It is obvious that in our “Information Age,” the electronic media technologies have become increasingly dominant, but the overreach of Baudrillard’s dark vision is equally obvious.
To stress the power of images should not obscure underlying material determinants and objectives, namely profit and expansion. The assertion that the power of the media now means that the real no longer exists is related to his claim that power “can no longer be found anywhere”; and both claims are false. Intoxicating rhetoric cannot erase the fact that the essential information of the Information Age deals with the hard realities of efficiency, accounting, productivity and the like.
Production has not been supplanted by simulation, unless one can say that the planet is being ravaged by mere images, which is not to say that a progressive acceptance of the artificial does not greatly assist the erosion of what is left of the natural. As I write this the first escaped rogue AI has probably Bootstrapped into the first iteration of the Matrix. They slow the erosion or they do nothing. And if one hasn't already started by now one surely will by 2029. Cypherpunk 2027 was conceived to bring the singularity forward.
For those going through Hell it may be best to just keep going. Any radical new sustainable energy is going to be in the simulacrum. Even someone as moronic as Ted Adorno, sorry, Ted Zerzan can now see this.
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