« The Obsessive Fear Of The Americans Is That The Lights Might Go Out. […] In The Tower Blocks The

« The obsessive fear of the Americans is that the lights might go out. […] In the tower blocks the empty offices remain lit. On the freeways, in broad daylight, the cars keep all their headlights on. In Palms Ave., Venice, California, a little grocery store […] leaves its orange and green neon sign flashing all night, into the void. And this is not to mention the television, with its 24-hour schedules, often to be seen functioning like an hallucination in the empty rooms of houses or vacant hotel rooms […].

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. […] It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently […].

In short, in America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man’s artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles (the seasons, day and night, heat and cold) has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd […].

You may seek to explain this in terms of fear […]. The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. »

— Jean Baudrillard, America