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WORLD ON A WIRE
Just imagine this...
Imagine you were to play this children’s game: your existence and identity are guaranteed by the simple fact that—against all odds and fears—you just write down that you are there. Kids reassure themselves about who they are by writing down: John Smith — Greenwich — Fairfield County — Connecticut — United States of America — America — World — Universe. Apart from Greenwich, these children will have seen very little of the world and certainly nothing of the universe at this point. But they firmly believe that it is just as they jotted it down. Yet what if this was not to be the case?
Imagine the chair you sit on and the table in front of which the chair is placed and the cigarette you light just now is not a real chair, not a real table, not a real cigarette. In reality you only imagine the chair, the table, the cigarette to be real. Do you think you would develop some doubt with regards to the question whether you yourself—seated on the chair at the table with the cigarette in hand—might in fact not be real? That you only imagine being yourself?
Imagine that somewhere in outer space there is a civilization whose general structure of society is almost identical to ours—yet its dimensions are so gigantic that, in order to solve its problems, it made an artificial copy of itself. This copy contains precise elements to plan one’s personal survival: In this case, a war in Southeast Asia would really mean that the General Staff of the “upper-world” would just like to know the outcome—for them—of a so-called limited war in an age of super powers. The assumption here would be a country with the technical standard A and the special conditions Alpha and a country with the technical standard B and the special conditions Beta. In such a scenario, inflation in Germany would then really mean that some economist from the “upper-world” would like to know, what would likely happen—in their world and in this particular moment—to employment markets and import-export business under certain monetary conditions and how this would impact demand-and-supply issues. The fact that you are presently lighting a non-filter cigarette would in reality mean that a cigarette company in the “upper-world” would actually like to know if such a cigarette would be marketable in “your” world and what the related cancer risks would be. The fact that you sit on a chair in front of a table with a cigarette is hence but a product of your imagination. Or to be more precise: The product of a tricky electronic manipulation that simulates what is going on in the world in a relatively small box. While the inhabitants of this world believe that they are inhabitants of a real world, they are in reality nothing but dead circuits.
From the information brochure:
Fernsehspiele Westdeutscher Rundfunk July – December 1973, pp. 63-66
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