There is no future without virtual communication

Rating: 10/10 (20 November 2010)

Who does not know Facebook? Who does not know Myspace? Who does not use the services of Facebook or Myspace? Who has never used their services? In our countries and, within years in the world, practically no one and not in a life time but every year, every month, everyday. Some will say this film shows the worst side of capitalism. I will say this film shows the most realistic side of the spirit and fire of free enterprise and free enterprise, in a capitalist or socialist free market economy, is the engine of the economy and the development of a country, of a society, of masses of people and of each individual.
The film shows marvelously how it is not the rich who achieve the best things when they are young because when you are rich and using silver spoons for breakfast and golden spoons for tea you hire the services of those who are more intelligent than you to do what you have the money to do but not the intelligence.
It is the one who cannot put one thousand dollars on the table who has the best idea and the knowledge necessary to create vast adventures because he knows in our modern world that what is going to succeed has to be cool and cool means free, freewheeling, easy-going, with no controls and no cops, or cash desks everywhere. Everyone knows that you will not succeed in any communication enterprise if you want to cash straight away the profit you will cash in ten years but not from the simple subscribers, but from the users who use the social network you have created to pass around a commercial message wrapped up in a way that makes it palatable for the simple subscribers who hate spam and anyway do not read it. That's where the creator of Facebook and the creator of Napster were and are right.
To liberate that communication power, a power that is virtual and real at the same time, a simulacrum for conservatives and a big leap forward for normal people, to liberate that force is to multiply the power and the force of each individual who can widen his knowledge, stretch his interests, pile up his connections and friends, accumulate his messages and exchanges. All the anti-virtual-reality proponents like Jean Baudrillard and a few others are just bitter people who regret a past that has gone, that is gone, that will never come back ever.
Maybe those inventors are so many Lucifers but Lucifer is an angel of light and I am ready to sleep, bathe, eat, drink, work, dance, write, sing, and do many other things, with that angel of light. They are going to tell you that it makes many crimes possible or easier, and they are just from the pre-stone age of mental underdevelopment. The Internet did not invent those crimes. The Internet did not make man a criminal or a pervert. It is not because we were looking at the beautiful cherubs of the Renaissance that we became, all of us, rapists of children. And there would have been no cherubs, and the pedophiles of the past would have struck anyway and all the same.
The film shows another element that is difficult to take, to analyze, to understand. The few people who see beyond the present and who know the technical and scientific principles that are going to change the face of the world are in this world an elite that has to defend themselves constantly against those who will try to make them work with no profit at all for themselves, I mean for those who are working, who are made to work. That explains the attitude of these people: they are afraid, they are protecting themselves, they are locked up at times in a world that is not that of ordinary people and they seem unbearable, they even try to make themselves unbearable but they are not monsters, they just need to protect their integrity and any human society is always trying to break the integrity of the weak and intelligent in order to accumulate power and riches in the hands of those who are strong and have no principles.
This film is a must in our culture.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID