the immense zone rustles with billions of padded messages. even its violence, wars, revolts, riots, ecological disasters, famines, genocides, murders are broadcast as spectacles, along with the following notice: you see, this is not good, it requires new regulations, other forms of community that must be invented, this will pass. despair is thus taken as a disorder to correct, never as the sign of an irremediable lack. 
this foreclosing of desire and the lowering of all signs into the imaginary of management gives to the megalopolis its strange style, namely, that of a zone that is both precarious and comfortable. 

jean-francois lyotard,
the zone