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 else 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.