would. And I am left miserably swirling around in a whirlpool of paranoia.
But we want that connection, don’t we? We want the messiness of interaction, of knowing a person and exchanging thoughts. We want that divine afterglow, that fusion and fission when two worlds collide.
My dear friend Remus has on many occasions asked me, “why are you setting conditions for your own happiness?”. That is, if you think about someone, reach out to them. Even if there are unreplied messages. Even if it has been 30min since you saw them. Even if we are told we ought to stop texting or talking to them because “if they wanted to, they would”.
I have learnt that people are just shit at replying sometimes, myself included. There are too many things to keep up with in our lives, and a whole text conversation can go missed not because someone does not care, but because they simply were tired and genuinely missed it that day. I’ve waited days for friends to reply me only to find out that I was the one who overlooked their reply.
On Pace and Patience
We have forgotten how to be patient. To wait and see what someone may mean to us, and whether they are worth all that space they take up rent-free in our heads. Our beloved digital era has shifted our interactions from slow, deeply embodied experiences — where things like physical presence, tone, touch, and shared space carried weight — to much faster, and often shallow connections.
We’ve moved away from engaging with the world through lived experience to something more abstract and mediated as we live out our lives and interactions online. Texting, though incredibly convenient and mostly accessible to a large part of the world, is a form of communication that strips away presence: something has been lost in how we once used to experience love and connection.
One of those things is a drastic reduction in the very necessary complexity of human relationships. Getting to know a person – whether a friend or romantic interest — ought to be complex. It’s two worlds colliding. There was a time when people met each other not knowing what they would mean to one another. There was a thrill in the infinite possibilities a single connection could sprout, and in letting things grow organically. Would friendship blossom into long-term romance? But romance should never be the end-goal of human connection.
Connection is itself autotelic – realising that to bask in another's presence just for the sake of loving their company is the purest, most gratifying feeling in the world. Can I just love you as you are right now? Can we do this forever, be like this forever? Groundhog day? And would it become the best friendship we've ever experienced in our life? Would a connection with someone new set off a chain of events, meetups, arguments, and laughter that would become the very friendship that teaches us that romantic love is really not all there is in life to hanker after – but that friendships teach us a love that demands nothing of us but to be happy? In an age in which we swipe with the intention of already setting out to romance one another, I guess we will never know.
The pace of modern relationships has drastically increased, and often I feel myself unable to keep up. Most of us are on some form of social media at all hours of the day. This constant connectivity means we expect immediate responses from those we contact, immediate validation on what we put up, and constant interaction with our curated online circles.
But the nature of love – of growing in love, of growing to love – is often slow, uncertain, even agonising. Texting gives us a false sense of immediacy and control over love. It strips away some of the mystery and distance that create longing and the deep respect for another person's individuality and personhood. But most of all, what is it doing to us? In the rush to be constantly connected, we lose the necessary time and space for the self to reflect and grow in the absence of the other – whether lover or friend.
Epilogue
Gone are the days of letters and flowers, where we would wait eagerly and patiently for a letter to travel the world and come into our hands. Of spending time with another person simply because we wanted to, and enjoyed their company. Of knowing someone through what they share with us, and not by stalking their entire social media feed and then thinking we know them and their entire history — thus unknowingly creating a parasocial relationship between ourselves and the image or ‘simulacra’ of them we have in our head5.
I mourn this. I used to write love letters to friends and family. It feels strange to do so now, but this is something I want to continue keeping in praxis practice. I miss being on a call with friends until 2am, or body doubling over the phone while we did our own things. I used to call my aunt and grandparents and talk to them for hours. I used to wait for letters from them while I was a kid in Hong Kong, and eagerly open them guessing who wrote what based on handwriting. I used to exchange letters with a junior in secondary school, and we would put glitter in our envelopes and imagine the other person opening it with a glittery bang (Caitlyn, I miss you, we haven’t talked in forever but I want to — can I?). Hells, I used to write letters to my best friend Felicia in secondary school and we saw each other every day. We even wrote them in morse code — a special language we shared.
I’ve kept all my birthday cards. All my letters. All the notes my friends and I passed around class as little bits of encouragement to each other. I want that back. There was nothing to ‘optimise’ or ‘strategise’ about in terms of who we met and had in our lives.
Of course, one must always be intentional about the people we keep around us — especially those we call our closest friends. Not everyone deserves our kindness, and too many of them will run it to the ground. This year alone has taught me more than enough of that.
But this year too I have met people who have given me new ways to see the world, just when I’ve thought that I’ve seen enough. It’s thrilling, exciting, and beautifully confusing. You don’t need to immediately cut someone off just because they are a materialist and you are an idealist, or because they are a cryptozoologist and you are a biology professor, or because (hot take!) your politics differ6. We only need listen. And share, gently. We may understand a thing or new that’s new, even if we do not agree with it.
I’ve always believed our job in this world is to understand the spectrum of human experience as best as we can, while still standing firm in what we believe in. Alternate perspectives help to refine, change, or cement our own, and we must be ready, willing, and open to all of those possibilities. Do all things with tenderness, and do your best in all things.
The map precedes the territory. But while it inescapably and inextricably does, and while we oscillate between irony and sincerity, may we continue to try. May we continuously fall in love with the thousand ways others have come to look at the world. May we express love in ways we want to and not necessarily how we think we ought to.
People will surprise us. Let them.
Welcome dear reader to a dialogue I had in my own head with myself as I was re-reading Simulacra and Simulation. Ravings of a mad person. Completely insane. Thank you for reading and sticking around despite that. <3 I also have no idea if this makes any sense to you. Let me know.
In Baudrillard's terms, a simulacrum doesn't just disguise the truth — it replaces it entirely. The perfect crime doesn’t just conceal its traces: it exists in a space where detection is rendered impossible because the act itself becomes part of the fabric of it false reality. A perfect crime is about creating an environment where the crime is indistinguishable from the system itself. It leaves no detectable origin because the entire framework of detection is subverted by the simulacrum. If the simulacrum is true, then it becomes the ultimate tool of obfuscation; the crime merges seamlessly into the false reality it creates. Any attempt to uncover it reinforces the illusion because the investigative act feeds into the simulation's coherence.
Indeed, A Thousand Plateaus has come back to haunt us again, dear reader. One may never escape it. But try to imagine me happy.
It pains me that even authenticity has become something one can ‘work on’ and improve, and that we are sold ways and methods and products to reach this vague, elusive, enlightened authentic state. The self-help industry capitalises on everything it can. I wonder what Heidegger would have to say.
Did I mention this weird conclusion I came to a few years ago, where all crushes are simulacra? A story for another day, then. Tldr; I had a crush and was thinking about the implications of that and concluded how stupid and illusory it actually was, and then like a pretentious thinker, thought my way out of it. Lmaozedong. Anyway. Moving on.
That said, if a person’s politics and actions that are driven by them pose a threat or invalidate your livelihood, personhood, or safety, that is a whole other issue. I’m talking here about people who simply have differing opinions but who do not actively go out of their way to disrespect and dehumanise others. The moment disrespect comes into the picture and you feel your mental health and safety being compromised, walk.
Hahaha! some of the endnotes made me laugh 😂 to answer 1. , i had to struggle reading it so many times to even begin to comprehend, but i think with the help of 2. i managed to at least land somewhere(?) the way i ended up interpreting it is that - the images we put out of ourselves do not hide who we really are, because 'who we really are' in turn, hides the ironic fact that there is actually -nothing- (was lost to us, sadly), thus 'who we really are' is actually/became the images that we put out instead. Or maybe i missed the mark altogether haha. Anyway, this was such an interesting read yet again, and i share lot's of the same woes, doubts and overthinking, so this was very relatable and encouraging. I agree too with especially the last few paragraphs. Admirable that you bared it all and write them out like this!
i'm left wordless — your lament is mine exactly 💔🥀