As being referenced, Baudrillard identified a process of progressive abstraction in his book 'Simulacra and Simulation'. The term was proposed by Baudrillard, who defined it in that book as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality".
It needs to be understood in terms of post structuralism, which is to say: studying cultural products for insights into language-use and discourse, which are seen to structure our world; with the Post- bit adding to that Structuralism a reflexive turn to encompass itself in analysis, and the way sign meanings aren't fixed. Structuralism was founded on the linguistic and semiotic theories of Suassure.
Because Hyperreality is described as the inability of minds to distinguish reality from a simulation, it holds special relevance to emerging Mixed Reality (eg Google Glass, Apple Vision Pro) where VR technology provides overlays or other additional information or gamifies aspects of interacting with the world, and so positions itself as a body of thought towards what looks to be the next iteration of the media landscape.
A major angle of criticism of Postructuralism, is criticism of Suassure's picture of how language works. This is compounded by how the English-language tradition developed along a different track, and the jargon-heaviness of the topic has made code-switching between the English language tradition and the Continental inheritors of Postmodern practice, difficult, and rare. Whether anyone is really stating their ideas clearly enough about the relation between language and reality to confirm if there even is a disagreement between traditions is in my book, an open question (apart from Chomsky who's Universal Grammar is just obviously wrong, imho).
There's also a widespread discomfort, with the Postmodern/Poststructural/Deconstruction focus on cultural products in social discourse, over arguments asserted in debate. I see that as an issue of style, that a tradition that came out of linguistics and literary theory, is going to have a different emphasis than one that came out of the attempt to axiomatise logic. And, I value keeping contact with cultural and social discourse, over withdrawing to an idealised world of Predicate Logic.
How hypereality gets created, involves taking a stance on the issues involved. I'd begin by saying the idea of a distinction between real and not real is pretty suspect, when we get to edge cases - and that's not new. A game has a virtual quality sure, but it also becomes part of reality, like money generates this interaction between ideas and physical conditions. If you go to the Dunbar Number and the Default Mode Network, we can understand the social-self as a virtuality resulting from the game of living in a hominid troop, and it generated real capacities for learning and communication through enhancing intersubjectivity. Virtual can have real impacts, and what we think of as reality can be profoundly structured by emergent social virtualities (eg the many types of 'games' for social status).
Santa Claus is often given as an example of hypereality, an accumulation of culture which completely obscures any actual history, yet through codifications like the poem The Night Before Christmas has come to have a clear identity and set of cultural practices.
Money also has a hypereality where the idea profit can always be a guide to choices, obscures actual impacts of actions on the world, pointed at by the Cree prophecy:
"When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last
river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will
realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you
can’t eat money." -Alanis Obomsawin
I can't place it, but I heard another quote that we are all trying to become rich enough to avoid the consequences of our pursuit of money.
I'd point to critiques that can be applied from totally different traditions. The idea meaning just gets caught in this vortex of self-reference, ignores real language use (even if it can accurately describe certain academics, or hedgefund managers a la American Psycho).
I like the idea of knowledge being generated from information (or loosely, facts) as about forming a Salience Landscape, finding relationships between things and to ourselves, such that we reduce 'cognitive friction' between our expectations about the future and what happens, and increase 'cognitive grip' or identification of where we can act most effectively like identifying metaphorical 'handles' on our experiences. We can then understand the compounding of terms and of information, not as getting lost in abstraction distancing us from reality, but as increasing the richness of our Salience Landscapes, and the sophistication of the cognitive grip we can have over it's elements.
Anil Seth in his talk Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality summarises his work on how we layer up sensory data from multiple channels, including after we process it, and assemble a reality we experience which is far from just 'out there'. In this neuroscience picture, digitally augmenting our reality just adds additional data to an experience which has always been an overlay, which aims to predict and infer not simply register.
Durkheim the foundational academic sociologist, provided the first definition of religion that could really encompass the full range of what humans do without denigrating non-Abrahamic traditions as just failures along the path to that. He focused on how enacting shared attitudes to sacred things (or values or ideas), has this binding power, that can unify a community and cohere their activities together, and help resist personal anomie or meaninglessness. This gives us a perspective to understand Santa Claus not as a mere 'referentlesss sign', but as part of binding rituals that assert values about a comminity that shares them through ritualised enactment (compare to the enormously cross-cultural power of sacrifices, which both feasting and present-giving echo).
Wittgenstein’s points about how a Private Language is impossible, pulls the rug from under a lot of assumptions we can seperate signs and the idealisations of language, from actual uses of language which encompass many hard centres but fuzzy edges to terms like 'game' which far from undermining good language use, actually enables our ability to be flexible and adaptive with it. A good example of applying this, would be in critiquing Suassure's ideas about binary oppositions which assume they represent something real about the world and how we organise it into categories, rather than being an extended metaphor taught through simple examples and then extended in abstractness through social practices (eg see discussion here Life and Death as one and the same?).
Evolutionary selection also provides a bulwark against the retreat into pure abstraction. Money or drugs or pornography or brand-names or ideologies or computer games or online gambling, or other physical or abstract triggers may give us what we think we want, and take a powerful hold of a group, a generation, a nation. But if they don't help them succeed in the world, those behavioural/meme complexes will be selected against. The vortex of referentless signs, will consume itself parasitising it's meme-host. No consolation for those in the vortex, which is why I think there's value in identifying destructive hyperealities. Like The Giant Jewel Beetle That Mates With Beer Bottles, the question we face is whether we can adapt the shorthand evolution developed to guide us towards it's goals and our continuance as a species, before changes in our hypereal social world lead us instinctively unreflectively towards apocalypse and extinction. I don't see that as just about distinguishing between real and unreal, but as about what reality we make. Not signified and signifier, but how we design our signs with where we are going in mind..
