  Baudrillard celebrated the coming of the new millennium with a recycling of some his old ideas on cloning, the end of history, and the disappearance of the real in a series of lectures collected as The Vital Illusion (2000). For Baudrillard (2000), cloning is connected to the fantasy of immortality, to defeating the life-cycle. Thus, it is no surprise that cryogenics — the freezing of dead human beings in the hope they might be regenerated in the future through medical advances — is a booming global industry. Likewise, in a digital era, he claims that history has come to an end and reality has been killed by virtualization, as the human species prepares itself for a virtual existence. Baudrillard complained that the contemporary era was one of weak events, that no major historical occurrences had happened, and that therefore life and thought were becoming increasingly boring.