We live in a spiritual culture and experience a common reality, where signs have ceased to conceal anything and simply mean that there is nothing behind them: no God, no ideology, no valid and ultimate judgment, only the simulation of the real and its endless recurrence.

Within this new relationship of the individual with images, symbols, and signs, we no longer have representation, that is, a utopian equivalence of the sign with the real, but a denial of the sign as a value that refers to the real. This simulation precedes the original, while the distinction between reality and artificial illusion disappears.

The map precedes the territory it maps, the media image of war precedes the war itself. Meaning now loses all significance and alternates indifferently and endlessly.

Whether analyzing the microcosm of Disneyland or the Watergate scandal, Jean Baudrillard observes that replicas simply conceal the fact that reality is irrelevant to the way we perceive our lives. Any claim to truth within this state, characteristic of the media age of late capitalism, is considered naive.

(From the presentation on the back cover of the book)