• BenLeMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        It’s a nod to something the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his essay The Precession of the Simulacra.

        His entire work revolves around Simulacra, copies of real things that end up replacing reality until eventually the copy is the reality, with no original that it is derived from.

        One of his inspirations in the aforementioned essay is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a king who orders his mapmakers to draw him the most accurate map ever, which ends up being in 1:1 scale. An obviously nonsensical exercise, much like Mr. Rashed’s endeavor to replace his actual background with an identical copy just to prove a point.

  • LurkingLuddite@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    That’s not true, though. It’s just a trick. If tricks are all it takes, then most magic tricks are justified and true in their intended implications. At least ones that do not need misdirection to distract from sleight of hand.

    • SparroHawc@piefed.worldEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      Not quite. Tricks are intended to make you believe something that is not true; in OP’s situation, the other people in the meeting believe that OP is sitting in the location that the background picture is taken from. They can’t actually see the background, however; instead they can see the photo of the background. Their assumption is correct, but the fact that they’re looking at a fake background means it COULD be false.

      • LurkingLuddite@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        The room is misrepresented. If it’s dirty, a clean image isn’t true.

        Just because something could be false does not magically make it true not-knowledge.