As reality fades, the world becomes increasingly lost in the fake make-believe world of Tik-Tok, Facebook,  the World Wide Web, Barbie and action heroes. Let us take a moment now to pay homage to what we once had before our reality slips from memory forever.

The real world that we once knew and loved was filled with objects, people and things we could touch, smell and hear.  In days of old before the arrival of television, we lived in a world populated by things like Pogo sticks, hula hoops and Silly Putty. We also played real board games like Monopoly, Clue, chess and checkers. Back in the day real kids played real stick ball with real bats on real streets.  Can you even imagine things like that? When was the last time you saw a group of kids playing touch football on the street?

All these real things will slowly disappear and be replaced by new largely unreal things.  The world is experiencing the ascendance of the fake. We now have fake news, a fake social life (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) and fake experiences.  We live in a world of television, AI, ChatGPT and video games. We are getting accustomed to all of this stuff.  I wake in the morning and begin to scroll through Facebook. What I expect to find there is beyond me.

The end of the real has been approaching for years and we’ve been given many warnings.   Popular art gives us warnings all the time. When Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video was released in 1983, it quickly became the most viewed music video in history.  The reason something scary captures the culture’s imagination is because it serves up a disturbing cultural phenomenon that people are unconsciously worrying about.

That video contained lots of zombies or what we now  call the walking dead. The Jackson video was merely the first. Since then we  have “28 Days After,” “Dawn of the Dead,” “Resident Evil,” “Zombieland,” “World War Z” and the television series “The Walking Dead.”

Zombies represent death in the living.  We have all become part of the walking dead as reality is killed off by Tik-Tok, Facebook and the rest.  Television,  cell phones and social media has become our dominant reality or should I say our dominant unreality.

Post-modern theory was been worrying about this same issue since the 1980s and they call this “The End of History.”  The French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard is the most well-known post-modern theorist and during the making of “The Matrix” film the directors used Baudrillard’s books as references.

Post-modern theory, as well as popular film, has been warning us to take heed, but there is nowhere to turn. The ascendance of the fake or what Baudrillard calls simulacra has arrived and it’s not about to leave. Henry Adams told us back in 1904 with his essay “A Law of Acceleration” that progress cannot be stopped.

All one can do is to look back fondly and with nostalgia and enjoy your memories of the real. We in New York  are very lucky indeed because we live near the greatest real city in the world. The New York skyline is real as are the museums like MoMA and the Whitney.  Broadway is real and so is the Joyce Theater, which is where I went this weekend to enjoy “Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes” set to the piano music of Philip Glass.

Everything about the performance was real. The dancers were real as was the pianist Maki Namekawa. The sound of the tap dancers on the hardwood floor was real as was the soft thud that the barefoot dancers made. The applause for the performance was real as were the smiles on the dancer’s faces when they were given a standing ovation.

This was not a television experience. This was a real experience. Long live the real.