---
title: "Simulation Anxiety"
description: "Bratton's term for the characteristic affect of a civilization running on simulations."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/simulation-anxiety"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/simulation-anxiety"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Simulation Anxiety

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/simulation-anxiety), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Bratton's term for the characteristic affect of a civilization running on simulations. For a General Theory of Simulations uses it twice: first in the account of AI, where the Turing Test defines the human by an ever-shrinking difference from the machine that imitates it, so blurring the line unsettles who we are, which Bratton likens to model collapse; then in the conclusion, where the Philip K. Dick worry about whether something is a simulation is generalized, and simulations built to manage that worry breed their own uncertainty. The examples turn on authenticity, from art forgery to Paro the robotic seal, whose users may know yet not care. Accept All Cookies restates it as the everyday simulation hypothesis eroding the folk real/fake distinction. Model Epistemology is its constructive twin; Ontological Asymmetry and Inverse Uncanny Valley name neighbouring discomforts. Bratton refuses to pathologize it, listing its "addictive microtraumas" among the theory's tasks.

## Appears in

- [Accept All Cookies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/accept-all-cookies) (2025-05-10)
- [For a General Theory of Simulations](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/theoryofsim) (2025-05-10)
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._