There is a particular kind of encounter that reshapes a life not through grand announcement but through near-accident. In the early 2000s, I was a student at a Pedagogical university – the kind of institution where the corridors smelled of chalk and institutional paint, where notices were still pinned with actual pins, and where nobody had heard of Google Forms because Google Forms did not yet exist. Applications to academic programs were still physical documents, mailed in e

When Jean Baudrillard wrote about the precession of simulacra in 1981, he described a world where representations precede and determine reality itself. We no longer experience the real, he argued, but navigate through endless layers of signs, copies without originals, simulations that have become more real than reality. At the time, this seemed like philosophical abstraction. Today, scrolling through Instagram, interacting with ChatGPT, or watching deepfake videos, his observ