<div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2028464,00.html">http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2028464,00.html</a></div>
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<div>Such had been Baudrillard's name for the defining problem of the age since the 1970s, when he wrote that the Marxian problem of class struggle had been replaced, in the "post-industrial" era, with the problem of simulation. He thus anticipated, by a decade or two, later arguments about the nature of "virtual reality". Pop culture paid tribute to Baudrillard's prescience in Andy and Larry Wachowski's 1999 film The Matrix, about a near-future Earth where human society is a simulation designed by malign machines to keep us enslaved. Hacker hero Neo (Keanu Reeves) hides his contraband software in a hollowed-out copy of one of the philosopher's books, and rebel chief Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) quotes Baudrillard's most famous formula: "Welcome to the desert of the real."
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<div>Baudrillard was invited to collaborate on the sequels, but declined. He later protested wryly that The Matrix had got him wrong: "The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment ... The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce."
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<div>In subsequent works, including The Consumer Society (1970), The Mirror of Production (1973), and Forget Foucault (1977), Baudrillard developed arguments about the increasing power of the "object" over the "subject" in modern society, and the way in which protest and resistance were increasingly absorbed and turned into fuel by the symbolic "system" of capitalism.
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<div>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett</div>