Jean Baudrillard has become the quintessential sociologist of the "post-Marxist" era. His analyses of the world of signs, the end of the social, and the delusion of explaining everything have become famous. Is a terrorist attack a political farce? The search for "objective" evidence is lost in the vertigo of interpretation. The fact is that we are faced with a logic of simulation that no longer has anything to do with the logic of facts. Simulation is characterized by the precession of the model over the fact.

The entire world is no longer real but belongs to the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a matter of falsely interpreting reality (ideology) but of concealing that reality is no longer necessary.

The masses absorb all the electricity of the social and the political; they neutralize it irreversibly. The masses are not good conductors; they do not radiate but, on the contrary, absorb all the radiation of History, Culture, and Meaning. The masses are inertia; they are the power of neutrality, a highly implosive phenomenon.

With a nervous, syncopated prose, an almost prophetic breath, and a sensibility already marked by postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard develops his most provocative ideas throughout the essays that make up this book.