A push-type reel lawnmower cuts a swath through a patch of fake grass. The nearuniversal contemporary conflict between the real and the virtual, between presentation and representation, between the thing itself and its mediation, is exemplified through the use of an actual physical object, a working tool; and a no-less physical replica in plastic and other hydrocarbon derivatives, of a patch of de-natured second nature. This increasing dichotomy within human perception has its damaging societal and cultural effects, as normative separation from the real through the stand-in of simulacrum has the propensity to establish ersatz and unexamined equivalences between types of experience, rendering fine distinctions less particular and even inconsequential.

Failure to acknowledge the acute differences between an objective thing and its mimetic surrogate can result in a lack of meaningful separation, such that real differences between the two begin to lose critical traction. Eventually the tension that historically has existed within acts of discernible discrimination becomes undermined in an uncritical relativism, collapsing into arbitrary signification; progressive thought itself becomes compromised and diminished.