This needed doing:

[For Baudrillard] Disney, in other words, facilitates ‘hyperreality’ — a semiotic form of cognitive closure — by rendering consumers blind to their blindness. Disney, on the semiotic account, is an ideological neglect machine. Its primary social function is to provide cognitive anaesthesia to the masses, to keep them as docile and distracted as possible. Let’s call this the ‘Disney function,’ or Df. For humanities scholars, as a rule, Df amounts to the production of hyperreality, the politically pernicious conflation of simulation and reality. […] In what follows, I hope to demonstrate what might seem a preposterous figure/field inversion. What I want to argue is that the semiotician has Df all wrong — Disney is actually a far more complicated beast — and that the production of hyperreality, if anything, belongs to his or her own interpretative practice. My claim, in other words, is that the ‘politically pernicious conflation of simulation and reality’ far better describes the social function of semiotics than it does Disney.

(Selected as a taster. Of course, read it all.)

ADDED: Part two.

As a bonus, the latest on Bakker at Dark Ecologies.