Simulation now operates through genetic miniaturization rather than duplication

Evidence

Such is the case for the city. Fires, war, plague, revolutions, criminal marginality, catastrophes: the whole problematic of the anticity, of the negativity internal or external to the city, has some archaic relation to its true mode of annihilation. … Even the scenario of the underground city - the Chinese version of the burial of structures - is naive. The city does not repeat itself any longer according to a schema of reproduction still dependent on the general schema of production, or according to a schema of resemblance still dependent on a schema of representation. (That is how one still restored after the Second World War.) The city no longer revives, even deep down - it is remade starting from a sort of genetic code that makes it possible to repeat it indefinitely starting with an accumulated cybernetic memory. Gone even the Borgesian Utopia, of the map coextensive with the territory and doubling it in its entirety: today the simulacrum no longer goes by way of the double and of duplication, but by way of genetic miniaturization. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Baudrillard’s earlier ‘map that precedes territory’ in the same book, and to Jameson’s ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ on postmodern spatiality.
• DEFINE: Sharply distinguishes the third-order simulacrum (genetic miniaturization/immanent order) from earlier copy-and-representation orders.
• BMF: The ‘genetic code that makes it possible to repeat [the city] indefinitely from an accumulated cybernetic memory’ evokes the re-creation of cities from blueprints in We, where the Single State reproduces identical glass structures from encoded plans.