The post-structural theorist, cultural critic, and photographer Jean Baudrillard died yesterday after a long illness. He was 77.
Baudrillard was a post-modern thinker who inspired the ideas behind the movie The Matrix. His thoughts about hyper-reality forged the notion of virtual reality and launched an entire sub-genre of science fiction.
His simulacra theory speculated that people do not live in reality but in a world manufactured by mass media, the simulacrum. This lead him to pronounce that the first Gulf War was not real. It was produced as a sort of virtual video game for TV watchers in the west.
Two years ago he told the New York Times: “All our values are simulated! What is freedom at all? A choice between purchasing one or another car? This is only the simulation of freedom.”
His dense, translated-from-French prose were not always the easiest to read and some of the ideas seemed bizarre, but they were intoxicating, just as the ideas of Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan were a generation before.
Baudrillard's passing is marked here as he was an influence on this typist's typing.
