Jean BaudrillardThinkers

The City is concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exist and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

The City is distinguished by the catastrophic forms it presupposes and which are a vital part of its essential charm. New york is king kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering inferno. Los angeles is the horizontal fault, california breaking off and sliding into the pacific: Earthquake.

The City , in years to come, will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban (a la Los Angeles). After that, it will bury itself in the ground and will no longer have a name. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in artificial light and energy. The brilliant superstructure, the crazy verticality will have disappeared.

Consumption is a kind of hysterical flight driven by an insatiable sense of 'lack.

Consumption is a power strategy. It is not the things themselves that are consumed, but the status value that is ascribed to them when they are made into symbols.

Consumption is a systematic and total idealist practice, which far exceeds our relations to objects and relations among individuals, one that extens to all manifestations (registres) of history, communication and culture.

Consumption is an active, collective behavior: It is something enforced, a morality, an institution. It is a whole system of values, with all that expression implies in terms of group integration and social control functions.

Consumption is an organized control of sign and one of the many ways any subject is assimilated in any given society. For baudrillard the logic of consumption is based on social differentiation. By the logic of social differentiation, individuals distinguish themselves and obtain social prestige and standing through the purchase and use of consumer goods.