EXCERPT As early as the seventeenth century, we see an important distinction made between feigning what something is and creating something out of nothing—the difference between dissimulation and simulation. And we find this already cause for ‘great alarm’, to use Francis Bacon’s line, which is why I undertook my travels in hyperreality, to places like the Simulation Training Instrumentation Command. STRICOM is is one of the the strangest military installations—there are no outer defences, there’s no sign of anything truly kinetic or military, it looks like a high-tech research park—and fittingly, it’s right next to Disneyworld, in Orlando. And the motto of this military base is ‘All But War is Simulation’. The notion is that war is the ultimate, the final reality principle…