The following is an extract from an essay by Felix Schultz entitled 'The Computer Network and the Future of Humanity' (1996):

Bill Gates is working at the technological realization of a global Internet through the development of multimedia technology and the corresponding software in close agreement with Clinton and.Gore, with whom he first had dinner in 1993. It should not be too surprising that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on research in this field, and that this is only a small percentage of what can be made here. All of this is happening on the basis of a premise that Bill Gates formulated as follows; "A computer should only help one to have fun and to have a nicer life in a collective mind," (1) - but not only that; technology frees the viewer and helps him to unfold his personality. As Gerald Levin, the chairman of
Time-Warner, said in an interview, "Our technology frees the viewer; it controls what goes through television but it no longer controls the sender of TV programs ...A human being defines himself through the newspapers he reads, through the films he sees in movie houses, through his favorite TV programs, and through the music he listens to. If our digital network will permit people to consume more information and entertainment in a purposeful way, they will grow as persons." (2)

'Persons' who identify themselves through consumption and entertainment will grow via the internet, but how about individualities? They are supposed to have "a nicer life in a collective mind." Gates often speaks of "striving towards a collective mind," and he welcomes the beginnings of a "collective society." (3) And in fact he is stating the general goal of media and information politics in the U.S. For instance, the U.S. news station CNN beamed out the first global advertising campaign at the end of January 1992 - for one whole day, every hour on the hour, Coca Cola, the figurehead of the western world of commodities , supposedly reached over 3.8 billion TV viewers in over 100 countries. In an allusion to the foreign policy of former President Bush, the chairman of the company, Donald R. Keough said, "This new world order gives an opportunity to reach more people with a single voice." (4) From the viewpoint of a global Internet one could also formulate it the other way around, - with it one will be able to fuse billions of people together into a unified, collective consciousness to such an extent that the 'mental presupposition for the introduction of a new world order is thereby created. The increasing ability to manipulate and de-individualize the individual that accompanies this will be compensated for by the "fun" that he has.

In other words, people from the U.S. are trying very hard to install a virtual sphere in our atmosphere and around the globe into which human beings are supposed to immerse their consciousness. This artificial world that runs on electricity - like the computers that transmit it - gains its fascination and brilliance from the myriad of possibilities that it offers the user, and also from the pictures that constitute it. A sphere of Imagination that is localized in the subsensible is created thereby.

1 B. Günter, 'Bill Gates. FromComputerfreak to Richest Man in America', Munich 1995, p. 19.
2 In: Der Spiegel, Feb. 27, 1995.
3 B. Günter, op. cit., p. 183.
4 In: Die Tageszeirung, Jan. I, 1992.