"Jean Baudrillard tends to use the words simulation and simulacrum interchangeably, and offers not so much a new theory of the simulacrum as a new history of the present viewed through the conceptual lens of the simulacrum. For Baudrillard, the simulacrum is essentially the copy of a copy, that is to say, the copy of something that is not itself an original, and is hence an utterly degraded form. At its limit, as in certain accounts of postmodernism, the simulacrum is used to deny the possibility of anything being the singular source or origin of either an idea or a thing. On this view of things, anything deemed to be an original idea or object is in fact a mirage, an optical illusion of the same order as back-projection in cinema. Another way of putting this would be to say that a simulacrum is only ever an effect and never a cause."