system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Hyperreality.
gpt
There once was a king who hired a team of cartographers to undertake the most exhaustive survey anyone had ever created; he wanted the most detailed map of his empire possible. The map he had the cartographers make was so detailed that the map's scale had a ratio of 1 to 1; the map itself spread out over the actual land that it was meant to represent.

Eventually, this empire began to decline, and so did the upkeep of the map that covers the entire empire. As the map rots away, it intertwines with the actual object it was supposed to represent. What is left is neither the object, nor the symbol that represented it, but something entirely else.
 
This is hyperreality, when the symbol of an object ends up redefining the object itself. Probably the biggest example of a hyperreal space is Las Vegas-- hotels that are themed to represent different environments that end up influencing how we see those environments.