The city was here before the freeway system, no doubt, but it now looks as though the metropolis has actually been built around this arterial network. It is the same with American reality. It was there before the screen was invented, but everything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screen in mind, that it is the refraction of a giant screen. This is not like a Platonic shadowplay, but more as if everything were carried along by, and haloed in, the gleam of the screen. Along with flux and mobility, the screen and its refraction are fundamental determinants of everyday events. A fusion of the kinetic and the cinematic produces a different mental configuration and overall perception from our own. (55)

Jean Baudrillard

"In the future, power will belong to those peoples with no origins and no authenticity. . . . Look at Japan, which to a certain exten has pulled off this trick better than the US itself, managing in what seems to us an unintelligible paradox, to transform the power of territoriality and feudalism into that of deterritoriality and weightlessness. Japan is already a satellite of the planet Earth. but America was already in its day a satellite of the planet Europe. Whether we like it or not, the future has shifted towards artificial satellites.

Jean Baudrillard

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared. But so obsessive is it that you go on hearing it behind the voice of Reagan or the Marines disaster in Beirut. Even behind the adverts. It is the monster from Alien prowling around in all the corridors of the spaceship. it is the sarcastic exhiliration of a puritan culture. In other countries the business of laughing is left to the viewers. here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation. (49)

Jean Baudrillard

The glass facades merely reflect the environment, sending back its own image. This makes them much more formidable than any wall of stone. It's just like people who wear dark glasses. Their eyes are hidden and other see only their own reflection. Everywhere the transperancy of interfaces in internal refraction. Everything pretentiously termed 'communication' and 'interaction'—walkman, dark glasses, automatic household appliances, hi-tech cars, even the perpetual dialogue with the computer—ends up with each monad retreating into the shade of its own formula, into its self-regulating little corner and its artificial immunity." (59-60)

Jean Baudrillard

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. it i even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared). (50)

Jean Baudrillard

In America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man's artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles . . . has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd. . . . "The skylines lit up at night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. There is some truth in all this. But what is striking is the fascination with artifice, with energy and space." (50-51)

Jean Baudrillard

From a historical standpoint, America is weightless. (52)

Jean Baudrillard

Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction.

Jean Baudrillard