The book with the hole in it
Early in The Matrix, Neo sells some illegal software to a guy at his door. He goes to his shelf and pulls down a book called Simulacra and Simulation. It's hollowed out. The disks are hidden inside.
I didn't catch it the first time I saw it. It took a few rewatches (the first Matrix is one of my all-time favorites, and it gets deeper every time) before I noticed what the book was. It's not an accident. The Wachowskis reportedly had the cast read Baudrillard before filming. Later, when Morpheus shows Neo the ruined real world, he even borrows Baudrillard's phrase for it: welcome to "the desert of the real."
The funny part is that Baudrillard didn't love the movie. In an interview a few years later, he said The Matrix had misunderstood him. The movie imagines a fake world with a real one hiding behind it, where you just need the right pill to escape. His point was darker. There might not be a "behind" anymore.
Four steps away from the real
Baudrillard opens the book with a tiny story borrowed from Borges. An empire's mapmakers get so good that they draw a map the exact size of the empire, covering it point for point. Over time the empire falls apart and the map is all that's left. People live on the map.
Then he lays out how an image drifts away from reality, roughly in four steps:
- It reflects something real. A photo of a real place.
- It distorts the real. The photo is retouched, made a little better than the truth.
- It hides that nothing real is there. The photo is of a place that doesn't exist, but it's presented as if it does.
- It has no connection to anything real at all. It's an image of other images. A copy with no original. That last one is the simulacrum.
He was writing about media, money and politics. But read that list as a web designer and it gets uncomfortable fast.
How websites drift
Here's a story I've seen, more or less, a hundred times.
A great studio designs a site for a real reason. The big headline and the moody photos fit that company. Designers love it and save it to their inspiration boards. Someone turns the look into a template. Thousands of businesses buy the template. Other designers see all those sites, decide that's what a modern site looks like, and design new ones in the same style, which become new templates.
A few rounds later, you get a bakery, a law firm and a software startup with the same hero section. Same gradient, same three cards, same stock photo of people laughing at a laptop. None of them chose it because it fit. They chose it because that's what websites look like.
That's stage four. A copy of a copy of a copy, pointing at nothing. It's not ugly, exactly. It's just not about anyone. (I got loud about this in Less is a bore, and the trend cycle behind it in The Alchemist.)
The same drift happens to content. Fake testimonials. "Trusted by" logos for companies that never heard of you. A stock photo of a "team" you've never met. Each one is a small stage-three image: presented as real, with nothing behind it. Visitors may not spot which one is fake, but they can feel when none of it is quite true.
Build from the territory, not the map
You can't really escape copying. Everyone learns by imitation. But you can choose what your work points at. My rule is to start from the territory, the real thing, and draw the map from there.
On this site, that turned into a few rules I hold myself to:
- Brand art is made from the site's own code. When I need a social preview image or a cover, it shows the actual planets the site draws, rendered from the same code. Not a "space-looking" illustration that kind of matches. If it's in the picture, it's on the site.
- No invented clients, numbers or results. Every build story in the Observatory comes from this site's own work. If I say a page got faster, it's because I measured it. If a feature exists in a note, you can go find it.
- Show the real work, moving. The case studies show real projects, and when I made a reel for the site, it was screen recordings of actual clicks and scrolls, not mockups floating in space.
- The hidden stuff points somewhere real too. Even the Matrix easter egg ends with the real thing: the red pill decodes every side quest actually hidden on the site. No fake depth.
None of that makes a site look more impressive. It makes it about something. That's the difference a visitor feels, even when they can't name it.
The real thing is usually weirder
The best part of building from reality is that reality is rarely average. The real reason a bakery exists is a grandmother's recipe, or a terrible first location, or a joke the owner tells every morning. The real reason I built a space-themed portfolio is that I've loved space since I was a kid. Every Lego set I owned eventually became some crazy ship, and every one of them was built for space. Add a philosophy degree I never stopped using, and you get this site. A template can't know any of that. It can only know what other sites look like.
The copies are all the same because they come from each other. The originals are all different because they come from real life. If your site looks like everyone else's, it's not because you lack talent. It's usually because the brief started from other websites instead of from you.
Baudrillard worried that we'd end up living on the map. Your website doesn't have to.
In practice
- Start the brief with the business, not with inspiration. Write down three things that are true about this company and no other. Design from those. Look at other sites later, if at all.
- Ask "what does this point at?" For every image, quote and number on the page. If the answer is "nothing real," cut it or replace it.
- Use real photos, even imperfect ones. A slightly awkward photo of the real team beats a perfect photo of strangers.
- Make your visuals from your own material. Your product, your place, your code, your handwriting. It can't be a copy if it's made from you.
- Never fake proof. No invented reviews, no borrowed logos, no round-number stats you can't back up.
Neo had to take a pill to find the real world. You just have to stop starting from the copies.