Avian Atrocity, I'm gonna Google Earth

Says Doug Mann: "...Baudrillard starts his important essay 'The Precession of the Simulacra' by recounting the feat of imperial map-makers in an story by Jorge Luis Borges who make a map so large and detailed that it covers the whole empire, existing in a one-to-one relationship with the territory underlying it. It is a perfect replica of the empire. After a while the map begins to fray and tatter, the citizens of the empire mourning its loss (having long taken the map - the simulacrum of the empire - for the real empire). Under the map the real territory has turned into a desert, a 'desert of the real.' In its place, a simulacrum of reality - the frayed mega-map - is all that's left." And as Ecclesiastes says: "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."