Jean Baudrillard on The End

In the countdown, the time remaining is already past, and the maximal utopia of life gives way to the minimal utopia of survival. We are experiencing time and history in a kind of deep coma. This is the hysteresis of the millennium, which expresses itself in interminable crisis. It is no longer the future which lies before us, but an anorexic dimension - the impossibility of being finished and, at the same time, the impossibility of seeing beyond. Prediction, foresight being the memory of the future, it diminishes in exact proportion to the memory of the past. When everything can be seen, nothing can beJ)reseen any more.

 What is there beyond the end? Beyond the end extends virtual reality, the horizon of a programmed reality in which all our known functions - memory, emotions, sexuality, intelligence - become progressively useless. Beyond the end, in the era of the transpolitical, the trans-sexual, the transaesthetic, all our desiring machines become little spectacle machines, then quite simply bachelor machines, before dying away into the countdown of the species.  

The countdown is the code of the automatic disappearance of the world, and all our little humanitarian machines, by way of which we anticipate that disappearance - the Telethons,' Sidathons2and all the rest of the Thanatons - are merely the promotional Sales Event for the misery of this fin de sie'cle.  But - and this is even more paradoxical - what are we to do when nothing really comes to an end any more, that is to say, when nothing ever really takes place, since everything is already calculated, accounted for, expired and realized in advance (the simu- lacrum taking precedence over the real, information taking precedence over the event, etc.)?