Essay: Hyperreal – Kashmir Edition by Ghulam Mohammad Khan

In this essay, Ghulam Mohammed Khan sounds an alarm about our descent into digital unreality, where AI deep-fakes and algorithmically warped truths erode our ability to trust anything we see or hear, using two anecdotes from Kashmir and some examples from current global political affairs.

We inhabit an era where the technologically mediated image has attained ontological primacy, giving rise to a pervasive simulacral order (Baudrillard, 1981) that systematically erodes the very distinction between reality and its representation. This condition, far exceeding Walter Benjamin’s anxieties about mechanical reproduction’s aura-depleting effects, manifests as a cultural pathology of the unreal, wherein the edited, the algorithmic, the ideologically constructed, and the satirically exaggerated dissolve into a singular, immersive “hyperreality”. As Guy Debord presciently observed in The Society of the Spectacle, “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (Debord, 1967). This proliferation is not merely quantitative but qualitatively transformative, constructing a parallel epistemic universe sustained by participatory myth-making (QAnon’s “closed universes of mutually reinforcing facts”) and the “performative utterances” (J.L. Austin, 1962) of social media, where likes, shares, and memes enact new social truths. The consequence is an epistemological vertigo—a condition Karl Popper might diagnose as the collapse of the “open society” into tribalistic “closed” epistemes resistant to falsification. When relationships, warfare, education, and commerce are reconfigured as aestheticized experiences (Griselda Pollock’s “pathos formulae” transmuting affect into consumable image), the unreal ceases to be deviant; it becomes the terrain of the normal, rendering the very act of distinguishing signifier from signified, truth from fabrication, a harrowing exercise in navigating what Jean Baudrillard termed the “desert of the real.”