Jean Baudrillard RIP

Today, we are everywhere surrounded by the remarkable conspicuousness of consumption and affluence, established by the multiplication of objects, services, and material goods. This now constitutes a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. Strictly speaking, men of wealth are no longer surrounded by other human beings, as they have been in the past, but by objects. Their daily exchange is no longer with their fellows, but rather, statistically as a function of an ascending curve, with the acquisition and manipulation of goods and messages: from the rather complex domestic organization with its dozens of technical slaves to the “urban estate” with all the material machinery of communication and professional activity, and the permanent festive celebration of objects in advertising with the hundred daily mass media messages; from the proliferation of somewhat obsessional objects to the symbolic psychodrama which fuels the nocturnal objects which come to haunt us even in our dreams. The concepts of “environment” and “ambiance” have undoubtedly become fashionable only since we have come to live in less proximity to other human beings, in their presence and discourse, that of our stupefied power, of our potential affluence and our absence from one another.
-Jean Baudrillard from Consumer Society