Disneyland’s imaginary framing hides that all of America is already hyperreal

Evidence

But this masks something else and this “ideological” blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 48

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The essential hyperreality passage: ideology critiques as ‘false representation’ are obsolete; simulation hides not a false copy but the loss of the real itself. Top-tier Baudrillard.
• XREF: The carceral simile formally parallels Foucault’s Panopticon discussion; worth cross-referencing prison as social totality.