I have written about our approaching “fake” world before, several times. There is not a lot that is “new under the sun” these days, just different ways to look at the same basic things. This is one of those things: the continual effort to synthesize reality.
Needless to say, we have had a history of this. It is all about assuaging our fear of nature by re-creating it (by the hands of man, not of God) in order to feel safe. If we make a “fake” nature, then we think (THINK) we have control over it. This worked fine when we faked things like wood panelling, animal fur to wear as a coat, fake leather chairs, etc. etc. Most faking is done for convenience, or to make something cheaper and easier to come by. Or so it seems. If you really analyze the phenomenon, you will see at its core is an effort to avoid nature, and by nature, I even mean things like hard work, inconvenience, and pain and suffering. It is natural for a human to wish to relieve himself of such encumbrances because the world is a difficult and unforgiving place, and at one time, the easier we made it for ourselves—the more successful we were at avoiding nature—the more likely we would survive. But that “one time” in the past was simpler, and our ability to create synthetic nature was limited.
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