Civilization, after all, has always been about using nature as a raw material to create products and an environment that expands our safety, our comfort and our possibilities. Inside this new kind of environment, an effort will be made, not only for machines to do everything for us, but also to bring everything to us, with transportation, communications and simulation. In effect, this artificial environment will be modeled after the buffet, in which all the world is laid before us for our choosing. Television, grocery stores, newspapers, malls, theme parks, encyclopedias, art museums, and so on, all carry out this basic function, offering us collections of information, fantasies, food, products and culture, from many places. 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.