The Golden Age of the Virtual Realms, Right Now

The virtual is just the latest expansion of human craving for meaning and it is brimming with opportunities: mostly symbolic, nonetheless, real. Thinking, presenting or manipulating a situation has always been dependent on the symbolic operations (Mircea Eliade, Raoul Girardet, Lucian Blaga, Camil Petrescu, Ernst Cassirer), on the uses and abuses of the referential and condensed symbols (Murray Edelman). At the same time, such operations are not reserved entirely to politics. In our virtually expanded contemporary lives, we relate to symbolic meanings, either consciously or not. As Slavoj Zizek noticed: “Behind the realities there are phantasies and behind the phantasies, realities.” Baudrillard’s ecstasy of communication and simulacra present the offer of a golden age open for individuals and politicians alike. The enemies are clear and the saviours, too. Just like decorations hanging in the virtual window here there are the (slightly) cosmeticized images of ourselves carved as individual persona representations, or, as the solutionmessages for the current problems, prompt as a soft form of political management. All these symbolic décors in the virtual malls that we visit and consolidate are symbolic attempts to approximate the golden age as we can “see” it, in our human everlasting aspirations for success and prosperity, for stability, communion and, possibly, peace.