Yesterday at SXSW, I ran into Tantek Çelik from blog-search outfit Technorati. It was a good thing too, because I had just been having a heated debate with somebody about whether there were any merits to the new "WTF" feature on Technorati, which allows users to annotate popular search topics to explain why they've gotten popular. At Tantek's urging, I looked up yesterday's most popular search topics, and discovered to my surprise that the number 4 search was for the name Jean Baudrillard, a famous postmodern theorist who invented the idea of cultural simulacra and inspired the infamous line Morpheus utters in The Matrix:
"What the fuck?" I exclaimed, and Tantek grinned so much his head practially fell off. "See?" he said. "Now you understand why we have the WTF feature! You can click on the little fire icon and read the WTFs that people wrote to explain the search."
So I clicked the fire and discovered what theory geeks have known for five days: Jean Baudrillard has died, and it's not just a simulation. The guy may have been a blowhard in some ways, and dangerously apolitical in others (he's famous for arguing that the Gulf War never happened because it was so technologically-mediated), but he was also one of the few philosophers whose ideas coherently explained what ubiquitous, high-tech media does to human consciousness.
Thus I think it's fitting that I learned of Baudrillard's death on Technorati, via an incredibly postmodern information delivery mechanism: an annotation of an automatically-generated list of popular search terms for data gleaned from internet-disseminated citizen media. Sorry to see you go, Jean, but I'll be consuming simulations of your identity for years to come.
Want to find out more about this theory geek who had Technorati buzzing? Start with his book *Simulacra and Simulations *(1981), and move on to The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). You won't regret it!
Jean Baudrillard [via Wikipedia]
