January 9, 2026
Thanks to Joy Reeves, a 2025 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
In the beginning of the television show Westworld, a man stares in blushing disbelief at Angela, the lifelike cyborg who greets him upon his arrival to the robot amusement park.
“Are you real?” he stutters out to her.
She looks at him and replies, “Well, if you can’t tell, does it matter?”
Well, does it?
The ever-thinning distinctions between real and artificial; between authenticity and spectacle, have long been a fascination of mine—even before the world began having earnest conversations on artificial intelligence a few years ago.
I spent a lot of time on this topic in college, where I chose elective classes examining “spectacular” culture dating back to ancient Rome. I learned to reimagine each epic brawl in Gladiator and Spartacus through a fresh metaphysical lens: that gladiatorial fights brought to light a disconcerting societal bloodthirst and catharsis that may have otherwise roiled quietly—diffusely—under the surface. And, most importantly, I learned that historiography (the study of studying history) itself raises complex questions on real vs. spectacle. Think tourist attractions. I learned that some Roman artifacts have become so overrun with visitors that the curators decided to replace the “real deal” with convincing plastic replicas.
“If you can’t tell, does it matter?”
For a long time, particularly after poring over the writings of French philosopher Guy Debord, I was fully convinced that, yes, it would be far more tragic to replace an original statue with a plastic replica than to let the real thing be swarmed by tourists until it disintegrates. According to Debord, original artifacts have indeed lost their intrinsic value now that they are housed in today’s “spectacular society.” Put simply, he believed that signs, brands, and enigmas now effectively take the place of original ideas. Plastic statues, then, are just one example of the anticlassicist, anti-historical, jaded mindset of the spectacle: the existential value of an artifact is overlooked in favor of the utility of the “sign” it presents to society or to tourists’ cameras (Debord 1998, 56). Today’s more pervasive “plastic statues” include everything from brands and logos to replica purses, reality television lore, and symbolic stick-and-poke tattoos.
Over time, I began to wonder if our (very human) love of a symbolic tattoo, or even a convincing knockoff-Gucci purse, is wholly a bad thing. Each is arguably more benign than a gladiatorial battle. Each, additionally, offers people across social classes a democratized alternative to breaking the bank on “real deal” art curation (in-person theater performances, original designs, fine art, a guided tour of Rome, etc.) while still gesturing at their cultural meaning. Perhaps encouraging all culture lovers to go after “the real thing” is tone-deaf amid today’s affordability crisis.
I was almost swayed. I heard many social media pundits and techno-enthusiasts argue, if this bursting media symbology floodgate is our new reality, we might as well learn to swim in the currents.
The advent of mainstream AI, however, reawakened from somewhere deep in my gut the realization that I will always be a John Muir-level preservationist. Keep the trees standing simply because they are trees. Show the audience a bit of the artifact’s historical weathering, if you safely can, instead of reimagining it in perfect plastic. If you can’t tell, it still matters.
It may have been the advertisement featuring a father who used generative AI to craft a heartfelt letter to his young daughter’s track idol. It may have been the tech company who promised, to a chorus of LinkedIn accolades, that purchasers of their robots would never have to send a human salesperson to another trade show (raising my curiosity as to how quickly human attendees would send similar proxies to have siloed siliconversations all day).
My grimacing reaction to these ads is not rooted in a personal distaste for AI so much as a distaste for the nihilism that ambiguity can breed. A future where we’re all unable to tell much of anything apart, and therefore toss our hands up and assert that just about none of it matters, feels like a societal concession deeper than just stupidity. At best, it’s an avoidable, infuriating trick—like Charlie Brown’s missed football. At worst, it’s a relinquishing of soul and being.
Ancient philosophers might say there is a thinning line, today, between “being” and “seeing.” Aristotle looked to the “telos,” or “end” purpose of an object for its meaning. Plato looked to whatever holy and transcendent “Form” it participated as. Both of them, at least, acknowledged an inexorable being-ness in all things. Perceiving the spectacle-specter of something is only half of experiencing—understanding, upheaving, improving—it. “Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act,” Debord writes of today’s society, criticizing consumptive “seeing” as a great pacifier. (Debord 1998, 22). In ancient Rome, keeping the masses pacified boiled down similarly, with the phrase: “Panem et circenses!”, or bread and circuses! (Köhne 2000).
I wonder, then, why do we still want to watch? Maybe for the same reason some would rather look at plastic than at a real statue. It’s hard to distinguish real from fake when the tools to do so are being intentionally withheld from us. Screens replace manuscripts, entertainment-commentary replaces news, and images circulate free of regulatory watermarks. Guy Debord, Roland Barthes, and their predecessors never encountered the visual algorithms that dominate today’s world.
The diffuse modern spectacle is dangerous—not in the same way the ancient Roman spectacle was gruesome—but in the novel and sinister way today’s algorithms dilute meaning into camera-ready backdrops or replication-ready Studio Ghibli paintstrokes.
Refocusing on the elusive truth requires a strategy Harrison Middleton University seems to embody well: we must have conversations about the propaganda around us, study history, practice rhetoric, debate philosophy, read old texts, write new texts, challenge each other, and enable ourselves to distinguish the Spectacle from reality. We must get our hands dirty. We must go to the source.
And in the end, maybe all this requires is a childlike curiosity and skepticism: a keen eye for what’s plastic.
Even if you can’t tell, it still matters. It will always matter.
References
Debord, Guy. 1998. Comments on the Society of Spectacle. London; New York: Verso.
Köhne, Eckart. “Bread and Circuses: The Politics of Entertainment.” In Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome, edited by Eckart Köhne, Cornelia Ewigleben, and Ralph Jackson, 8-30. 2000 ed. Los Angeles: University of California Press. PDF e-book.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ Rroselavy
