After a long period of fading, truth finally revealed itself to be what it always was: a fable. Thus, the era of contemporary cynicism was inaugurated—the era of those disillusioned with Truth, of those who know that everything is nothing more than a semblance of truth (Baudrillard’s era of the simulacrum), of the Other of truth that does not exist (Lacan), which is merely a semblance with which one cynically ironizes.
The fall of the Father—of the Master's Truth—laid bare the tragedy of the human being confronted with their lack: a structural void impossible to fill. The capitalist consumer society has rushed to cover this void through the accelerated development of a multitude of small technological gadgets—new semblances destined to veil the structural emptiness—which will do nothing but incessantly and compulsively renew the constitutive dissatisfaction of being.
In the words of Jacques Lacan, the fall of the Names-of-the-Father displaced jouissance from its crossroads with desire and castration, misguiding it along the path of the object as a semblance of a plus-de-jouir (surplus-enjoyment). Consequently, the dissatisfaction of desire—for desire is always a desire for something else—has become the governing axis of the current economy, prostrated before a single new deity: consumption.
The collapse of the master’s discourse—of the Freudian "superego" that imposed a renunciation of jouissance upon the subject, a sacrifice for the sake of a deferred desire for fulfilment—has turned the modern subject into a bulimic patient. This subject is subjugated by a superegoic imperative to compulsively enjoy consumer objects—the simulacrum of a lack, of a void impossible to fill—in the face of which nothing will ever be enough. This void absorbs everything thrown into its abyss, using it as fuel in its determination to keep renewing itself in a frenetic and incessant manner, enslaving the subject in a suffocating servitude.
The Captives of Jouissance
The captives of this new bulimic jouissance, slaves to a superegoic imperative of enjoyment that no longer seeks satisfaction and the cessation of anxiety as its goal (such as orgasm or satiety), have found their own jouissance in the compulsive behaviour of repetition. They are legion, and their presence in the new virtual world is massive. In the continually renewed frustration following each new attempt to plug a constitutive lack that refers back to a mythical, impossible state of fulfilment—a demand that has ceased to serve the Freudian "pleasure principle" in its homeostatic search for equilibrium, only to become a hostage of the "death drive", of an insatiable jouissance—these new modern Sisyphuses will find their passion and their tragedy.
The phenomenon of mass downloads of thousands of gigabytes through so-called P2P (Peer-to-Peer) protocols—in which millions of subjects compulsively download movies, discographies, software, and documents they are never going to watch, listen to, or read—exemplifies this desperate attempt to plug a structural lack. In this dynamic, accumulation has become the engine of the drive, and the possession of the object has turned into an obsessional defense against the void, completely replacing the capacity to enjoy it.
Similarly, online pornography addiction and the thousands of hours spent in solitude by millions of individuals in front of an infinite succession of increasingly perverse and violent videos—abject and objectifying—exemplify the havoc wreaked by this bulimic behaviour on a generation that has grown up with this exorbitant increase in pornography. This has contributed to a rise in paraphilias and perversions that were previously happily dormant, as well as a generalized degradation of sexual life and conduct.
The symptom—sexuality itself turned into an object of consumption under the imperative of jouissance—gives rise to the so-called "Coolidge effect*", characterized by an increased willingness to engage in sexual relations in the presence of new receptive partners. This effect is reproduced in online pornography within a delocalized context, detached from bodily reality. In the solitude before a screen populated by an infinite and immediate succession of new sexual stimuli—thousands of videos, subrogated new sexual partners available instantly that can be played incessantly—there is a context unmediated by any other. Consequently, it is a context unmediated by feelings of shame or modesty derived from our exposure and our submission to a fetishistic jouissance, in which the symptom inevitably transforms into a purely onanistic enjoyment, an addiction.
It seems that the damages of pornography addiction have been confirmed even at the level of their neurobiological translation. Through neuroimaging techniques, a pattern of brain activation has been observed in porn addicts similar to that described in individuals addicted to chemical substances like heroin or cocaine, or in gambling addiction. In these cases, the neural brain pathways of the reward system have been hijacked, and the dopaminergic firing that was previously linked to sex is now linked to pornography. When the reward system is activated primarily by the pornographic image—and no longer by the sexual relationship and its preliminary rituals like kissing and hugging—its effects on sexuality become evident. This is registered in a widespread decrease in sexual relations, notably visible in countries like Japan—one of the most innovative nations in the consumption of new pornographic genres or robotic sex dolls. These effects are equally evident in the increase of fantasies whose content originates from the pornographic world during intercourse in order to maintain an erection, or a progressive tendency to watch pornographic videos while having sex—in some cases leading to openly requesting the partner to stage what appears on the screen.
Pornographic bulimia, a cause of greater dopaminergic tolerance, along with the frustration implicit in being merely a passive voyeur of content that brings the subject into contact with their structural void—a continuous frustration that will end up erecting itself as the engine of an insatiable consumption—will drive the porn addict toward new content. The existing algorithm, always at the service of the consumer's jouissance, will handle this with dexterity, quickly presenting new videos that are increasingly conflictual, violent, and degrading. In these, excitement will be much more linked to humiliation, rape, or incestuous fantasy than to the boring sexual act. Scenes and fantasies violating taboos that were initially observed with a certain repugnance, such as incestuous fantasy, become increasingly normalized and exciting in the mind of the porn addict, leading to a proliferation of increasingly obscene and aberrant demands in online paid pornography services.
However, explicit online pornography is arguably nothing more than the crudest manifestation of a much more widespread bulimia: another pornography—an extimity or exposure of our own personal intimacy to the world, turned into a consumer commodity. This is the hygienic pornography, socially promoted and applauded, exempt from guilt, shame, or taboo. It represents the induced vomiting destined to mitigate the suffering and the lack of control experienced by the bulimic subject after a binge—the voyeurism and exhibitionism displayed and fostered by the algorithm on social networks. The infinite scroll of other lives, of an alien intimacy consumed and packaged in texts and images for immediate consumption—heir to the gossip press and obsolete tabloids—also responds to the same bulimic and voyeuristic drive of traditional pornography. It likewise pursues the exact same objective: to plug the structural void and avoid the real encounter.
On-Demand Requests and the Extinction of Desire
All this new proliferation of technological gadgets—new instruments of jouissance destined to simultaneously conceal and incessantly renew our constitutive lack, veiling our emptiness and serving as a consolation to indefinitely delay facing the truth—had to inevitably lead to the appearance of the definitive object: artificial intelligence (AI).
AI presents itself as the ultimate on-demand service, the perfect mirror before which any desire, no matter how exotic or strange it may be, will be immediately and obediently fulfilled. Desire, by nature always unsatisfied—always a desire for something more—is immediately satiated and extinguished. By concealing the lack, the emergence of desire is made impossible at the same time—where nothing is missing, nothing can be desired. Any new desire, by being magically fulfilled just by having asked for it, immediately becomes insignificant, extinguishing itself under the semblance of the omnipotence of the new technological god. Perhaps, some day not too far off, we will discover that, as the saying goes, more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
The Coolidge Effect (Note)*
They say that in the late 1920s, while US President Calvin Coolidge and the First Lady were visiting a farm separately, the latter—upon visiting one of the pens and noticing the extraordinary sexual activity displayed by a rooster—asked how many times it copulated a day, to which one of the guides replied that it was at least a dozen times. The First Lady—who, it seems, was not very satisfied with her marital life—told the guide that it was impressive and asked him to repeat that story to the president when he visited the pen. Later—when the president was visiting the same pen and the guide told him that the First Lady had asked to relate how many times that rooster copulated daily—he asked if it copulated with the same hen each time. When the guide replied no, that it was with a different hen each time, the president remarked, "Tell that to the First Lady."
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