The Simulacra

A society whose government is entirely fake — the President is an android, the First Lady an actress. Dick's point is not that the deception is malevolent, but that a population conditioned to receive reality through mediated representations eventually loses the capacity to distinguish representation from the thing it represents. The simulacrum becomes more real than the original — not because it is convincing, but because the original has become inaccessible. An AI ecosystem that feeds on AI-generated content is Baudrillard's nightmare rendered as a technical process: outputs remain fluent and confident but are copies of copies, with edges smoothed and peculiarities averaged away.