Transeconomy Quotes

“[...]We simply have to get used to this split, to a world dominated by this distortion. Of course, there really was a crisis in 1929, and Hiroshima really happened, so both financial crashes and nuclear bombs have had their respective moments of truth. But there has been no series of increasingly serious crashes (as Marx predicted), nor has war gone from one nuclear showdown to the next. In each case, there was one event - and that was that. The sequel has been something else entirely: both big financial capital and the means of destruction have been 'hyper-realized' - and both are now in orbit above our heads on courses which not only escape our control but, by the same token, escape from reality itself. War hyper-realized and money hyper-realized circulate alike in a space which is inaccessible - but which consequently leaves the world just as it is. The upshot is that our (real) economies continue to produce, even though the slightest logical consequence of the fluctuations occurring in our imagined economy would have sufficed to destroy them utterly (we should not forget that the total volume of trade currently represents a mere forty-fifth of the total movement of capital). Similarly, the world continues to exist even though the detonation of a thousandth part of the available nuclear explosives would have reduced it to nothing.[...]”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena