Please Help me understand what this means: THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SIMULACRE?

Question

It has been some decades since Western culture could be accurately described as Industrial. Since the under-consumption crisis of the Thirties, we have shifted entirely into a social structure dominated not by production but by reproduction, not by equivalence but by commutation, not by merchandise but by the model. We live in a post-industrial world. A world no longer where all labor is exchanged and loses its singularity but where labor and leisure become entwined. Not a culture bought and sold but one where all cultures simulate one another. Not a place where love is prostituted but where a liberated keel sexuality is compulsory. And an era in which time is no longer accumulated like money but is broken in a confused web of nostalgia,
fetishism and futurism.
SPK has always been certain to establish its separation from any label like "industrial" because it has always pursued a strategy radically more efficient - the successor to industrial society.

The realization of this difference is vital for any strategy: artistic, revolutionary, terroristic. If not, we shall only continue to confuse the symptom for the cure...
If the industrial era was determined capitalist mode, then the post-industrial is hypercapitalist. And in the sphere of signs the society has become indeterminate and codified. In the pre-industrial era every sign had a corresponding reality. In the industrial, every sign became equivalent to all others with money as the mode of social coherence. Now, however, all signs have become models, slightly differentiating all social reproduction - a generalized code of simulation. The real horror is that this process no longer stops at the factory gate but penetrates our homes, our loves and our minds. All our time becomes marked time...

Walter Benjamin (McLuhan later) was the first to realize that technology was not a productive force but a MEDIUM - the principle - the FORM of the new society of publicity, information and communications networks. Seriality or the mechanical reproduction of exactly equivalent clones had given way to models generative of all forms according to a modulus of differences. This digitalized genetic cellule - the code-produced all questions and all possible solutions. A DNA generative of control of the social organism.

-SPK

Answer 1

simulacrum

1. representation or image: a representation or image of something

2. something vaguely similar: something that has a vague, tentative, or shadowy resemblance to something else

[Late 16th century. < Latin< simulare (see simulate)]

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?refid=1861732759

Simulacrum (plural: -crums, -cra), from the Latin simulacrum which means "likenesss, similarity", is first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation of another thing, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god; by the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original. Philosopher Frederic Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, where a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real. Other art forms that play with simulacra include Trompe l'oeil, Pop Art, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave.

Recreational simulacra include reenactments of historical events or replicas of landmarks, such as Colonial Williamsburg, and constructions of fictional or cultural ideas, such as Fantasyland at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The various Disney parks have by some philosophers been regarded as the ultimate recreational simulacra, with Baudrillard noting that Walt Disney World Resort is a copy of a copy, “a simulacrum to the second power.” In 1975, Italian author Umberto Eco expressed his belief that at Disney’s parks, “we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it." This is for some an ongoing concern. Examining the impact of Disney’s simulacrum of national parks, Disney's Wilderness Lodge, environmentalist Jennifer Cypher and anthropologist Eric Higgs expressed worry that “the boundary between artificiality and reality will become so thin that the artificial will become the centre of moral value.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum