“It is in this sense that America has become,” Baudrillard writes, the last remaining “primitive society of the future.” It has “no ancestral territory… except in the future and is, therefore, nothing but… perpetual simulation.” In other words, if we constantly entertain ourselves with simulations of the future, then we’re destined to remain in a perpetually primitive state, as a more advanced future still awaits us. Our current level of technology is so primitive that almost all of our techno-scientific advancements lie still ahead of us. But if the future is not a given—if stagnation,
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