system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are simulacras necessarily bad?

To make it clear,  I'm asking as a person who only has very basic surface level understanding of the subject.

If I understand correctly, Baudrillard argues that the modern world is the world of simulations where many of such simulations don't even have originals. A very common example I see online is media, which tries to simulate contemporary culture in attempts to appeal to people and ends up influencing the culture it tried to simulate, even if the simulation was incorrect. In Baudrillard's own book he makes an example with the map and the territory, the former being a simulation and the latter real and says that today it is the map that survives and territory becomes a desert.

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My question is: 

Why are such simulations without an original bad in an of themselves? I see how that can be exploited in our society by people with the power over the objects, such as brands, to influence the subjects in a malicious manner. But are simulacras always bad, and if so, why?
gpt
Simulacra aren't bad. Baudrillard's argument is that concern over real-ness or trying to preserve reality and fight simulation is the worst thing one can do - and in fact is precisely a product of simulation and just causes more simulation.

Baudrillard ultimately advocates "seduction" or reversibility.

First, Baudrillard's stance is that real and fake are two moments in a cycle. In your example (we see pictures of a tourist resort in Hawaii and decide to visit, but the reality isn't really like that, but we interpret it through that frame, and it keeps happening so the owners of the resort ultimately remake the resort to resemble the pictures, and so on), it's impossible to determine which experience is fake and which is real (Is the place in Hawaii no longer really itself? If the pictures came first, are they the real original? Or is the place still really real?). And, in fact, it's neither. It's all a simulation, moving through this cycle of influencing, influenced, imagined, mapped onto, realized. Simulation isn't the opposite of real, it's the nature of contemporary reality. You can also think here of the example of the soldier faking an illness vs. simulating an illness from the first chapter of Simulacra and Simulation - right after that map/territory bit you mention. If a soldier fakes an illness, they're pretending and acting, but nothing is going on. If they simulate the illness - perhaps by poisoning themselves or drinking ipecac - then they're vomiting, feverish, etc. They really are experiencing the illness, even if the underlying cause is missing.

How we should respond to the simulated nature of reality is through reversibility. When we try to impose one notion of reality or what we think it originally was, what we're really doing is imposing our vision of what the world SHOULD be like. That's just simulation. We're just re-making that Hawaiian resort again. And, in fact, when we fight to make everything only one way, it produces resistance, produces rebels, and Baudrillard argues that this causes whatever we're fighting against to proliferate and become worse. Instead, we should just accept them as two reversibility moments - real and fake, both simulated.

It's a little confusing, because Baudrillard says that the attempt to secure the real is "the Empire of the Good" or "good," and reversibility is "the Empire of Evil" or "evil." But he's advocating for what he calls "evil."