I think people get too caught up with Baudrillard and the French Postmodernists, and miss the true meaning behind what they are trying to describe.

They are describing a world where the technology of social construction is so pervasive and powerful that we cannot differentiate the real from the socially constructed. How do you gauge what is 'authentic' from inauthentic when the world is socially constructed?

For example, Trump ran on being authentically himself, as opposed to Clinton which was socially constructed based on Democratic Party talking points. So a reality TV star became president instead of a career politician because he was more 'authentic'.

Hyperreality, unlike what is portrayed in the Martrix, is when the socially constructed map overlays reality until it destroys reality replacing it with the social construction. Baudrillard's three steps are: 1. when the map refers to a real territory, 2. the map overlays reality until it is impossible to tell the difference between real and the map, 3. the map completely destroys reality so there is nothing left to refer to.

An example of this is the modern dog. Dogs descend from wolfs. Man by subjugating wolves to make them pets, overlayed human social characteristics over the wolf domesticating them. Today dogs are a completed new animal socially constructed by man.

The difference between now and the past is we never had the ability to completely subjugate nature on a planetary scale. Now we do, and we are. Soon there will be no real 'nature' that has not been altered by man. The word 'reality' will be meaningless.