Abstract
In today’s communication society, an opposition between the intellectual elite and mass opinion emerges ever more strongly. Both the components of the former and the latter, one in spite of the other, believe that they embody the authentic individual. Moving from some famous figures of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the essay shows how this opposition is actually based on a dialectical relation, on a “negation of negation”. Would the computerized world of the net then represent the medium of this conciliation? Or is there something that in the infinite web of relations that constitutes the virtual society, and seems to realize the Hegelian Geist – I that is We and We that is I – reveals its constitutive lie? What remains of the spirit, of the We and of the individual?