Now available in English

 

What is the similarity between battery chicken, iris scans, Facebook friends, and porn videos? They are all features of a technical system built to satisfy our desires and to suppress our fears. It is a so-called hyperreality, an improved version of natural reality, promising wealth, security, and belonging. However, behind the shiny appearance we can detect a few dangerous mechanisms. Increasingly our tools are controlling us, instead of the other way around, and we are steadily rebuilding the world into a machine with laws we are unable to change. What are the risks of this machine? How can we discern the illusions of hyperreality? With insights derived from Rene Girard and Jacques Ellul, among others, this book calls for a joyful spiritual life, in the midst of stubborn reality.

 

Frank Mulder is a freelance journalist in the Netherlands writing for different magazines and newspapers. With his wife and four children he lives in a community with refugees in a poor neighborhood. He likes technological products like his bicycle, but he has no smartphone.

 

“As I read the book I became increasingly aware of a sort of total comprehensivity in brevity I’d not come across in such a critique since I read similar reflections by the Russian Valentin Tomberg. In its very Dutch matter-of-factness and insight it is spot on.

 

Examples of this tone and dry wit pop up throughout the book and he comes across as something of a mash-up of Wendell Berry and 1980s comedian Stephen Wright.

 

Mulder could be a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, on a bicycle, planting sycamores instead of apple trees, helping people, one by one, break free from the threefold madness of money, planning, and crowds.”

 

—Michael J. Sauter, Front Porch Republic

 

 

“Hyperreality is about a lot more than ‘how our tools control us,’ as its subtitle promises. ‘How our modern culture has gone badly wrong—and a possible way back for people’ is the bigger message I read. Mulder’s superb journalistic skills describe how our mad desires for wealth and consumer goods, for security and safety, and for social affirmation and acceptance are doomed to fail in our lived reality. . . . The ‘hyper’ reality on our screens seduces and distracts us away from the actual reality of people and nature all around us. . . . I will be recommending Hyperreality to all of my thoughtful, reflective friends.”

—David W. Gill, President, International Jacques Ellul Society

“In the spirit of Ellul and Girard, Frank Mulder interrogates the extraordinarily virtual realities we now inhabit. Whether or not we share Mulder’s faith in our inevitable deliverance, we can benefit from his keen insights on the way we have used technology to surround ourselves with illusions of choice, control, and immortality.”

—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and Team Human