Is there, by the way, any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a mental space of freedom and discovery. Indeed it merely offers an enhanced, yet conventional, space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites and established codes. Nothing exists beyond these search parameters. Every question has its anticipated response. You are the automatic questioning-and-answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder, you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ecstasy of communication.

No more “other” facing you. No more final destination. Any destination, any correspondent will do. The system goes on, without end and without purpose with the sole potential for infinite reproduction and involution. Hence the comfortable dizziness produced by this electronic interaction that acts like drugs. One can spend one’s entire life at this, without any interruption. Drugs themselves are only the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity.

In order to win you over to it, people tell you that the computer is merely a handier and more complex kind of typewriter. But this is not true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page flutters in the open air, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or written page with my eyes, which is something I cannot do with the screen. As for the computer, it is a true prosthesis. I am in a tactile and intersensory relation with it. I am becoming myself an ectoplasm of the screen. Hence, in this incubation of the virtual image and of the brain, the technical faults which afflict computers and which are like the lapsus of one’s own body.

On the other hand, the fact that priority is given to the identity of the network and never to the individuals’ identity implies the option of hiding and disappearing into the intangible space of the virtual and thus, the option of not being located anywhere, which resolves all problems of identity, not to mention those of otherness. The attraction of all these virtual machines undoubtedly derives not so much from the thirst for information and knowledge as from the possibility to dissolve oneself into a phantom conviviality. A feeling of “being high” takes the place of happiness. Virtuality comes close to happiness only because it surreptitiously removes every reference from it. It gives you everything, but, at the same time, it subtly takes everything away from you. The subject is realized to perfection, but then, it automatically becomes object and panic sets in.