Consider fiat currency. Bank runs clearly show that they only stand, as long as 'enough' people have trust in it. It is 'made up', by fiat, through an agreement. But, it has real infrastructure, notes and coins that are difficult to forge, digital payment systems, encryption protocols. Just because something stands as true as long as enough buy in to it, doesn't make what they buy into infinitely malleable, and subject to change whenever the consensus changes. Is money 'real'? That's not straughtforward to answer.
Baudrillard gives the example of the Borges story 'On Exactitude In Science', which he explicitly uses in developing his picture of the hypereal. The whole story is only one paragraph, so here it is:
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that
the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the
map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those
Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds
struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations,
who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears
had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some
Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of
Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all
the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
(Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida,
1658
Here then is Baudrillard's picture. A community lost in it's fictions, falling into ruins around them. Consider for comparison the lure of money - there's a quote I haven't been able to attribute:
"We all hope to become rich enough to avoid the consequences of how we
made our money."
By taking money as real rather than a mechanism of exchange that relies on mutual trust and trade of mutual benefit, we risk getting lost:
"When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last
river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will
realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you
can’t eat money."
-Alanis Obomsawin, of the Abenaki tribe from the Odanak reserve, near Montreal.
The worlds many cases of largely fairly minor border disputes over areas of unlivable wasteland, like say the Sino-Indian Border Dispute, show the literal dangers of getting lost in maps.
I'd suggest reading Baudrillard, rather than ironically arguing with a strawman - a simulacrum, of Simulacra & Simulation...
