Deleuze encounters the phenomenon of the simulacrum not as a copy of the original but as the enunciation of difference in intrinsic form and reality. For Deleuze, we enter a world in which ‘Simulacra are those systems in which the different relates to the different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity and internal resemblance: it is all a matter of difference’ (Deleuze 1990: 299). The transcendence of violent images online and their dissemination as affective screen images remakes the spectatorship of terror, where consuming terror through the simulacra of immateriality online (re-)produces new modes of birthing the terror-bound subject and terror as subsumed through post-indexicality. Here terror imagery reterritorialises the virtual sphere, producing new subjecthood with and through the semiotic capitalism of the internet. Terror imagery and its dissemination online reveals the simulacrum as a spectre in which circuits of consumption and assemblages re-enact it as a commodity for the masses, revitalising digital terror through capitalism and its hidden algorithms. In the process, it unleashes violence and the imaginary of terror as part of the ‘sharing’ economy, celebrating the simulacrum as both the recombination of (im)material forms and its abstraction by capital online.

Through the catechism ‘God made man in his image and resemblance’, Deleuze invokes a provocation through the Old Testament, highlighting the distinction between the copy and the simulacrum wherein man through sin lost the resemblance while maintaining the image (Watson 2005: 257). Crafted neither in inferiority nor as a copy of the copy, the simulacrum to Deleuze was about internal difference despite its external resemblance. Both arts and sciences through time have been saturated with robust debates about the conception of representation as well as mechanical reproduction. Today these discourses are renewed through the embedding of our everyday lives in new media platforms where the notion of ‘virtuality’ holds centre stage, thwarting our sense of the real through simulated environments and through an architecture in which reproducibility is celebrated and seamless through convergent technologies. Though the notion of the simulacrum has been juxtaposed and associated with the original or authentic, our renewed anxieties about truth and authenticity in the age of the digital reiterate how simulacra and the simulated have often been embroiled in the demise of the real and the effacement of the authentic.