Ballard was one of the few observers for whom the Kennedy assassination was not a chapter in the dated genre of conspiracy but the start of a new politics in which power would be exercised by the dissemination of images. It is not so much that Ballard foresaw events such as the death of Princess Diana. Worse, his diagnosis implies that they have become inevitable. What proved unacceptable in Cronenberg's film was not its sexual vignettes, which are oblique and restrained. It was the film's suggestion, which faithfully reflects Ballard's intent in the book, that in societies in which scarcity has been overcome, what is most threatening is the loss of desire.
Contemporary economies stand on the insatiability of our wants.
Because they are so quickly sated, the economy soon comes to depend on the manufacture of transgressive desires. Ever since Mandeville's Fable of the Bees we have known that the creation of wealth requires the mobilisation of passions that morality represses. Ballard goes one step further and suggests that the health of late 20th-century economies depends on mass psychopathology. It is not entirely fanciful to see in Crash a premonitory glimpse of the world that is being shaped in the Bluewater shopping centre. Still, to view Ballard as a political moralist would be a complete misreading.