It Is Always The Same: Once You

... The Age Of Simulation Thus Begins With A Liquidation Of All Referentials - Worse: By Their Artificial Resurrection In Systems Of Signs, A More Ductile Material Than Meaning... It Is No Longer A Question Of Imitation, Nor Of Reduplication, Nor Even Of Parody. It Is Rather A Question Of Substituting Signs Of The Real For The Real Itself.

In Years To Come Cities Will Stretch Out Horizontally And Will Be Non-urban (los Angeles). After That, They Will Bury Themselves In The Ground And Will No Longer Have Names. Everything Will Become Infrastructure Bathed In Artificial Light And Energy. The Brilliant Superstructure, The Crazy Verticality Will Have Disappeared. New York Is The Final Fling Of This Baroque Verticality, This Centrifugal Excentricity, Before The Horizontal Dismantling Arrives, And The Subterranean Implosion That Will Follow.

It Is Perhaps Not A Surprise That Photography Developed As A Technological Medium In The Industrial Age, When Reality Started To Disappear. It Is Even Perhaps The Disappearance Of Reality That Triggered This Technical Form. Reality Found A Way To Mutate Into An Image.

In The Same Way That We Need Statesmen To Spare Us The Abjection Of Exercising Power, We Need Scholars To Spare Us The Abjection Of Learning.

The Price We Pay For The Complexity Of Life Is Too High. When You Think Of All The Effort You Have To Put In -telephonic, Technological And Relational -to Alter Even The Slightest Bit Of Behavior In This Strange World We Call Social Life, You Are Left Pining For The Straightforwardness Of Primitive Peoples And Their Physical Work.