“It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.”

– Jean Baudrillard, America. Translated by Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 1989. p. 23.

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“We can no longer match the perfection of our tech­nological devices. What we produce is beyond our imagination and our representation. Humanity, confronted with its own divinized model, with the realization of its own ideal, collapses. Our abilities, both in the domain of the imagination and responsibility and in the register of desire and pleasure, are completely surpassed. Those who believed in the unlimited morphological and anthropological adaptability of humankind and its ability to change at will were wrong. Today, human beings have become the weak link in technological processes, in the world-processing. The only choice left is between disappearing or being “humanengineerized.” And the more the performance gap grows, the more human beings compensate for this failure by expanding their technological park, even extending it to Sloterdijk’s “human park” and the biological modeling of the species. Ashamed of their incompleteness, humans have turned themselves into experimental beings.”

— Jean Baudrillard, “Where Good Grows” in The Agony of Power. 

Introduction by Sylvere Lotringer. Translated by Ames Hodges. semiotext(e)
intervention
series • 6. 2010.

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– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

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