ABSTRACT
Our conceptions of the virtual have traditionally orbited around two poles that consider it either as a mere copy of the real or, on the contrary, its technological upgrade. In this chapter, we show that these conceptions are parasitic on an unjustified Platonic dualism that fails to appreciate the intricate relation between virtual and real. We examine the phenomenology of this complex relation and begin a meditation on what it actually means to be now traversed by the virtual everywhere. Inspired by Baudrillard, we offer a contemporary phenomenology of digital hyperreality that explores not only how the digital is responsible for a particular kind of addiction, but also how, in the demand for reality to feel more real than real, it diminishes and flattens experience, creating, as the experience of loss and the passing away of things become intolerable, what we come to call digitally induced death anxiety.
