If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts...) - as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us...
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. ... It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.... The desert of the real itself.
Jean Baudrillard
