Harassed and Slaughtered with Impunity

This reference to (material) production is pivotal today, in the context of the ongoing digitalization of our lives. We live in the midst of an arduous revolution in the ‘forces of production’, whose much-publicized tangible effects (new and newer gadgets invading our lives) overshadow its much more far-reaching repercussions. The true question apropos of cyberspace and Virtual Reality is not ‘What happens to our experience of reality?’ but, rather:’How does the interposition of the World Wide Web affect the status of inter subjectivity?’ The true ‘horror’ of cyberspace is not that we are interacting with virtual entities as if they were human – treating virtual non-persons as real persons, but rather, the opposite: in our very interaction with ‘real’ persons, who are more and more accessible only through their stand-ins in cyberspace, we are treating ‘real’ persons are virtual entities that can be harassed and slaughtered with impunity, since we interact with them only in Virtual Reality.Žižek, Slavoj (2001) Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?