It isn't hard to see where Sherry Turkle's philosophy leads. It inevitably takes us to a state of political apathy in which we cease asking how we are being manipulated by simulations, and just enjoy them. They enjoy the manipulated facade, without questioning where it comes from, who created it, or for what purpose. Let everyone eat, drink and exchange sexually-charged messages on the Internet, because we will never understand what it all means, anyway. In the vision they offer, the popular culture that appropriates everything and turns it into a simulation and a story line becomes the model for the self, society and reality.
Life becomes a symbolic arena for the acting out of fantasies.
With this in mind, we can now provide a more complete portrait of the culture of advanced technology and simulation. On the other, it is using science and technology to give us the kind of control over the physical world that we have over simulations, and to describe reality as a kind of simulation. We can thus see one of the essential characteristics of this new culture, which acts as if it is trying to transcend the limits of existence by creating simulations that seem real and by making reality more like a simulation. It is similarly trying to accomplish this in its philosophy, with efforts to argue that simulation and reality aren't so far apart as we may have thought. Here is an expression of this idea in a passage from the novel The City and the Stars , which was referred to in the previous chapter.