After a lifetime spent telling us that reality had disappeared, Jean Baudrillard has – apparently – died. Not a bad career move at all for a philosopher of virtuality; I presume he’ll live on as an avatar in Second Life.

I can’t say I ever learned much from anything he wrote, though he has some good lines here and there — his observation that the city is a competition did as much to shape my understanding of urbanization as anything in Jane Jacobs. Everything you need to know about his thought is in The Matrix.

He was always a bit of a philosopher/clown, but he became embarrassing in recent years. His thoughts on the riots in the French suburbs last year were inadvertently hilarious; his take on terrorism and the post-9/11 world was near-criminal in its idiocy.

Still. There is that cool scene in The Matrix where Neo hides the disc in the copy of Simulacra and Simulations.