Sure thing. Up front: I've only read Simulacra; I wouldn't call myself well-versed either. So if you have read that, the following "should" make sense, reserving the possibility that I'm off-base in my interpretation of Baudrillard - a possibility I readily admit is a real one.

Others in the thread have probably pointed out by now that the linked NPR story leaves conspicuously absent a key point in the "private buses in SF" narrative, i.e. that the recent ire (past week or two) flared up when some Vanguard type filmed himself pretending to be an obnoxious "let them eat cake" Googler. The next day, the even bigger story was that that video was a fake (not a hoax but a "true fake", to use Assange terminology). Indeed, were it not for the true faking of the perspective of one "side" of A Divided San Francisco, this NPR story, titled "Private Tech Buses Drive Tension" couldn't exist. Couldn't. So what? So whether the original was a lie or not has become definitively irrelevant - the length of its shadow is the same. The point being not that NPR is lying or something like that, but rather: that the Symbol has progressed on through to the fourth stage, that of the fully realized Simulacrum, now totally divorced from the "map-reality" (you remember the Borges fable about the nation-sized map at the beginning of the book?) which begat it in the first place. It now exists only on a plane of interaction with other Symbols (e.g., this is part of a series on Income Inequality, which, of course, has no non-wholly-symbolic connection to private buses) which have also divorced themselves of their original connection to reality and which also only interact with other Symbols. Baudrillard, you will recall, names this plane the "Hyperreal." Real because it is.