Status Updates From Cultura y simulacro

how are there so many chapters left my brain and attention span are suffering, we continue nonetheless, is good exercise for the brain cells

"To dissimulate is to pretend to not have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have."

okay finally something i can make sense of, capitalism = cancer

'We are simulators, we are simulacra (not in the classical sense of "appearance"), we are concave mirrors radiated by the social, a radiation without a light source, power without origin, without distance, and it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight- without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination.'

'The original monstrosity of the beast ... has been exchanged for that of a spectacular monstrosity: ... King Kong wrenched from his jungle and transformed into a music hall star. ... Kong dies for having renewed, through seduction, this possibility of the metamorphosis of one reign into another, this incestuous promiscuity between beasts and men (... one that is never realized, except in a symbolic and ritual mode).

'It is useless to ask oneself if cancer is an illness of the capitalist age. It is in effect the illness that controls all contemporary pathology, because it is the very form of the virulence of the code: an exacerbated redundancy of the same signals, an exacerbated redundancy of the same cells.'

When one sees Las Vegas rise whole from the desert in the radiance of advertising at dusk, and return to the desert when dawn breaks, ... advertising is not what brightens or decorates the walls, ... and all the architecture, ... and that it is this liquidation, this reabsorption of every thing into the surface ... that plunges us into this stupefied hyperreal euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else ...

'Make Beaubourg bend!'

'Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.'

'Anything serves to escape this void, this leukemia of history and of politics, this hemorrhage of values, ... -a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funeral exaltation, in the same retro fascination.'