What Is the Massurreality?
What Is the Massurreality?
The Territory in Which We Must Now Work
Massurreality (2025 Update)
The Massurreality is the collectively generated and algorithmically maintained field of mediated perception—part dream, part deception, part desire. It is the surreal, synthetic membrane through which most people now experience life, culture, and identity. It emerges from three interwoven strands:
MASS: Refers to mass media and now social media - an omnipresent, algorithmic broadcasting of images, sounds, signs, stories, and branded selves. This media ecology saturates our inner worlds with the logic of the feed: bite-sized, emotionally charged, endlessly scrolling.
SUR: A prefix of paradox: super-real and superficial, transcendent and trivial. Sur gestures toward both the mystical possibilities of imaginal consciousness and the glossed-over surfaces of consumer fantasy. It is the shimmering veil through which deeper truths might break - if we learn to see.
REALITY: Not a stable given, but a consensus construct - engineered, monetized, and memetically reinforced. It is the "default setting" of culture, built and updated through the massurreality’s unceasing feedback loop.
The Field of Contest
Since 2002, the massurreality has expanded from television and ads to a global, participatory spectacle shaped by data and desire. It is a field of profound distortion and possibility - both a prison of prefab identity and a stage upon which new myths might be born.
Into this field steps the creative community: not to escape, but to cultivate. Artists, designers, storytellers, mystics, and visionaries become gardeners of the imaginal - clearing space for beauty, autonomy, and shared becoming. The tools of pollution can become the tools of cultivation. A polluted field is still a field.
In a post-labor future - freed from the tyranny of commodified toil - the massurreality can be reclaimed as a commons of the imagination. This book proposes that creatives take up this work consciously, not as entertainers or content creators, but as seed-planters of new worlds. Worlds we are not afraid to live in.
We are living in a hallucination of consensus.
This is not a metaphor. It is structural. It is environmental. And for creatives - those whose task is to make sense of the world, to respond to it with imagination and integrity - it is the very air we breathe and the ground beneath our feet.
This environment has a name: the massurreality.
I first coined the term over twenty five years ago to describe the strange fusion of mass media, surrealism, and reality - a field of manufactured images, symbols, and identities that offered not so much truth as performance. What I saw then was the rise of a kind of synthetic dreamscape: reality filtered through advertising, mass broadcast, digital effects, and branded aesthetics.
But what began as a surreal spectacle has since metastasized into something deeper and more immersive. It no longer just surrounds us. It shapes us.
From Mass Media to Algorithmic Reality
Where mass media once broadcast a unified narrative to millions, today’s media ecology offers millions of personalized hallucinations. The feed we scroll is designed specifically for us—yet all of it is filtered through the same infrastructure of profit, surveillance, and influence. Each of us lives in a different shard of a broken hologram.
This is not just information. It is environment.
It is atmosphere.
It is programming.
The massurreality now operates through our phones, our timelines, our entertainment choices, our shopping suggestions, and our political affiliations. It is tailored, targeted, and tuned to keep us engaged—because our attention is the product.
And within that field, what does it mean to be a creative? A thinker? A soul with something to say?
The Architecture of Illusion
The Massurreality works because it feels like the real thing. It simulates connection, identity, purpose, and some version of beauty or at least sparkle. But beneath the gloss, its primary function remains consistent: to capture attention, trigger desire, and channel behavior in ways that serve commercial or ideological aims.
It offers us templates for living—lifestyles and aesthetics and belief systems—each easily assembled from a prepackaged menu. It tells us who we are based on what we consume. It rewards performance over presence, branding over being, reaction over reflection.
The danger here is not just cultural. It is existential.
The Massurreality replaces lived experience with simulation. It swaps memory for metadata. It turns meaning into marketing. It doesn’t just mediate reality—it becomes it.
And when creatives mistake this mind world for the real world, our work gets hollowed out. It becomes decoration. Distraction. Just more noise in the stream.
Not the Enemy, but the Medium
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that we spend our lives trying to master this system. I am not advocating for endless posting or hypervisibility or trying to "hack" virality.
In fact, I believe the less time we spend inside it, the better.
But we must account for it. Because whether we engage directly or not, it is shaping the psychic weather of our time. It influences how others perceive the world—and how we see ourselves.
So the task is not to reject the massurreality outright, nor to drown in it.
The task is to see it clearly.
To hold it lightly.
And to work within it consciously—as mythmakers, not marketers.
The Massurreality is a polluted field, yes.
But it is still a field.
And fields, even damaged ones, can be cultivated and replanted.
Unplug to Reimagine
To do that, we have to step outside of the stream—not physically, perhaps, but psychically. We have to reclaim our minds, our hearts, and our senses from the noise and novelty. We must remember what it means to simply be.
The first creative act in the post-spectacle world is not a painting or a novel or a performance. It is a clearing.
A clearing of inner space.
A clearing of mental fog.
A clearing of nervous overstimulation.
Go outside. Sit in silence. Feel your breath.
Put your hands on paper, wood, dirt, canvas.
Listen to your own rhythms.
Follow your own questions.
Write or draw something that doesn’t need to be shared.
Reclaim your creative life as something sacred, not strategic.
Only from that space can we begin to imagine new forms—new modes of being that do not spring from the premises of the current media environment. Only from that space can we begin to design a future that is more human, more handmade, more personal, and hence more true.
The Creative Society Begins in the Soil
In the book I’m working on now - Creative Lifestyle, Volume 2: The Creative Society_I propose that we must not simply reform the broken systems of our time, but imagine living ones that grow from the ground up. Systems rooted in belonging, not ownership. Systems that remember the Earth as sacred. Systems that honor human imagination as a force of nature, not a branding strategy.
This vision does not begin online.
It begins in how we choose to live, create, connect, and care.
It begins with you choosing to reclaim your own time, your own attention, your own inner compass.
Massurreality may be the dominant field for now - but it does not have to be the only one.
Let us cultivate new spaces.
Let us plant gardens beneath the spectacle.
Let us become not content creators, but culture tenders.
Let us remember how to live - and then build futures from that remembrance.
This is our work.
This is our chance.
This is where we begin.
Let’s Grow This Together
If this piece resonates with you—if you feel the pull to help reimagine the future, to reclaim our cultural field from noise and spectacle, to build a more creative and humane society—I invite you to be part of the ongoing conversation.
Leave a comment below. Share your reflections, your questions, your lived insights. I read everything and welcome the dialogue.
Share this post with fellow creatives, writers, educators, visionaries, and quiet soul-gardeners who might be seeking a deeper path through this moment.
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We are not alone in this.
We are the ones who remember how to plant.
Let’s tend the field together.
As Duane Toops said recently: "We don't believe in carrying corkscrews. We believe in planting vineyards. And, we show up to water it everyday."
Very thought provoking Cecil, I need to reread tomorrow and hopefully ill absorb completly your piece. In calmer moments I always think what would J G Ballard feel about the current ‘Media Landscape’ As always very stimulating 🙏