I think that perhaps we can make information by traveling through communication. But, for me, the whole area has no symbolism, no symbolic intensity: it is such a technical abstraction. Communication is technical – it’s not change. Change is perhaps something else psychologically, symbolically and so on. The concept of communication is sustained, generated by technology, so really with the Internet we attain the highest limits of communication. But what I would ask is, ‘Who is it that communicates?’ Who is it? There is one terminal and then another. There are two terminals, two specific areas of abstraction which change the information. But also, all the personality changes, in fact all the charm, all these things disappear inside it. Communication is something which is factual and also artificial. In my opinion it lifts you slightly out of simulation. You are really in the field of dissimulation. But my opinion after the last time I used the Internet is that it is not really a place which opens up communication, an area of discovery. But I’ve not really had the experience, I’m not on the Internet and I don’t make any use of it. However, I think it is a very powerful means of disappearance. The network is a place for disappearance and communication, data processing, cybernetics. It is the art of disappearance. What I mean is that you can immerse yourself in the machine; digitalised, virtual reality. You can immerse yourself in it and disappear completely. There are the problems of freedom, subjectivity and many others. This is something which goes round and round and round, but that’s a point of view which is a little bit negative. That’s true but I have the feeling that there is at least the fantasy of communicating. It is impossible to think that it might be possible to communicate all over the world with everyone at whatever moment in ‘real time’ in virtual reality . . . all that is too much. That’s another utopia, a utopia which has been realised. But the danger is that utopia should not be realised because when that happens it’s finished. So everyone is going to vanish into thin air on the network, but what goes on inside it? Who talks to whom? I don’t feel it is a place where real events happen. It’s not an original place. I’d really like the Internet to be a revolution, but it’s a revolution that makes us go further into The Perfect Crime. For me it’s one of the elements of The Perfect Crime. | Jean Baudrillard, From Hyperreality to Disappearance